A Hungarian portal has sent questions to an organisation that provided funds for a left-wing propaganda site that published content derogatory to women on its social media, back in 2020. The questions were forwarded to the members of the advisory board that includes, among others, a political scientist at Stanford University, history professors at Oxford and Yale Universities, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and NATO's former Commander-in-Chief in Europe.

As we reported on Wednesday, the Hungarian left has received far more than the amounts it admitted so far, approximately 3 billion Hungarian forints in funding from the US through the Action for Democracy group.

The Hungarian Mandiner portal points to an important detail: Oraculum 2020 Kft, the publisher of the left-wing nationwide propaganda portal EzaLenyeg.hu, also received 1 billion forints from the American organisation. The company’s owner is Zoltan Pava Jr, previously an advisor to two left-wing governments led by former prime ministers Ferenc Gyurcsany and Gordon Bajnai.

EzaLenyeg has already lost a lawsuit filed by Gergely Gulyas, the Hungarian prime minister’s office chief, for spreading falsehoods and lies, the portal recalls. Mr Gulyas went to court after the newspaper made false allegations that he and MP Zsofia Koncz, who had just lost her father, were having a love affair. Mr Gulyas won the lawsuit as the court ruled that the portal’s claims were unfounded. The court ordered the portal to pay one million forints in damages to the minister, who asked Zsofia Koncz, also a target of the portal’s denigration campaign, to decide about the fate of the money. The amount was eventually donated to paramedics and spent on purchasing a chest compression equipment.

The portal does not only excel in producing fake news, but also in shaming women, Mandiner writes, recalling that on 4 March, 2020, it shared the article smearing Zsofia Racz, then deputy state secretary, with the words “Life is sugar, you just have to learn to suck.”

Action for Democracy is an organisation led by David Koranyi, who earlier worked as an advisor and state secretary of former leftist Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai. More recently, he also worked as the city diplomacy advisor of Budapest’s leftist mayor, Gergely Karacsony.

It is worth, however, looking at the other people who can be linked to Action for Democracy, Mandiner notes. The chairman of the organisation’s advisory board is author Kati Marton, and its members include Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist at Stanford University, Timothy Garton Ash, professor of history at Oxford University, Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale University, journalist Anne Applebaum, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the Former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Wesley Clark, former NATO Commander-in-Chief in Europe. On its website, the organisation writes that their mission is to provide support to civil society and independent media to “combat hate, fear and exclusion,” the Hungarian portal writes.

Mandiner wrote to the organisation and the members of the advisory board. It asked whether they had suggested providing support to the publishing company of Ezalenyeg.hu, whether they knew what kind of articles appeared on the site, whether the support was compatible with their anti-hate mission, whether they considered the portal an independent media outlet. It was also curious to learn their interpretation of the aforementioned post – concerning a young female politician – entitled „life is sugar, you just have to learn to suck.”