I boarded a flight to Budapest and landed in Moscow

Nothing cures my homesickness like Hungarian propaganda, which starts at the Budapest airport with “family-friendly country” billboards. This is how the country creates its pseudo-reality for billions. There are more of these billboards at the airport than any other brands. They’re featured in several languages, but the website is only in Hungarian (bar a minimalistic one-pager in English). There is no target group, no message, just building a fake world and more oligarchs for billions.

In the meantime, the Hungarian government took another page from the Moscow playbook and banned the Pride parade to protect children, supposedly. For a while, I tried to be apologetic for Hungary, but after reading Masha Gessen’s book The Future is History, I can’t excuse my country anymore.

And while they’re ready to change our constitution to restrict the freedom of assembly in literally a day, they also lie about who they protect. The former ambassador to Peru was caught with 19,000 (yes, thousand) child pornography pictures. He got a fine of around €1500. After the outrage, they used the case to rile people up against homosexuals. Fast forward a few years, and they give a presidential pardon to someone involved in another pedophile scandal. An ex-government official turned Protestant leader aided the pardon. They don’t protect children. They ruin education, equality, economy, and the future of the country.

Sure, I exaggerated the title. This is not Moscow yet, and I’m not going to fall out of a window in a tragic accident because I wrote this post. But we’re definitely one step closer to the windowsill.