Welcome listeners to the next edition of the editor's desk.

I'm Rusty Reno, editor of First Things, and today I'm with Gladden Pappen, a First Things author, and now an international

diplomat and man of mystery. And you're here in New York, and I thought it would be great for us

to just sit down and talk about things in general. So welcome to the podcast, Gladden. Great to be

here, Rusty. Great to see you. And thanks so much. So tell listeners, you were a

professor of political science or political philosophy at University of Dallas. And you

took a position in Budapest. So tell us what you're doing these days. So that's right. I was at the University of Dallas

until about this time last year. And since then, I've become

president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs,

which is a think tank that's attached to the Prime Minister's office of Hungary.

So we are the foreign policy think tank working directly for Prime Minister Orban.

We have about 50 staff and we try to study everything that's going on in the world

and figure out why it matters to Hungary and try to explain also why the viewpoint of this

country in Central Europe that has maybe implausibly gotten a lot of attention is also important

for the world as well. Eight million people live in Hungary? Close to ten. Close to ten. For a ten million people, I

got to say the Western press is fixated on Hungary. They really are and I've thought about

this and I think that it's because Hungary is a kind of counter-example within the West.

They created a kind of, you could say, iron curtain of disinformation around the country.

They made everyone think that it's a very, very scary place where there's no freedom whatsoever,

and they're terrible anti-LGBT laws, etc., etc.

And the reality is that Hungary basically preserved the status quo ante of Western norms

that pretty much everyone accepted until 20 years ago.

...