Goody, humans.

Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.

And let me tell you, there are a few dangerous ideas floating around Europe at the moment.

As we look towards this weekend's second round runoff elections in France,

President Emmanuel Macron has rolled the dice,

and everyone is waiting with bated breath to see whether or not,

as much of the legacy media puts it, France will be governed by a far right party for the

first time since the Vichy regime during World War II.

I'll get to more of that in a moment, but this episode is about the only example, really, of a true slide of a

democracy into semi-authoritarianism in Europe, inside the European Union. Thanks to a strong

man in Hungary who's become something of a poster child for right-wingers all over the world,

from Tucker Carlson to Donald Trump.

They seem to love Victor Orban.

Orban is in the news again this week because he is Europe's most pro-Russian leader.

And Hungary, the country that he's been running for 14 years, has just taken over the rotating European Union presidency. This is something that

each country gets for one year. It's now Hungary's turn. And the first thing that Orban has done

is he's popped up in Kiev to hold talks with President Vladimir Zelensky about why Ukraine

should stop fighting and should beg Russia for peace, basically.

Viktor Orban's foreign minister in Hungary has made at least five trips to Russia since the

start of the war. NATO has been pretty appalled that Hungary, which is a NATO alliance member

and a member of the European Union, would be

cozying up to Vladimir Putin and refusing to help Ukraine. Hungary has really become a thorn in

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