Viktor Orbán won't be the last anti-LGBTQ+ strongman to topple

One of the world's most openly homophobic and misogynistic leaders just lost power. Viktor Orbán is out.

For years, Orbán, as prime minister, held up Hungary as proof that a country could be tightened, simplified, and brought under control — a place where national identity came first and anything that complicated it could be pushed out. That message did not stay in Hungary, it moved, was studied, repeated, and turned into strategy by political movements that wanted the same kind of power.

A sitting prime minister stands in front of an international conservative audience, calls liberalism a virus, lays out a governing formula built on “no migration, no gender, no war,” and describes his country as an incubator where this has already been done. In this incubator, LGBTQ+ people are treated as threats, schools are stripped of language that acknowledges them, and identity itself is recast as something dangerous. That model is not hidden but exported, applauded, and picked up by American politicians who repeat the same lines, target the same people, and build policy on the same idea: that a country works better when some people are pushed out of it.

Hungary turned that idea into law, piece by piece: Pride shut down, LGBTQ+ content pulled out of classrooms and media, transgender people blocked from changing their documents, and families redefined so same-sex couples were written out of them. Each step narrowed who could exist openly, who could be recognized, and who could move through daily life without having to think about it.

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That narrowing did not stay on paper, it showed up everywhere: in what people said out loud and what they stopped saying, in who stayed and who left, in the way visibility itself started to carry risk, and in the quiet calculations people made about whether it was safe to be seen, safe to speak, safe to exist without drawing attention.

It extended into control over bodies and families, with policies designed to reward one kind of life and shut down others, pushing a version of reproduction and identity that treated people as part of a national project instead of as individuals with their own lives, their own choices, their own futures.

The same pattern took hold in the United States, with Donald Trump embracing Orbán directly, echoing his language, aligning with his priorities, and advancing policies that restricted abortion, cut off support for reproductive healthcare, and tied together immigration, identity, and population in a single story about who the country is for. At the same time, states pushed through wave after wave of laws targeting LGBTQ+ people, especially trans kids, removing them from classrooms, from sports, from public life, and backing it all with the same claim: that this was protection.

The result has not been stability, it has been escalation: more harassment, more threats, more violence. People are targeted in public and online, entire communities are made more visible as targets and less protected, and the gap between what is said and what is happening grows wider every year.

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Hungary already broke it: Voters showed up in numbers too large to ignore and removed a government that spent more than a decade tightening its grip on media, courts, and public life, ending the run of a leader who built power by deciding who did not belong and forcing that decision into law.

We are already broken: in rent that doesn’t get paid, in groceries that don’t last the week, in rights being taken in real time, in classrooms where teachers stop mid-sentence, in hospitals where care is denied or delayed, in people getting harassed, threatened, or attacked for being visible, and in a country where the people trusted to stop the damage wrote it into policy and now defend it.

There is nothing abstract about it, and there is nothing left to wait for, because when enough people are living like this at the same time, they stop asking for relief and start acting on it, not quietly and not alone, but together, in ways that shift what holds and what doesn’t.

Josh Ackley is a political strategist and the frontman of the queerpunk band The Dead Betties. Follow at @momdarkness and listen to music on Spotify.

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