Racist Traitors need to be checked.
John Presco
“They’re saying that Putin is enabling the ‘white genocide,'” White said, referring to the longstanding racist trope that white people are being disproportionately killed across the world by people of color in order to undermine global white supremacy. “They feel that their white brothers and sisters are being killed, and having to fight for something that doesn’t necessarily pertain to them.”
Conservative pundits have also voiced support for Russia. Candace Owens has pushed the Putin talking point that Russia created Ukraine. She also tweeted “Russian lives matter.” She was retweeted by the Russian embassy in the U.S.
The foreign military intelligence agency of the Russian Federation, known by its abbreviation GRU, currently has more intelligence officials deployed in Mexico than in any other country in the world, with the final goal of influencing the decisions taken by the United States. That’s according to the commander of the United States Northern Command, Glen VanHerck, who issued this warning on Thursday during a hearing of the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services, during which he added that the Kremlin is seeking to access the US from the neighboring country.
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Why is there support for Russia on the far right?
Putin has a long history of cultivating and providing material support to far-right leaders in Europe and the United States, according to Andrew Weiss, a Russia expert and vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
In exchange, those leaders parrot Kremlin talking points, Weiss said.
America’s far right shares a common enemy with Putin and Russia: the West’s liberal values and the cabal of elites they say controls the economy and the media.
“It helped for Russian purposes to act like all of these other people agree with them,” Weiss said. “It was a way of creating an echo chamber where there isn’t one.”
Like Putin, former president Donald Trump has frequently professed his personal admiration for the Russian president and capitalized on the disdain for western liberal values among some conservatives, said Jared Holt, a fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab who researches extremism.
With Trump out of office, many of his supporters are now looking to Putin to take on their enemies, Holt said.
“Some of these far-right cliques within the broader pro-Trump movement came to view Trump as an avatar, fighting against the ills of society they perceive,” he said. “I think they view Putin, also, as an avatar standing up against similar forces.”
Why are Kremlin talking points in Americans’ news feeds?
Unfounded claims to gin up support for the war – including claims that the US is funding bioweapon labs in Ukraine or crisis actors are faking events in the war – have gained traction on social media throughout the conflict, according to Zignal Labs, a software company that tracks and analyzes trends in online narratives.
The far right has echoed many of these claims. On his Telegram channel, Joseph Jordan, a white nationalist podcaster who goes by the name Eric Striker, claimed a pregnant woman injured in the bombing of a Ukrainian maternity hospital was an Instagram celebrity. QAnon-affiliated Twitter and Telegram accounts also spread the pro-Kremlin conspiracy theory which was quickly debunked.
New conspiracies pop up daily. They are manufactured for a domestic audience in Russia and pro-Moscow Ukrainians but also push buttons in the US. The latest spreading on social media is an unfounded report from Russian state media outlet Sputnik that Hunter Biden and George Soros are funding biolabs in Ukraine.
The danger? That Russian propaganda will find a receptive audience beyond extremist channels, said Stephanie Foggett, director of global communications at intelligence and security firm The Soufan Group.
“The far right used the pandemic to creep into the mainstream and broaden their appeal to followers of QAnon and anti-vaxxers,” Foggett said. “Now there is a really, really ripe ecosystem for conspiracy theories.”
Ukraine as extension of culture wars
Fueling support for Putin and his Russian offensive is the perception that he alone can save the world from identity politics and western globalization, extremism experts say.
Putin has long fomented aggression towards the LGBTQ+ community. He has passed stringent laws against “gay propaganda,” and recently blasted gender nonconformity as a “pandemic” equal to Covid-19.
“Putin ain’t woke,” former Trump advisor-turned-far-right podcaster Steve Bannon declared on his show shortly before the Russian invasion. “He’s anti-woke.”
In Putin, the far right sees a strongman capable of remaking the world order and rejecting liberal values such as gay rights, said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University.
“This is similar to the way that we saw some far-right support for the Taliban last August,” Miller-Idriss said. “There’s the appeal of a ‘strong man’ or the idea of a strong resistor against the West and all that’s gone with that in both of those cases – anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ, authoritarian hyper-masculine, all of that kind of tough-guy stuff.”
Putin doubled down on this rhetoric in a speech Friday, in which he accused the West of trying to “cancel” Russia. The Russian president invoked author J.K. Rowling, who has been criticized for her anti-trans comments.
“Not so long ago, they canceled children’s author Joan Rowling whose books were spread all over the world in the hundreds of millions of copies, because she did not please fans of so-called gender freedoms,” Putin said in a televised speech.
For some, the conflict in Ukraine is about the same stuff of the culture wars in the US and that’s dangerous, Foggett says.
“What really concerns me is that the right especially, they are projecting their own social anxieties into the Ukraine-Russia conflict,” she said.
Not everyone on the far right supports Putin
Not everyone on the far right is siding with Russia in the war. Some Neo-Nazis and white supremacists oppose Putin because of his vow to “de-Nazify” Ukraine.
One U.S.-based neo-Nazi website declared support for Ukraine based solely on the claim that Russian military success would undermine a region that has previously been welcoming to white supremacist organizing.
Kesa White, a researcher at PERIL who tracks white supremacists and other groups, said she’s also seen another narrative gain traction online.
“They’re saying that Putin is enabling the ‘white genocide,'” White said, referring to the longstanding racist trope that white people are being disproportionately killed across the world by people of color in order to undermine global white supremacy. “They feel that their white brothers and sisters are being killed, and having to fight for something that doesn’t necessarily pertain to them.”
LONDON (AP) — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Saturday that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a “turning point for the world,” arguing that a victory for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces would herald “a new age of intimidation.”
Lawmakers reject Russian official’s request to return Alaska: ‘Never, ever, ever’ (msn.com)
As Russia moves into western Ukraine, families say goodbye and some volunteer to fight
Russian parliament member Oleg Matveychev on a TV program addressed waves of sanctions against Russia in response to the country’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, saying leaders should “think about reparations.”
“The harm these sanctions caused us cost money. Return of possessions, including possessions of the Russian Empire, Soviet Union and even parts of Russia that are now occupied by the United States,” Matveychev said on Sunday, according to the Anchorage Daily News.
© Alex Edelman, APSen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, questions witnesses during a Senate Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Hearing on the federal government response to COVID-19 on Capitol Hill Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2020, in Washington.
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The host of the show asked Matveychev about the return of Alaska and Fort Ross, which was established by Russians in California, according to the California Department of Parks and Recreation.
“This is my next point – recognizing Alaska, Fort Ross and Antarctica,” Matveychev responded, according to the Anchorage Daily News. “We actually discovered it, so it rightfully belongs to us.”
The United States reached an agreement to purchase Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million in 1867. Alaska was admitted as a state in 1959.
Republican Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski balked at the statement, tweeting coverage of the comments and a gif of Taylor Swift with the caption “That will never, ever, ever happen!”
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Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy also responded to the comments, tweeting “Good luck with that!”
“Not if we have something to say about it. We have hundreds of thousands of armed Alaskans and military members that will see it differently,” he added.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy continued calling for a no-fly zone in Ukraine, or at least additional military hardware, sanctions and other actions targeting Russia as the country continues its invasion of Ukraine.
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