Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News presenter, sent a video message yesterday to CPAC Hungary, a two-day gathering of right-wing politicians and ideologues from across Europe and the United States.
"I wish I was there in Budapest," Mr Carlson said. "If I ever get fired and have some time and can leave, I will be there with you. But in the meantime, God speed".
It was unclear whether the message had been recorded before or after Fox News and Mr Carlson agreed to part ways last week.
CPAC Hungary is in its second year – a spin-off of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in the United States, an annual flagpole event for American right-wing politicians since 1974.
The words 'No Woke Zone' featured at the entrance to the conference in Budapest and one panel discussion was entitled 'No Country for Woke Men'.
Speaking at the event, Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán compared liberalism to a "virus" and said that "migration, gender propaganda, woke are all just variants of the same virus".
"Hungary is the place where we didn't just talk about defeating the progressives and liberals and causing a conservative Christian political turn, but we actually did it," said Mr Orbán.
It was familiar territory for Hungary's prime minister.
Last August, Mr Orbán spoke at CPAC in Dallas and called for American and Hungarian conservatives to join forces for elections in 2024, referring to next year's US presidential and European parliamentary campaigns.
Mr Orbán endorsed Donald Trump's candidacy for both the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections.
Hungary's ruling right-wing Fidesz party, which has governed Hungary since 2010, takes a hardline stance on immigration from outside of the EU, opposes transgender rights and has enacted legislation to limit adoption for gay couples.
In recent years, Fidesz has cultivated close links with the Republican party in the US.
"Fidesz realised, in the same way that Republicans in America realised, I think, that they benefit a lot more from heavy polarisation," Gabor Gyori, a Hungarian political analyst, told RTÉ News.
Mr Gyori said that Fidesz had been a centrist-liberal party in the 1990s but gradually shifted towards the right with "a more intense focus on nationalism".
A number of right-wing American politicians spoke at the Budapest event, both on stage and via video link.
Paul Gosar, a Republican Congressman from Arizona, said that "wokeism denigrates conservative values" and that "Satanic individuals have tried to destroy Hungary".
Other guests included Andrej Babis, a former Czech prime minister, Eduardo Bolsonaro, a right-wing Brazilian politician and son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Fox News contributor Sara Carter and a smattering of right-wing MEPs.
Many speakers at the event criticised liberalism and what they termed "gender ideology".
Guglielmo Picchi, a former Italian deputy minister for foreign affairs, said "we have to organise our troops, our cultural troops to defend our children".
This would have been well received by Mr Orbán’s government which introduced a law in 2021 prohibiting the promotion of homosexuality and gender change to under-18s. Hungary currently faces a European Commission legal case over the legislation.
Fidesz displayed its anti-immigrant and nationalist stance at the event too.
A video screened for guests during one of the intervals showed archive footage of refugees arriving at an unidentified European border crossing during the continent's refugee crisis of 2015.
"They flood our borders and make our cities unliveable," said the film’s narrator over images of refugees.
"They want us not to feel secure. They want to erase our Jewish-Christian values".
Fidesz adopted a hardline stance towards refugees since Europe’s refugee crisis of 2015. But it has found a new rallying cry of late: opposing transgender rights.
"Fidesz has needed new issues to energise the base. This war against woke ideology and transgender rights is probably the new major issue because it appeals to the sense of foreigners coming in and trying to change Hungary," said Mr Gyori, a senior analyst at Policy Solutions, a political research institute in Budapest.
Professor Andrea Peto, a Hungarian expert on gender issues told RTÉ News, that Fidesz was using gender as "symbolic glue".
"It has got nothing to do with gender studies but this is a proxy, a rhetorical tool in order to glue together different political forces, to mobilise them with hate and exclusion, to create an alternative world order against liberal democracy," said Professor Peto, who teaches at the Central European University in Vienna.
In 2018, the Hungarian government removed accreditations for Masters programmes in gender studies.
The ties between Fidesz and US Republicans stretch back to the late 2000s when Arthur Finkelstein, an American political consultant who had advised Republican candidates for decades, shaped Mr Orbán's 2010 parliamentary election campaign, which he won.
Steve Bannon, former White House chief strategist to Donald Trump, and Mark Meadows, a former White House chief-of-staff during Mr Trump's administration, will both deliver video messages to the conference today.
"Orbán experienced the good years when Trump was in power and an ambassador in Budapest which basically endorsed anything that Orbán said, and I think he would like that back," said Mr Gyori.
