Save Rural Texas: Our Land, Our Water, and Our Future Are Not a Blank Check for AI, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. September 2, 2026

Save Rural Texas: Our Land, Our Water, and Our Future Are Not a Blank Check for AI

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

September 2, 2026

I want to call attention to Save Rural Texas, a growing grassroots movement organizing to protect rural Texans’ land, water, property rights, infrastructure, and communities amid the extraordinary expansion of artificial-intelligence data centers. Its message should resonate across political lines: economic development does not entitle corporations to a blank check on our land, water, electricity, or local democracy.

Artificial intelligence is often described as though it exists somewhere intangible, in “the cloud.” But the cloud has an address. It occupies land. It requires substations, transmission lines, generating capacity, roads, enormous buildings filled with servers, cooling systems, and, depending on their design, potentially extraordinary amounts of water. 

Increasingly, that address is rural Texas.

A recent Texas Tribune analysis found that more than half of the data centers planned for Texas are slated for unincorporated areas, precisely where county governments possess substantially less land-use authority than municipalities (Cobler, 2026). In places such as Hood County, residents confronting multiple proposed data centers have raised concerns about water, electricity, noise, traffic, pollution, and the transformation of rural landscapes, only to discover how little authority local governments possess to regulate what is coming (Martinez et al., 2026).

In this vein, I encourage you to listen to this community conversation on the matter with James Talarico to get a sense of just how profoundly our communities, landscape, and wildlife are already being impacted.

This raises a fundamental question about property rights. What does private property mean when a rural landowner can defend the boundaries of a ranch or farm but possesses very little democratic authority over an enormous industrial complex next door? Property rights cannot mean only the rights of corporations wealthy enough to assemble thousands of acres. They must also include the rights of families whose homes, wells, farms, roads, landscapes, and communities surround these developments. 

Texas groundwater law still carries something of a survival-of-the-fittest logic through the rule of capture—what the Texas Water Development Board has memorably described as the “law of the biggest pump.”

This raises an obvious question: In an era of hyperscale AI development, what happens when the biggest pump is backed by the deepest corporate pockets?

Although groundwater conservation districts provide regulation in many places, Texas has no single statewide agency controlling groundwater production, and areas outside groundwater districts remain especially vulnerable (Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, 2025; Texas Water Development Board, n.d.-a).

That legal framework developed long before anyone imagined hyperscale AI facilities. What happens when the proverbial biggest pump belongs not to another farmer or rancher but to one of the most heavily capitalized industries in the world?

Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas Research & Policy Center, and I explored precisely this problem in our essay, “Draining the Ogallala Aquifer for AI? Project Matador and the Myth of Limitless Growth.” Project Matador, being developed by Fermi America in partnership with the Texas Tech University System northeast of Amarillo, is envisioned as a massive artificial-intelligence and energy campus covering roughly 7,570 acres. It is situated in a region deeply dependent upon the already-stressed Ogallala Aquifer (Valenzuela & Metzger, 2026).

The Texas Water Development Board has documented long-term declines in the Ogallala because groundwater withdrawals in much of the region exceed recharge (Texas Water Development Board, n.d.-b). Yet Project Matador has secured access to substantial water supplies. Access does not necessarily equal daily consumption, and actual usage will depend on cooling technology, recycling, buildout, weather, and other factors. Nevertheless, the potential scale should command our attention.

Metzger and I made a simple point that bears repeating: paying more for water does not make it renewable. A corporation's capacity to purchase a scarce natural resource does not answer the larger public question of whether that resource should be consumed at that scale. Markets answer, Who can afford it? Democratic governance must answer, What must be preserved?

This is why Project Matador and Save Rural Texas belong in the same conversation. Both expose an emerging imbalance in which private capital can move faster than democratic governance and ecological knowledge. Texas communities too often learn about massive projects after land has been acquired, financing negotiated, nondisclosure agreements signed, and development plans advanced. The corporation knows what it needs to know about the community before investing; the community may know very little about the corporation until the project is difficult to stop (Goldenstein & Foxhall, 2026).

Governor Greg Abbott's August 3 directive ordering an audit of data centers seeking connections to the Texas electrical grid is therefore significant. It recognizes that the state needs better information about electricity use, water, cooling systems, ownership, incentives, and community impacts (Office of the Texas Governor, 2026). But an audit should be the beginning of reform, not its conclusion. Texas still needs meaningful groundwater protections, greater transparency, genuine community participation, clearer limits on public subsidies, and stronger authority for rural communities confronting projects capable of permanently transforming their landscapes.

People across Texas are struggling to find information about proposed data center projects popping up in their neighborhoods, like Mason McCallister, center, who has been on a crusade to get information. Meanwhile, local officials and even state elected leaders say they need more information to regulate the growing industry. Illustration by Mariana Ocejo for The Texas Tribune. Source images: Shelby Tauber, Leila Saidane, and Briana Vargas for The Texas Tribune; Aiden Gonzalez/The Texas Tribune

That is why I support Save Rural Texas. Its position is not anti-technology. Artificial intelligence may produce genuine advances in medicine, science, education, accessibility, climate research, and communications. But acknowledging those possibilities does not mean accepting every data center, at every location, at every scale, consuming whatever water and electricity its owners can purchase.

That is not innovation policy. It is the surrender of public decision-making to the idea that technological expansion is inevitable.

There must be places where Texas says yes to data centers, places where the answer is yes only under enforceable conditions, and places where the answer must be no—because an aquifer cannot sustain the demand, because the electrical grid cannot support it, because the public subsidy outweighs the demonstrated benefit, or simply because a community decides that thousands of acres of agricultural land should remain agricultural land.

Rural Texas is not vacant territory awaiting its highest bidder. It is home, agricultural production, groundwater, habitat, history, family inheritance, and community. Texas can embrace innovation and participate in the future of artificial intelligence without surrendering the principle that technology must remain accountable to people and place.

Our communities are not sacrifice zones. Our aquifers are not corporate reservoirs. And our land, water, and future are not for sale simply because someone arrives with the biggest check—or the biggest pump.

References

Cobler, P. (2026, August 14). Data center audit lacks specifics even as Gov. Abbott, industry leaders tout it. The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/14/data-center-texas-audit-moratorium/

Goldenstein, T., & Foxhall, E. (2026, August 10). While data centers boom in Texas, their plans stay shrouded in secrecy. The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/10/texas-data-centers-transparency-information/

Martinez, A., Tauber, S., Mahajan, A., & Ford, A. (2026, June 2). Eight data centers threaten to transform this small Texas county. Local officials say they have no power to stop them. The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2026/06/02/texas-data-centers-hood-county-local-control-rural-water-power/

Office of the Texas Governor. (2026, August 3). Governor Abbott directs comprehensive data center audit. https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-directs-comprehensive-data-center-audit

Save Rural Texas. (n.d.). Save Rural Texas. https://www.saveruraltexas.com/

Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. (2025). Groundwater regulation for private well owners. https://www.tceq.texas.gov/response/drought/groundwater_regulation.html

Texas Water Development Board. (n.d.-a). General groundwater and private water well frequently asked questions (FAQ). https://www.twdb.texas.gov/groundwater/faq/faqgwm.asp

Texas Water Development Board. (n.d.-b). Ogallala Aquifer. https://www.twdb.texas.gov/groundwater/aquifer/majors/ogallala.asp

Valenzuela, A., & Metzger, L. (2026, July 23). Draining the Ogallala Aquifer for AI? Project Matador and the myth of limitless growth. Environment Texas Research & Policy Center. https://environmentamerica.org/texas/center/articles/draining-the-ogallala-aquifer-for-ai-project-matador-and-the-myth-of-limitless-growth/

Scapegoating Democracy at a Point in U.S. History Where We Need MORE Democracy, Not Less

After being of the opinion that Trumpists had already taken off their masks of white supremacy and racial hatred, Umair Haque makes an excellent point of how their new terrain is the scapegoating "democracy" itself. The problem never has been democracy at all. I quote the famous and beloved educator and author, Deborah Meier, who once said 

"If there is a problem with democracy, we don't need less democracy. We need more democracy."

To make democracy the culprit is to indeed invite fascist neoliberalism that is the economic system that is already tearing into the heart of our country given the widening inequality. What we are seeing happening right now on the extreme right of a quintessential power grab where republicans are fully about preserving rights for themselves to exploit others and robbing the rest of us any right, including to existence, that these folks see as threatening of their power.

Do read this great analysis and critique of neoliberal, capitalist patriarchy by Umair Haque that I mostly think signify the dying breaths of white supremacy. We always knew it would be violent and reactionary. 

We could not be treading as a polity more dangerous waters. The immediate solution is to get out and vote.

Oct 5 is the deadline to register to vote for November Elections

Sept. 20 is National Voter Registration Day. #Vote2022

-Angela Valenzuela

#SayNoToFascism #Vote2022 #DemocracyNotAutocracy #RacialCapitalism

The Trumpists Are Taking Their Masks Off — Guess What’s Underneath?

When a Political Side Explicitly Rejects Democracy and Embraces Violence, Can a Society Survive?

by Umair Haque August 15, 2022

Credit: Olivier Douliery

They’re getting crazier, more spiteful, bolder, and more violent by the day. The GOP, of course, the Trumpists. It’s worth taking a moment to pause and ask: what do they even want at this point?

They keep outdoing themselves in terms of ignorance, hostility, and sheer idiocy. Every time you think “they can’t possibly get any worse”…they do. Now, they’re explicitly against…democracy. As in, overtly.

Lately, if you’re keeping watch, a new form of ignorance has arisen. It’s not totally new — like so many of the beliefs radicalizing this social group and political wing, it’s a fringe belief making its way into the mainstream. Now you can hear it out in the open, amongst those aspiring to office — or worse, holding it.

“We’re not a democracy — we’re a republic!” Whew. Take a second to parse the irony of office-holders in a democracy saying…it’s not one. Then take a moment to chew on the fact that apparently, Trumpists have all become Plato’s progeny, and are now deep thinkers on matters of the body politic. I kid. The Republic, this isn’t.

“I want to address something that’s bugging me for a long time,” Bliss said. “And that’s the history and the sacredness of our Constitution and what our founding fathers meant.… We are a constitutional republic. We are not a democracy. Nowhere in the Constitution does it use the word ‘democracy.’ When I hear the word ‘democracy,’ I think of the democracy of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That’s not us.”

“Sperry, the activist sitting in the audience, had posted on Facebook a few months before: “Please strike the word democracy from your vocabulary! WE ARE A REPUBLIC!!!”

What do these ninnies mean by this line that once used to be a fringe belief but is now going full-on mainstream — “We’re not a democracy, we’re a republic!” How do you even begin to square that with, well, the Constitution, which, as flawed as it is, at least aspires to democratic ideals of truth, justice, equality, freedom for all?

It all goes back to the fundamental question: what do these lunatics even want?

The best explanation of this line comes from one of them themselves: “Well to me, what a democracy is, is like 51 percent of the people can decide that they want my property, and they can take it. Where a constitutional republic is: No, you can’t do that.”

Like I said, Plato and Thomas Paine are rolling over in their graves, clutching their tummies with morbid laughter. A constitutional republic is…”no, you can’t do that”?

And yet here’s the explanation not even hidden in plain sight, but loudly proclaimed. The reason that these fanatics don’t want a democracy — explicitly — is to protect private property rights. In other words, they want a kind of libertarian utopia, where there are no public goods — no public schools, systems, water mains, anything. “Freedom” is being able to choose your own — even if it means, of course, not having any. Democracy, because it insists on public goods — after all, that’s what education, health, longevity, really are — is anathema to this conception of what a society should be.

This has deep and sinister roots in America, the choice of a fanatical focus on private property, at the expense of public goods. Where does it come from? Sadly, slavery, of course. The Souths’ justification for slavery was bound up in “property rights,” only over people. The problem was that since people were property — the most valuable form of it, free labour that made the economy go — the central focus of society had to become protecting those “private property rights.” Hence, the Fugitive Slave Act empowered anyone to become a deputy chasing down a runaway slave, since they were just “property.”

If all that sounds, well, proto-fascist to you, it should. The Nazis were fascinated by America, and studied it intently, modeling their odious laws to repress and then annihilate Jews and all other kinds of minorities, on Southern ones. And it doesn’t take a genius to think too hard about just why some people would be able to become other people’s property — they must be subhumans, only good for menial labour, disposable commodities, only fit to be traded. How horrific.

This history poisons America to this very day. When Trumpists cry “we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic,” it’s not because they’ve suddenly become political science scholars. It’s because they mean “the protection of private property rights,” which in America has long been code for proto-fascism. We’ll send our kids to our schools, we’ll shop at our stores, we’ll sit on our buses — and you don’t belong here, except as property. In other words, “we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic” is thinly veiled code for supremacy.

And yet though all this has deep roots in American history, it’s still a quantum leap into the abyss. How so?

Trumpism, like so many demagogic movements, works by scapegoating. And scapegoating evolves. First it was “just” Muslims, then it was Mexicans, then it was Mexican babies, then it was all Latino families, who had to be “separated,” then it was everyday “real” American kids, even white ones, who might say the word “gay,” and then it was women, all of them, from whom rights of privacy, expression, and association were taken by a rogue Supreme Court. Scapegoating evolves and grows as demagogic movements do — and it’s a key mechanism of social collapse, because the bigger the scapegoats get, the bigger the Big Lies do, and the more damage has to be done to society, the more overt and explicit and intense and far-reaching the violence, brutality, and hate.

Now. What’s really going on when Trumpists cry “we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic!” They are reaching the outer limits of scapegoating. The scapegoat? This time, it’s democracy itself.

Who’s responsible for the woes of the “real” American? Why did their lives fall apart, generations plunging into downward mobility and penury, the elderly never retiring? Who ripped the heart out of all those Rust Belt towns? Who kicked the legs out from under the working class? Think of that sequence of scapegoats above — they’ve all been blamed for it, in sequential order, Muslims, Mexicans, Jews, gay people, their kids, their families, then everyone’s kids, and finally now women. Where do you go from there?

You see, you have to go somewhere, and always find a new scapegoat, in a demagogic movement and politics. Because of course just finding targets to pick on doesn’t solve the actual problem. You could “separate” literally every single Latino family in existence — and it wouldn’t do a thing to solve the problem of the white American working class falling apart, or Americans not having much of a future. The same was true, of course, of Nazis, Jews, and Germans. Scapegoating is so poisonous because it’s a vicious cycle: since it doesn’t work, a bigger scapegoat always has to be found.

Until, at least, you reach the end. And there’s nowhere left to go.

What’s happening now is that Trumpists are being offered a new scapegoat for their woes. Hey, old lady, why didn’t you ever retire? Hey, kid, why can’t you get a job? Hey, middle-aged guy, why is your life worse than your parents? Scapegoating is like a spell — it wears off. The old scapegoats don’t work that much anymore. Say Muslims, Mexicans, to the fanatics in America — and they’ll shrug. They need fresh meat, to really whet their appetities. The new scapegoat being offered to America’s fanatics is democracy itself.

You didn’t get the life you expected, wanted, felt entitled to…because democracy. Democracy’s the problem. Sure, “democracy” here is a code-word — rights for anyone else but us. Us — the pure of faith and true of blood. We’re the only people in society who deserve rights like speech, expression, association, privacy. The rest? They’re subhumans. Because they’re not pious enough of faith, or they’re not pure enough of blood. They don’t deserve power.

And that is what all this is really about. Power. When Trumpists cry “we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic,” it’s not because they’re debating the ghost of Winston Churchill, and winning — it’s because for them, it’s a way to claim absolute power. It means: nobody else is to have any real rights, which amount to powers. Powers of self-determination, sovereignty, even existence.

Let me make that crystal clear, in case it’s not. In a “republic,” the Trumpists believe that what the minority says can and should go. And because the minority wants it badly enough, hard enough, is willing to be more brutal and violent than the majority, that bestows a kind of moral right to power, alongside the natural, divine right that comes from purity of faith and blood. So in said “republic,” gay people aren’t to exist, women aren’t to have rights, kids are to be taught what fundamentalists want, church is to supersede state, even if not everyone’s church, since it’s not everyone’s state anymore. The minority is now to have absolute power, and define society’s hierarchies their way.

You get this much respect, money, property, power — because this is where you fit in the hierarchy now. Pure of faith, true of blood, a man? Great, you’re at the top, where you belong. A woman, but willing to submit? OK, we’ll let you have a place, a rung. Minority? Woman not willing to submit? Hmm, sounds like trouble — you’re below the dividing line between “person” and “property,” you’re not to have the same rights as people.

All this is about power. Absolute power. To define other people’s lives. You see, in a democracy — and this is what makes democracy so, so different from all the other political-social forms which preceded it — we don’t do that. Each person gets to decide their own life, fate, existence. At least that’s the ideal, even if progress towards it has been slow, especially for women, gays, minorities. Still, the ideal remains: in a democracy, freedom is two things — self-determination, at the individual level, supported by self-governance, at the group level, nurtured by shared investment, at the collective level. We all need things like schools and hospitals and roads and books, in order to fulfill our own potential, and in a democracy, we support each other with those, and then let everyone decide their lives on their own.

It’s a good thing.

The Trumpists are saying no to all of that in their new insane form of ignorance — “this is a republic, not a democracy!” They’re saying that people shouldn’t have the right of self-determination. The minority will decide how everyone will live — and they’re already doing it to women, and next up gay people. They’re saying that because people don’t have the right of self-determination, self-governance, as in, we all consent to govern ourselves, doesn’t matter, either. If you don’t consent to being governed by the minority, too bad, shrug. They’ll do it with guns, anyways — why do you think they brandish them so openly now? And they’re saying that because self-determination and self-governance shouldn’t exist, there’s no need for shared systems of public goods that nurture everyone. What’s there to nurture, in all those hated subhumans, Mexicans, Muslims, Jews, gays, women, anyways? Maybe women can be made to forcibly give birth — but that’s about it. Everyone has their place in this hierarchy — and yours is below ours.

That is how all this is a quantum leap into the abyss. It’s a very, very dangerous step for a society to take when one major political bloc begins to explicitly demonize democracy. To scapegoat it as the Big Scapegoat for the pure of blood’s and true of faith’s woes. Because of course the answer is then clear: tear down this Great Wicker Man called democracy. Burn him!! And set yourselves free! Even if it means burning the village down right alongside it.

This is how scapegoating plays out, in collapsing societies. First the scapegoats are ethnic groups, already low on the hierarchy of power, long hated. Then they expand to include those further up it. Then scapegoating expands further, to include even the faithless and heretical and impure among even the “real” people — women with the wrong attitudes, kids who display the wrong tendencies, teachers, doctors, journalists, intellectuals, anyone who doesn’t fit into the by-now fascist project of total conformity to a homogenized, cleansed ideal of purity and blood and virtue. And finally, when even all this doesn’t work to solve the problem of the declining living standards of the “real” people — a last scapegoat must be found. Democracy itself.

Where else have we seen exactly this process? In nearly every society which has completed the process of social collapse is the grim answer. This is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany. Germans — at least enough of them — accepted Hitler as their glorious, all-powerful thousand-year Fuhrer precisely because democracy itself was scapegoated for their woes. We’ve seen this play out in the Muslim world, too, and in Africa, time after time, democracy itself blamed for people’s misfortunes and struggles, as religious zealots and warlords took power. And of course this, too, was the central rationale of the terrible disaster communism ended in — democracy itself was scapegoated as being critical of the Party, hence, dictators like Stalin emerged, rose, and were glorified.

The Trumpists are finally taking their masks off. And what’s underneath is the face of a monster, rotting, squirming, snarling, sneering, baying. It’s the face of all the lunacy and idiocy and monstrosity in history, from fascism to theocracy to supremacy, through the dark ages, through war, hate, brutality, atrocity, right back to the Stone Age, where power is violence, and violence is the way of the tribe.

Imagine accepting someone as your Fuhrer. Really imagine it. Think about what it takes to go there, because that’s what Trumpists are basically saying now. Right out in the open. And that’s not all. In the last few weeks, they’ve proclaimed they were willing to die for Trump — remember their insane, violent reaction to the FBI raid on Trump’s tacky, lurid mansion?

When a political bloc and social group reaches this point — demagogues are scapegoating democracy itself, their masses are thrilled by that, slavering over it, calling for its end, willing to die for their demagogues, accepting them as their Fuhrer…it’s in an incredibly bad place. It is reaching terminal velocity of collapse, and is mere inches away from the hard, cold ground. Yes, the fall can still be broken. But first, a society has to figure out just how hard and fast it’s really falling. And that, too often, is the hardest part.

Umair
August 2022

This is Dead Serious: If We Fail to Call out Fascism, Hungary Indeed Offers a Glimpse of America's Authoritarian Future

Ok, friends. We all seriously need to take a close look at Hungarian Viktor Orbán who is a fascist prime minister of Hungary who has held his grip on power since 2010. From 1998 to 2002, he also previously held office. This Wikipedia piece on Orbán is eye-opening and states, among other things, that he opposes Western democracy and promotes anti-Americanism.

Despite this, Orbán is clearly a darling of the extremist U.S. Republican Party. He recently presented at the August 4, 2022 CPAC gathering in Dallas, Texas.  This is the same leader who recently railed against opposing 'mixed race' society. Following on the Nazification of American Education piece I just posted, coupled with this in-depth piece below from The New Yorker, this should sound off all kinds of alarm bells. 

Also view this report by Hallie Jackson of NBC News to get a sense of just how popular Orbán is. While this is clearly a reflection of the Trumpian moment we've been in for some time now, we should not at all be confused that Orabán, like Trump, is a fascist. 

If that word doesn't work for you, think "Hitler," in order to grasp what I am attempting to convey. Yes, this is dead serious.

It's a bit stunning to me that more people, especially Democrats, aren't calling this out. Just because it doesn't quite look or perhaps even feel at the moment like Nazi Germany, let's not be naive. Orbán's anti-Semitic tropes coupled with his scapegoating of immigrants are similar to the fear mongering and polarizing aims of our current, Trumpian Republican Party. Let's also not forget or ignore that according to this Los Angeles Times piece, Viktor Orbán's closest EU ally is Russian President Vladimir Putin.

I think this New Yorker piece actually does answer the question posed in the title. The answer is yes. Unless we vote these extremists out of power, Orbán and Hungary do offer us a glimpse of an authoritarian future. We're already seeing it with all the hateful attacks on the LGBTQ community, the controlling of women's bodies, the racist dog whistles that stoke white supremacist ire. 

We cannot deny the useful and telling role that Orbán is currently playing in American politics. He's signaling to American fascists where to take our country. He wouldn't have been invited to keynote at CPAC if this were otherwise.

We're witnessing before our very eyes such a small, narrow-minded and mean Republican Party. While we're clearly better than that, we also need to call it out for what it is: It's fascism. And fascism is antithetical to democracy.

Fascism is NOT an American value. Get out and vote in November like your lives depend on it because they do.

Oct 5 is the deadline to register to vote for November Elections

Sept. 20 is National Voter Registration Day. #Vote2022

-Angela Valenzuela

#SayNoToFascism #Vote2022 #DemocracyNotAutocracy

Does Hungary Offer a Glimpse of Our Authoritarian Future?

American conservatives recently hosted their flagship conference in Hungary, a country that experts call an autocracy. Its leader, Viktor Orbán, provides a potential model of what a Trump after Trump might look like.

by 

June 27, 2022

The Republican Party hasn’t adopted a new platform since 2016, so if you want to know what its most influential figures are trying to achieve—what, exactly, they have in mind when they talk about an America finally made great again—you’ll need to look elsewhere for clues. You could listen to Donald Trump, the Party’s de-facto standard-bearer, except that nobody seems to have a handle on what his policy goals are, not even Donald Trump. You could listen to the main aspirants to his throne, such as Governor Ron DeSantis, of Florida, but this would reveal less about what they’re for than about what they’re against: overeducated élites, apart from themselves and their allies; “wokeness,” whatever they’re taking that to mean at the moment; the overzealous wielding of government power, unless their side is doing the wielding. Besides, one person can tell you only so much. A more efficient way to gauge the current mood of the Party is to spend a weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference, better known as CPAC.

On a Friday in February, I arrived at the Rosen Shingle Creek resort, in Orlando. It was a temperate afternoon, and the Party faithful were spending it indoors, in the air-conditioning. I walked into a rotunda with potted palm trees and chaotically patterned carpeting. Shabbat services were about to begin, and a minyan of young men, give or take, roamed around in MAGA-themed yarmulkes. The CPAC dress code was big-tent: pants suits, sweatsuits, bow ties, bolos—anything, pretty much, except for an N95. A merch kiosk near the entrance sold Nancy Pelosi toilet paper, gold-sequinned purses shaped like handguns, and Trump 2024 T-shirts in every size and color. Even the staircases were sponsored—one by Fox News and another by Gettr, a social-media platform founded by Trump-campaign alumni. If you aligned yourself with it at just the right vantage, you could parse Gettr’s slogan, “Making Social Media Fun Again!” Otherwise, it looked like red-white-and-blue gibberish.

“Trump Before Trump”

Andrew Marantz discusses the American right’s embrace of Viktor Orbán, on The New Yorker Radio Hour.

Political rallies are for red-meat applause lines; think-tank conferences are for more measured policy discussions. The American Conservative Union, the group that organizes CPAC, tries to have it both ways. On Saturday, I spent a while in the main ballroom, watching a panel called “Put Him to Bed, Lock Her Up and Send Her to the Border.” “Him” referred to Joe Biden, “the hair-sniffing dementia patient in the White House”; the first “her,” of course, was Hillary Clinton; the second was Kamala Harris, who was lambasted as both an “empty pants suit” and a wily “Cersei Lannister.” That afternoon, Trump arrived, hosted a V.I.P. gathering featuring a spread of Big Macs under heat lamps, and took the stage, giving a ninety-minute stump speech to an ecstatic crowd, all but confirming his intention to run for President again.

The policy discussions were mainly tucked away upstairs, in conference rooms with a tiny fraction of the foot traffic. One panel, on European populism, was called “More Brexits?” The moderator, an American named James Carafano, introduced the first speaker: Miklós Szánthó, the director of a Hungarian think tank called the Center for Fundamental Rights. (According to Átlátszó, an investigative-journalism outlet in Hungary, the Center for Fundamental Rights is secretly funded by the Hungarian government.) “He’s a real European,” Carafano, a foreign-policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, said. “I know that because I saw him in Europe!”

For decades, at conferences like CPAC, international exchanges were mostly assumed to flow in one direction: Americans exporting their largesse, and their ideology, to the rest of the world. At the first CPAC, in 1974, the keynote speaker, Governor Ronald Reagan, gave a rousing address about soldiers who had shed their “American-melting-pot blood in every corner of the world, usually in defense of someone’s freedom.” In recent years, as the future of the Republican Party has seemed increasingly up for grabs, American conservatives have shown more willingness to look abroad for ideas that they might want to try out back home.

Szánthó, a stout man with a smartly tailored suit and a waxed mustache, began by quibbling with the panel’s title. “There will be no so-called Huxit,” he said, despite his country’s disagreements with “the deep state of Brussels.” Szánthó lives in Hungary, but he spoke fluent Fox News-inflected English. “When it comes to border protection, when it comes to the Jewish-Christian heritage of the Continent and of the European Union, or when it comes to gender ideology,” he continued, the Hungarians, nearly alone among citizens of Western nations, “step up for conservative values.”

Hungary has a population comparable to Michigan’s and a G.D.P. close to that of Arkansas, but, in the imagination of the American right, it punches far above its weight. Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister since 2010, is now the longest-serving head of state in the European Union, and one of the most fiercely nativist and traditionalist. Starting in 2013, he made a political foil out of George Soros, the Jewish financier who was born in Hungary but hasn’t lived there in decades, exploiting the trope of Soros as a nefarious international puppet master. During the refugee crisis of 2015, Orbán built a militarized fence along Hungary’s southern border, and, in defiance of both E.U. law and the Geneva Conventions, expelled almost all asylum seekers from the country. Relative to other European nations, Hungary hadn’t experienced a big influx of migrants. (Out-migration is actually more common.) But the refugees, most of them from Syria or other parts of the Middle East, were an effective political scapegoat—one that Orbán continues to flog, along with academics, “globalists,” the Roma, and, more recently, queer and trans people. Last year, Hungary passed a law banning sex education involving L.G.B.T.Q. topics in schools. Nine months later, in Florida, DeSantis signed a similar law, known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. DeSantis’s press secretary, talking about the inspiration for the law, reportedly said, “We were watching the Hungarians.”

Experts have described Orbán as a new-school despot, a soft autocrat, an anocrat, and a reactionary populist. Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of international affairs at Princeton, has referred to him as “the ultimate twenty-first-century dictator.” Some prominent American conservatives want nothing to do with him; but more have taken his side, pointing to Hungary as a potential model for America’s future. That afternoon, on the CPAC main stage, Dan Schneider, the executive director of the American Conservative Union, singled out Orbán for praise: “If you cannot protect your own borders, if you cannot protect your own sovereignty, none of the other rights can be protected. That’s what the Prime Minister of Hungary understands.” The house lights dimmed and a sort of political trailer played, set to melodramatic music. “For over a millennium, to be Hungarian meant to sail the rough seas of history,” a narrator intoned over a horror-movie-style montage: Mongol invaders, migrant caravans, a glowering George Soros, drag-queen story time.

 

The lights came up, and Szánthó walked to the lectern, waving stiffly. “Hungary has fought wars, suffered unthinkable oppression, to gain and regain our liberty,” he said. In the current war, he went on, the enemy was “woke totalitarianism,” personified by George Soros (he paused for boos); the hero was “one of the true champions of liberty, a man you know well, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán” (a generous round of applause). He praised “President Trump” and tried to initiate a cheer of “Let’s go Brandon,” a substitute for “Fuck Joe Biden” used by right-wing culture warriors who spend too much time on the Internet. He quoted the old chestnut “Hard times create strong men,” although, the way he said it, it sounded like “strongmen.” And he invited the audience to join him at the next CPAC conference, the first to be hosted on European soil: CPAC Hungary.

“You do not have to have emergency powers or a military coup for democracy to wither,” Aziz Huq, a constitutional-law professor at the University of Chicago, told me. “Most recent cases of backsliding, Hungary being a classic example, have occurred through legal means.” Orbán runs for reëlection every four years. In theory, there is a chance that he could lose. In practice, he has so thoroughly rigged the system that his grip on power is virtually assured. The political-science term for this is “competitive authoritarianism.” Most scholarly books about democratic backsliding (“The New Despotism,” “Democracy Rules,” “How Democracies Die”) cite Hungary, along with Brazil and Turkey, as countries that were consolidated democracies, for a while, before they started turning back the clock.

Szánthó mentioned “Jewish-Christian heritage,” but there aren’t many practicing Jews left in Hungary. Orbán, in his speeches, often uses the phrase “Christian democracy,” which he portrays as under continual existential threat. Given that the vast majority of Hungarians, apparently including Orbán, do not attend church regularly, it seems plausible that his audience hears the word “Christian,” at least in part, as code for something else. “If we manage to uphold our country’s ethnic homogeneity and its cultural uniformity,” he said in 2017, “Hungary will be the kind of place that will be able to show other, more developed countries what they lost.” His constant theme is that only he can preserve Hungary for the (non-Muslim, ethnically Magyar) Hungarians—about as close as any European head of state will come to an explicit rejection of ethnic pluralism in favor of state-sanctioned white nationalism. For many of his American admirers, this seems to be a core element of his appeal. Lauren Stokes, a professor of European history at Northwestern University, told me, “The offer Orbán is making to global conservatives is: I alone can save you from the ravages of Islamization and totalitarian progressivism—and, in the face of all that, who has time for checks and balances and rules?”