Zsolt Bayer, a co-founder of Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party, a long-time friend of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the right’s most prominent publicist, sees the current refugee crisis in Hungary and Europe as a racial war intended to annihilate white people. Mr. Bayer shared these thoughts at a rally in Budapest this past Sunday, attended by an estimated 1,500 people, and organized to protest a magazine cover in Hungary, which portrayed Mr. Orbán with a mustache that resembled that of Adolf Hitler. In this paper, I have suggested before that Fidesz and the far right Jobbik party are indistinguishable. Perhaps I was wrong, because based on Mr. Bayer’s speech, Fidesz is now more extreme than the ominous opposition party.

Mr. Bayer’s premise, that dark forces are conspiring against white people throughout the world, is framed in a quote from controversial author, historian and race theorist Noel Ignatiev. Mr. Ignatiev has long seen race as a social construct, something that Mr. Bayer fails to mention to his audience, who he left thinking that the American theorist wants to annihilate white people. Mr. Ignatiev has spoken about wanting to “abolish the privileges of the white race” and added: “The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race, which means no more and no less than abolishing the privileges of the white skin.” Mr. Ignatiev, a long-time Marxist, is essentially suggesting that a type of constructed white identity carries with it automatic privilege, rendering equality between all races impossible. The theorist could have clearly phrased this in a less inflammatory matter, and his theories are Manichean and possibly somewhat outdated in the twenty-first century. But regardless: his overarching message of ingrained, implicit racism is worth considering.

The Fidesz co-founder portrays this Marxist academic as an influential thinker among western policymakers, a mover and a shaker, a man who walks the corridors of power with confidence and ease. This is simply not true, but Mr. Bayer’s audience is left thinking that a madman who wants to commit genocide against white people is a powerful voice in Washington.

“There are all kinds of weapons: traditional, chemical, atomic. And now we see that there are also racial weapons. This is the weapon that they, the invisible hands, have employed against Europe and against the white race,” declared Mr. Bayer in Budapest.

The term “invisible hands,” within this context, is coded language, easily deciphered by everyone in that audience and on the Hungarian right as a reference to liberals, left-wingers and Jews. (Mr. Ignatiev is, himself, of Jewish origins.)

“Why has everyone, from everywhere and all at once, decided to start heading towards Europe? Why? Let us declare loudly and level-headedly: this is an artificial, manufactured mass migration. And its goal is the final and irreversible transformation of Europe’s ethnic and religious composition. And for this, they have already produced the necessary ideologies. According to the Harvard professor, the white race must be made to vanish,” said Mr. Bayer. At several times in his speech, the crowd, fired up by the orator, interrupted him.

The other “ideology” that Mr. Bayer dismisses is the fact that Europe’s population is ageing and dwindling, and that immigration is most likely the only way to ensure a large enough active adult population to keep pensions and social services sustainable. Mr. Bayer believes that European corporations want to employ “Syrian masons and Bedouin goat-herders” in their factories, rather than native European youth, because they represent cheap labour.

“Our leaders in Brussels want to sell Europe from over our heads and they want to destroy our Europe…Anyone who dares to oppose this automatically becomes a Nazi,” said Mr. Bayer, explaining to his audience why Viktor Orbán is often labeled as an extremist.

“But I have some bad news for these criminals, namely for the Austrian chancellor, the French foreign minister, the western journalists, who are liars to their very core and, of course, for the good-for-nothing people behind the Magyar Narancs publication: of the 500 million natives of Europe, 450 million do not want to see any more immigrants. The Hungarian prime minister represents their opinion,” declared the Fidesz publicist.

The crowd held up signs that read “Je suis Orbán,” amidst dozens of Hungarian and Szekler flags and the event’s organizers, the Forum for Civic Cooperation (Civil Összefogás Fórum – CÖF), a pseudo-NGO, fully in line with Fidesz party interests, declared that further protests were coming against the “liberal fascists” and those who criticize the prime minister.