Did Tucker Carlson just reveal his ‘deranged right wing vision’ for America?

Tucker Carlson's visit to Hungary and his praise for its authoritarian leader Viktor Orban betrayed his "deranged" vision for America, according to a new column.

The Fox News host will speak Saturday at the right-wing MCC Feszt in Budapest, where he also broadcast his prime time program all week, and his admiring praise for Orban reveals a "deeply unsettling glimpse" into the "authoritarian nationalist future" that Carlson and others on the ultra-right have for this country, according to Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent.

"It displays a deranged right wing vision of self-rule that sees competitive authoritarian methods as the route to securing ethno-nationalist ends," Sargent writes. "It's the future they want."

The right-wing broadcaster fawned over Orban's decision to block immigrants from entering the country and credited those views for that nation's success. The Fox News host also suggested Hungarians were more free than Americans.

"This tension — declaring America a less free society based on paranoid notions of sinister forces repressing anti-liberal-internationalist yearnings, while embracing the autocratic nature of Orbanism — is central to grasping the Carlsonist right's true dream future," Sargent writes.

Carlson, who has laughed off suggestions that he might run for president in 2024, and other ultra-right conservatives have lost faith in democracy because voters have chosen representatives who are receptive to immigration and welcome diversity, which the right wing finds intolerable, the columnist said.

"For Carlson, this outcome is unacceptable," Sargent writes. "Only nefarious elite manipulation can be to blame for this. If majoritarian democratic outcomes result in these things, democracy has become self-destroying and no longer legitimate."