The Defender of “Normality”
By Dénes Csurgó. This article was originally published in Hungarian on 444.hu. It has been slightly edited to suit an international audience.
The members of the Safe Society Foundation (VTA) board: Kristóf Trombitás, Zoltán Moys, Andrea Földi-Kovács, László Földi, Anett Szabó, Zsolt Kovács. Photo: Facebook/Védett Társadalom Alapítvány
A new organisation has appeared on the right wing in Hungary, recruited from well-known figures in the Fidesz media and fawning to the radicals. Its goal is to protect normality against the forces of globalisation.
A new name has cropped up with growing regularity in the government-controlled press in the last few months to back up the official line on a range of subjects. The Safe Society Foundation (the Védett Társadalom Alapítvány in Hungarian, variously known as the VTA or VDTA — it can’t decide which), is one of the newest groupings on the right wing. Its stated aim is nothing less than to “protect normality” against the forces of globalisation. However, the founders of this organisation are embracing the methods of the very “globalists” that they consider their enemies, looking to George Soros’ Open Society Foundations as the model for the VTA.
Set up in summer 2021, the Safe Society Foundation stands up for freedom of speech on behalf of racists, homophobes and those hostile to migrants. It is organising into a global network to counter opposition to the Orbán government. The organisation’s representatives are not unknown — most of them are familiar faces in the government-friendly press. However, its members have as many links with far-right groups as with politicians in the coalition parties.
What is the opposite of open?
The Safe Society Foundation’s activity consists mainly of media presence - the publication of content in the media and board members’ appearances at Fidesz events. However, it was founded with far greater ambitions. Its home page states that the Safe Society Foundation “offers protection against globalist organisations and ideologies seeking to remove physical, biological and moral boundaries”.
As the manifesto on its website reads:
“We, the founders of the Safe Society Foundation, believe that the created world can be maintained by adhering to, and handing down, the traditions of our forefathers. We vow to protect, guard, and expand under all circumstances the existing order, eternal values, and universal human culture according to the laws of the Creator. The community, the family and the nation represent the bonds that serve as the basis of life, both at an individual and at a social level.”
“We speak out against the forces that attack traditional values and wish to overturn the foundations of order. We believe that, armed with the power of love and faith, the purity of the spirit and spiritual knowledge rooted in tradition, we are capable of triumphing over the materialistic forces that ever more openly and aggressively seek to extend their domination which is based on economic and political power and information control.”
In their pronouncements, its leaders often talk about the organisation protecting “normality” from those who — in the words of Safe Society Foundation founder Zoltán Moys in an interview with the newspaper Magyar Nemzet — “would make abnormality normal”. However, the VTA saves itself a lot of bother by not articulating in what way the normality they are defending is normal. If we accept that there is a normality which is “created” and is handed down from generation to generation through traditions, then even the question of what makes the normal normal is itself an attack on normality. So we are forced to accept that the normal is whatever the VTA defines as normal. And the VTA will protect it at any price from the kind of people that it believes it must be protected from.
“First, they try to put themselves in the place of God, then they turn nations against each other, then they seek to wipe out nations, next they have a go at the foundations of the family and today they are casting doubt on the racial and gender identity of the individual.” This is another quote from Moys, who says the foundation is taking part in a thousand-year-old struggle “between universal values based on tradition and the relativist, materialistic counterforces, the mercenaries of lies.”
Moys does not say in his interview who belongs to this “group, small in number but all the more aggressive, who have massive financial backgrounds and proclaim themselves to be the progressive elite”. However, the foundation’s name offers a big clue. Elsewhere the organisation has admitted where this name comes from and who is the target of this struggle.
Moys is clearly taking aim at the Open Society Foundations set up by George Soros, so much so that he originally registered the organisation as the Closed Society Foundation.
According to filed registration documents, the Closed Society Foundation was set up in January 2021 and operated under that name for almost five months. Then the founders asked to change its name from the negative-sounding “closed” to the more positive “protected” or “safe”. The only reference to the original name in the registration documents is in the listed aims of the foundation: “the support for social transformations aiming to restore a closed society.”
The Safe Society Foundation claims that scientific research is its main task, but it lists other aims, too:
The promotion of the normal — according to the laws of the natural world — men
The organisation and promotion of programmes related to the preserving of national, religious and gender identity;
The curbing of efforts directed against organic communities, nations, faith, religion and the traditional family model;
The elaboration of and support for legal and constitutional programmes;
The support of economic restoration programmes — reprivatisation;
The support of local and national economies against multinationals and the uninhibited, dishonourable money-grabbing economic policy of behind-the-scenes powers;
The promotion of freedom of speech, freedom of information and “organic culture” in the face of the “opinion dictatorship and censorship of multinational tech companies that hold the majority of opinion-forming instruments” as well as “aberrant self-realisation programmes that destroy traditional values”.
In addition, it lists aims such as supporting public health initiatives and gathering information about different “programmes curbing unnatural transformations taking place in the world”.
The Safe Society Foundation not only gathers information about similar organisations around the globe but actively supports them, too — one of its key activities is funding such work.
We asked the foundation which organisations it had given funds to or planned to do so, and where the funds for this purpose came from, but we have not had a response. Nor are there any accounts available for the organisation that might shed some light on this.
Board of Trustees of the Foundation, with scarf and cake. Photo: Facebook / Safe Society Foundation
The Safe Society Foundation is clearly thinking in terms of an international network, otherwise it would not be able to compete with the “Soros network”. It is not clear how the internationalisation is going. The Google map on its website seems to suggest the organisation already has a presence on every continent, but what it really shows is where its supporters come from. Kristóf Trombitás, a member of the board, said in September that the Safe Society Foundation had a dozen international branches right from the start, and their number is continually growing. He envisions a strong international network in four to five years’ time with members in almost all major Hungarian towns and cities forming a larger community.
That membership is already taking shape, both in the coalition parties and in the broader far right. The Safe Society Foundation has a private Facebook group with more than 6,000 members, including two government undersecretaries, Bence Rétvári and Trisztán Azbej, a legal expert at the national broadcaster, Zoltán Lomniczi, several right-wing journalists and people from more extreme groupings such as the leader of the Legio Hungaria, the largest far-right organisation in the country.
The Helsinki-Budapest axis and the Hungarians who fled home
For all its high-sounding aims, the Safe Society Foundation has precious few achievements to show for itself, even though it is relatively new. Its main work is giving support in the media to the government’s harsher messages. The foundation has embraced the strong anti-migrant line that was used in previous Fidesz campaigns, but its major themes are the global persecution of Hungarians and Christians, as well as countering “LGBTQ propaganda”.
The foundation’s blog (vdtablog.hu, which it refers to as an information page) features a series of interviews with Hungarians who moved back home from abroad. The key message here is that the West has become a terrible place to live, with an unbearable opinion dictatorship and the fall in law and order due to migration.
Recently the website started a series of fact-finding articles, on topics such as how homosexuality is being presented in a positive light on an online course at one of the big Budapest universities, ELTE. “Massive homosexual propaganda is being conducted at the University at the taxpayers’ expense,” says the introduction to one article. Kossuth Radio, one of the main national channels, also reported on this.
On a similar theme the blog has begun a video series on “child protection”. The first one featured a discussion between the psychologists Emőke Bagdy and Melinda Hal.
The articles on the blog also reveal that the campaign to avert climate catastrophe is in fact seeking to “eliminate and replace white European pride with an artificially created theme of a depressed, self-hating people who are destroying the Earth and are ashamed of all their ancestors achieved”.
The Safe Society Foundation has also set up a “legal assistance” organisation which will probably feature regularly in public broadcasting.
Just as the Centre for Fundamental Rights was set up as a pro-government counterpart to the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, so the Safe Society Foundation has set up the Budapest Committee as a counterpart to the Helsinki Committee. This swears to protect the rights of the most oppressed of minorities, which is white, right-wing Christians, according to government propaganda.
One of the first cases it embraced was a debate between Rita Perintfalvi, a Catholic theologian, and Dénes Hess, a Franciscan friar, that had received little publicity. The friar had addressed an open letter to Perintfalvi on the website Vasarnap.hu, saying that the theologian “was mocking her own profession and peddling her ‘rantings’ that went against the teachings of the Church and the Bible” when she said on her Facebook page that “the enjoyment of homosexual lust is not only acceptable but also natural”. Hess said that according to the teaching of the Catholic Church it is a sin, and he expressed this at length.
Perintfalvi responded on her Facebook page, writing that “not only were Hess’s arguments homophobic but they raised the possibility of the charge of public incitement”. The Budapest Committee leapt to the friar’s defence: “If necessary, the Budapest Committee and the Safe Society Foundation will provide legal defence for Dénes Hess and anyone else who threatened by the steamroller of the woke dictatorship”.
The escaper, the agent and the rest
The Safe Society Foundation team is formed from the journalists, presenters and ubiquitous experts of the Fidesz media. They tend to be the more radical representatives of Fidesz’s thinking or at least those willing to take the government’s thinking to its logical extremes. It is no accident that several of the foundation’s staff are close to members of far-right groups, whose causes they espouse, as we shall see later.
The foundation was set up by two campaigning journalists of the right, Árpád Szakács and Zoltán Moys. Szakács, a black-belt culture warrior, was editor-in-chief of the regional newspapers that belonged to the Mediaworks company between 2016 and 2020 serving up government-friendly fodder. He was a leading figure in the right-wing struggle for dominance in world of arts and literature. However, he became such a firm anti-vaxxer that he completely turned against Orbán’s politics and joined the Our Homeland Movement (Mi Hazánk Mozgalom). This may be linked to his departure from the Safe Society Foundation.
Moys, who has family ties to Fidesz — his father-in-law is Sándor Lezsák, the Fidesz deputy speaker in the Hungarian parliament — remains an active figure in the Safe Society Foundation.
VTA’s Founder Zoltán Moys. Photo: Facebook / Safe Society Foundation
Moys is the leader of the Börzsöny Action Group, which is perhaps best known for setting up the Breakout Memorial Tour [editor’s note: to commemorate the last-ditch attempt by the Nazi and Hungarian troops trapped in Buda in 1945 to escape through the ring of besieging Soviet troops]. He is one of those lucky few who can combine their hobby with their work. Besides the Breakout Tour, which is state-funded, he also directs “Home-walker”, a television series about hiking routes in Hungary and the Carpathian Basin (the area of pre-1918 Hungary) that has strong nationalist and irridentist overtones.
The programme is produced by Moys’ company, Dextramedia, which has received numerous orders from the national broadcaster. Between 2011 and 2014 it earned 400 million forints (more than £1 million at the time) from work such as this. In 2013 it produced a five-part series about a housing development in Ócsa built for victims of the foreign currency loans. Daniel Papp, the director general of MTVA, which supervises the national television and radio channels, worked as an editor on the series.
Since last autumn Moys has been a member of the teaching staff [running a course on making documentaries] at the University of Theatre and Film Arts (SZFE), which was turned into a private (Fidesz-controlled) foundation in 2020.
The Breakout Tour is quite a magnet for far-right groups, and Moys enjoys numerous other links with them. As the investigative website Átlátszó noted, until 2011 Dextramedia produced the N1TV news programme for Jobbik, the party that at the time was on the far right. One broadcast referred to Hitler as an important statesman.
For a while the Sixty-four Counties Youth Movement (Hatvannégy Vármegye Ifjúsági Mozgalom — another far-right irridentist group) operated at the same IP address as Dextramedia, as did the homepage of HVIM member György Gyula Zagyva, who became an MP. The company also supported — as did Kuruc.info — 2013 Christmas concert of the rock band Nemzeti Front (National Front).
Heading the board of the Safe Society Foundation is László Földi, a familiar face on chat shows produced by the national broadcaster and TV channels belonging to the Fidesz media conglomerate, the Central European Press and Media Foundation.
László Földi on public service television.
Földi began his career as an agent for the communist secret police and was a local party secretary in the Communist Party. He continued as an agent after 1989, as operations director in the new Information Office, rising to the rank of colonel by 1995. However, he got caught up in the “Birch tree” scandal that broke in 1996, where the secret services were revealed to be illegally gathering information on left-wing politicians. Földi was investigated for breaching state secrets and illegal handling of information and was sacked. Charges were dropped in 1999 for lack of evidence, but that was the end of his career as an agent.
By then, however, Fidesz was in power and Földi was involved in the first big scandal of the new administration. He subsequently set up a security company called Defend and as a trusted figure amassed state orders, building up a staff of 2,400 by 2002. Once the Socialists returned to power that year, he resigned, fearing his bad relations with the party would spell doom for the company.
Földi is a regular commentator on security affairs for the right-wing press, known for his comments and extreme theories, though these have sometimes landed him in hot water. In 2017, at the peak of the government’s migration hysteria, he said in an Echo TV programme that civil organisations helping migrants were war criminals, traitors, collaborators and people smugglers, and in a war such people can be openly liquidated.
At the time Földi was working as an adviser in the Budapest Mayor’s office. After that outburst the mayor, István Tarlós, banned him from making any statements about migration so long as he worked for the mayor. Földi couldn’t keep to that and was sacked. His pronouncement was too much even for Fidesz-controlled Media Council, the body that oversees the press in Hungary, which fined Echo TV for its report that it said broke the law.
However, Földi continued to be one of the Fidesz media’s favourite security experts. He was given a column in Magyar Idők, a newspaper set up by Fidesz, and he regularly cropped up on national television. Examples of his more extreme statements include:
By opening the borders to migrants Angela Merkel did more harm to Germany than Adolf Hitler.
It would have been legitimate to sink the boat of the reporter photographing Foreign Minister Péter Szíjjártó relaxing on the yacht of Hungarian oligarch László Szíjj.
There is a conscious attack on normality and the best solution would be to pull the plug on the internet.
Földi doesn’t hold back when talking about the aims of the Safe Society Foundation either. In a manifesto-like article about the foundation in the daily newspaper Magyar Nemzet, he referred to an open letter penned by some French army generals that caused an outcry in France and was seized upon by the right-wing press. The generals wrote about the danger of a racial war, one of the causes, naturally, being anti-racism.
“Their assertion, which can be called a cry for help, was triggered by the unmanageable dead-end of multiculturalism, by the multitude of dramatic events that have followed naturally — sadly — from the coexistence of different cultures,” Földi wrote. “We, the representatives and members of the Safe Society Foundation, believe that the battle of ideas is not over yet. The time for real generals has not come yet‚ although it is important to know that they stand ready behind us. The battle of reason can still be fought, defending all that represents the dignity of human existence.”
Andrea Földi-Kovács and László Földi. Photo: Facebook / Safe Society Foundation
Another member of the Safe Society Foundation’s board is Andrea Földi-Kovács, László Földi’s wife and a former presenter on the news channel Hír TV. She and her husband often represent the new foundation and its views at various Fidesz events, such as László Böröcz’s Buda Civic Salon. At one such event she said that while the left wing operates on emotions, the right wing runs on arguments. She says all this in the name of an organisation that, as we mentioned above, doesn’t much bother to support its viewpoint with arguments. This is normality, end of story. Földi-Kovács, according to an article on the Mandiner website, left Hír TV directly because of the foundation.
Földi-Kovács is not the only Hír TV veteran on the board: Anett Szabó is another. In addition, there is Zsolt Kovács, another TV presenter, and Gábor Göbl, the bass guitarist of the group Moby Dick and a former Jobbik representative in Sopron, in western Hungary. Kristóf Trombitás is the best-known face on the board, and one of the beneficiaries of the Facebook campaigns financed by Megafon Centre, a group that handles Fidesz’s social media propaganda. Up to 14 February this year Megafon Centre had spent 75 million forints (£200,000) in advertising on Trombitás’ Facebook page. This is half what the organisation spent on, say, [the right-wing political scientist] Dániel Deák’s page, but Trombitás is still one of the popular faces of pro-Fidesz content. Of all the foundation’s media staff, his career is the one that is on the rise within the Fidesz propaganda complex. He sees himself as a foot soldier willing to go into the ideological battle — and he sees the coming elections as the true war of the worlds
Béla Incze on Pesti TV.
The right side of the pitch
While these figures are on Fidesz’s right wing, others involved in the Safe Society Foundation are involved in hard-core far-right groups. Perhaps the best-known face is Béla Incze, who has taken part in several radical groups.
Incze was a member of the board of the HVIM and in that capacity he spoke at a demonstration in 2011 in support of György Budaházy [a far-right irredentist who was later imprisoned for terrorist activities]. At the rally Incze said the Nazis’ SS Werwolf, which Goebbels envisioned as operating as terrorist cells after the collapse of the Third Reich, should be the role model for right-wing groups. Incze encouraged his audience to practise martial arts and to get acquainted with weapons “because there might come a time of civil war when people will go off to work in the morning and in the evening so to set off bombs. Who knows?”
For a while Incze was a parliamentary assistant rather than as a national terrorist. He worked for HVIM member and MP György Gyula Zagyva, and later was employed by the Jobbik MPs. That was until he threw a magnesium flare on to a car during a stag party and punched the unhappy owner, who happened to be a policeman. His contract was terminated forthwith.
Incze left the HVIM in 2018 — sources said this was because the organisation was getting closer to the Our Homeland Movement which had formed out of the right ring of Jobbik, and Incze preferred to remain independent. So he formed the Legio Hungaria, where he remains active.
This group was one of the organisers of the Day of Honour march [on 11 February, another event commemorating the 1945 breakout]. It was the Legio that attacked an alternative cultural centre in Budapest, the Aurora, when it was holding a Pride-related event in 2019. Incze defines himself as a militant conservative, and his group holds training camps for nationalist youth, organises racist conferences and actively maintains contact with far-right groups in neighbouring countries.
The leader of the far-right group Legio Hungaria, Béla Incze posts in the Safe Society Foundation’s closed group, although not very often.
At the end of January, he wrote about the Day of Honour and, both on his own Facebook page and in the Safe Society Foundation’s group, expressed gratitude that the foundation was the only right-wing platform that “gave Tamás Lipták the opportunity to express his opinion in the face of unworthy left-wing attacks”.
This was a reference to another former HVIM member who moved to the Legio Hungaria. Lipták is now the head of the Legio’s Budapest branch — he is also a football fan and an active member of the ultra groups which caused trouble during the last European Championships and at the Hungary-England football matches last year, for which the Hungarians were penalised by UEFA. The “unworthy left-wing attacks” were related to this: the Bellingcat investigative website wrote about the ultras after they attracted global attention during the Euros and Lipták’s name cropped up several times. The Telex website published the article in Hungarian, and Lipták responded on the VTA blog, which the Legio Hungaria also carried. He didn’t deny the Bellingcat statements, but he complained that he had to smuggle in his anti-kneeling banner into the stadiums (the Bellingcat article writes a lot about this) while banners with “far-left” symbols such as a fist smashing a swastika are allowed in with no further ado.
Lipták crops up much more frequently than Incze on the Safe Society Foundation Facebook group, and presents a programme together with VTA board member Kristóf Trombitás,VTA blog editor Tamás Horváth, and Béla Pörge [who writes for 888.hu, the right-wing news website set up to counter the success of the investigative portal 444.hu]
Béla Incze, Zoltán Moys, Tamás Horváth and Tamás Lipták. Photo: Facebook
The programme is a “fan” podcast called The Right Side of the Pitch, and you can get a feel for the tone by reading the racist and homophobic posts on the Facebook page. Since the programme began in March 2021, its guests have included Balázs Sziva, the singer in the skinhead bands Romantic Violence and Hungarica; Áron Ambrózy, a journalist on the Pesti Srácok website; and László Szentesi-Zöldi, a journalist on the magazine Demokrata. The guest on the most recent programme was Zoltán Moys — though comments by Tamás Horváth on Facebook suggest that Béla Incze was also present. Hardly a surprise, given that the topic was close to both men’s hearts: the breakout and the Day of Honour event.
The breakout is a favourite subject for Tamás Horváth, both on his Safe Society Foundation blog and also on 888.hu. An article he wrote in February 2020 entitled “Glory to the heroes: 75 years since the start of the breakout” caused quite a scandal. Horváth quoted the “inspiring message” issued by the Nazi general Otto Wöhler, which praised Hitler and the Hungarian Arrow Cross leader Szálasi. “The Hungarian and German soldiers defending Budapest bore witness to their idealism and their heroic view on life — taking a stand with their weapons in their hands, they sacrificed their lives on the altar of European culture,” Horváth wrote. 888.hu took down the article after protests from Jewish organisations.
In August 2021 Horváth was appointed editor-in-chief of Vasarnap.hu, “a government propaganda portal funded by the state, dressed up as a church website and turning out anti-gay and anti-abortion material.” However, he resigned two weeks later, probably because of the Hitler-Szálasi article. The comment posted by the portal was that “hatred has never been and never will be compatible in any form with our faith and our mission. All such incitement goes against our values.”
Horváth was invited as the editor of vdtablog.hu to appear on a national television programme to talk about where freedom of speech ends and incitement to hate begins. Among other things, he said that “telling the truth can never be an incitement to hatred”. The Hitler article was not mentioned. Most recently he appeared on Pesti TV, where he and Béla Incze were defending the commemoration of the breakout. This time, however, he was introduced merely as a journalist.
