A U.S. citizen serving as a political assistant at the Hungarian Embassy in Washington participated in a 2017 white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left one counterprotester dead, an investigation by RFE/RL’s Hungarian Service has found.
Over the past seven years, Taylor Ragg has been involved in the conservative and far-right wings of the U.S. political landscape that have widely embraced Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's populist authoritarian rule as a model for the United States.
Ragg, 29, has served as a political assistant at Hungary's Washington embassy since at least February 2021, according to archived screenshots of the embassy’s website and multiple sources close to the embassy.
Video footage reviewed by RFE/RL’s Hungarian Service shows that Ragg carried a torch during a nighttime march of white supremacists in Charlottesville on August 11, 2017, as part of a protest against the city’s decision to remove a statue of General Robert E. Lee, the Confederate military leader during the American Civil War.
Participants in the evening march shouted white-nationalist slogans, though video footage reviewed by reporters does not show Ragg, who carried a tiki torch, chanting along with other marchers shouting, “You will not replace us.”
The following day, clashes erupted between participants in the protest, called “Unite the Right,” and counterprotesters, and a woman was killed when a man drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters. The driver was convicted of hate crimes and sentenced to life in prison.
Three sources close to the Hungarian Embassy in Washington confirmed to RFE/RL’s Hungarian Service that the man seen on video footage of the torch-lit march on the eve of the deadly events is Ragg.
Neither Ragg nor the embassy responded to questions about his employment sent by RFE/RL’s Hungarian Service.
A month after the deadly Charlottesville event, Ragg made national news in the United States when a woman studying at his university accused him of inciting harassment against her with a Facebook post calling on others to “report this illegal at my school bragging about breaking the law.”
The woman, Paola Garcia, was brought to the United States by her parents at a young age and had been granted the ability to stay in the country under a program initiated under former U.S. President Barack Obama to allow undocumented immigrants to remain temporarily if they arrived as children.
The president of Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, subsequently sent a statement to its community calling Ragg’s post “reprehensible." The university subsequently announced that Ragg was no longer enrolled.
Ragg was photographed last year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual conference that attracts conservative activists and politicians, together with Mark Ivanyo, head of the self-described “national-populist” conservative advocacy group Republicans for National Renewal.
Ivanyo has praised Orban , who has endorsed former Donald Trump, the former U.S. president and current Republican nominee in the November 5 U.S. presidential election, as “a man of the people and for the people.”
Since his ascent to power in 2010, Orban has clamped down on civil rights and tightened control of the media, while his continuing ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has put him at odds with other European leaders.
