June 2, 2023

The Far-Right's Love Affair with Vladimir Putin

Why and How Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson Promote Russian Propaganda

Although I began writing this essay before Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News, it is still relevant. He won’t have nearly as big of a platform, but he could and probably will easily gain a significant one elsewhere. More importantly, his show only serves as a case study of trends in far-right politics that, as I will argue, stretch far beyond his particular ecosystem of grifters. 

Last year, a bizarre story unfolded in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine that involved none other than the most-watched cable news show of 2021: Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight.

On March 9, 2022, Carlson stated on his show that the United States government was funding the creation of “deadly pathogens” in Ukrainian biolabs. Several outlets swiftly debunked these claims, including Politifact, which clarified that while the Department of Defense and the Ukrainian health ministry have partnered since 2005 to study deadly pathogens to prevent outbreaks, they were not creating biological weapons.

Four days later, Mother Jones obtained a leaked March 3 Kremlin memo recommending that state TV air clips of Carlson’s show because he defended the invasion. That's just what they did. 

The funny thing is, that particular segment of Russian propaganda started as… Russian propaganda.

As the Washington Post reported, Moscow has made similar claims about US-funded bioweapon labs in Ukraine for years– all the way back to Soviet times. Somehow, this claim recently made its way into the far-right social mediasphere. The now-suspended Twitter account @WarClandestine wrote that COVID-19 is a US-manufactured bioweapon and Russia is invading Ukraine to destroy more bioweapon labs before they can be unleashed on the world. Somewhere along the way, InfoWars picked up the story, and the claim was endlessly repeated across QAnon-affiliated outlets. Eventually, it ended up on Carlson’s show.

Although the webs of communication are highly complex, it’s easy to understand how such a claim ended up on Fox News. Carlson regularly promoted conspiracy theories, disinformation, misinformation, and outright lies on his show. Just one week before his March 7 show, he brought on Michael Gableman, head of a Republican-ordered probe into the 2020 election in Wisconsin, to talk about his work. In it, Carlson claimed that the voting rate in many nursing homes was 100%, when official data showed that it was in fact 67%. In another segment the year before, he claimed that an incident involving an alarm going off at a warehouse that held ballots in Georgia was evidence of voter fraud, when in fact it was just a door being opened by some off-duty police officers. And this is far from the first time Carlson made or featured guests making false claims about COVID-19. 

No, how this disinformation ended up on Carlson’s show is very well documented. The more interesting question is why an extreme subsection of the American right, Carlson included, would be so eager to believe Russian propaganda when one would expect a conservative to insist on loyalty to their own nation. There’s nothing weird about conservatives criticizing the policies of Joe Biden, but straight-up siding with your country’s international political rival seems very out of the ordinary. Explaining this bizarre turn of events in the American far right requires a deep dive not only into its recent history, but also into the nature of far-right ideology itself.

Putin’s Fanboys, East and West

The world has had a bit of a thing for authoritarian, far-right leaders in recent years. Jair Bolsonaro, who expresses open admiration for and a desire to return to military dictatorship, handily won Brazil’s 2019 presidential election with 55% of the popular vote. Current Polish President Andrzej Duda and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán have both passed or proposed policies restricting the rights of women and LGBTQ people. And finally, any discussion of this would be incomplete without discussing our very own former President Donald Trump.

Trump’s presidency was nothing short of revolutionary for the American far right. His popularity among the conservative base has nearly made criticizing him an act of political suicide for Republican politicians. Although he is not the most popular president of all time– he might be one of the most hated in living memory– he nevertheless inspired exceptional enthusiasm both for and against his policies. For all the horrible things he’s done, few presidents can claim to be able to inspire riots intended to overturn an election. This enthusiasm also means that– regardless of the subject– his supporters generally follow his lead. Which brings us to Trump’s frequent statements of admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

As Vox reported in 2017, one of the many 180s in Republican popular opinion triggered by Trump is approval of Putin. To this day, Trump has repeatedly praised Putin as a strong leader, echoing statements of approval towards other strongmen such as Bolsonaro. Favorability ratings among Republicans have followed Trump’s lead, thanks in no small part to Carlson of course, as more have a negative view of President Joe Biden than they do of Putin.  To be fair, that’s still an 81% disapproval rating, and Democrats also viewed Trump more unfavorably than Putin. The fact remains, however, that the margin of disapproval is much greater. 92% of Republican respondents said they viewed Biden unfairly, a difference of 11 percentage points. 87% of Democrats had a negative view of Trump, while 85% had a negative view of Putin.

To be perfectly fair, people in the United States have been overwhelmingly united across ideological lines in sympathizing with Ukraine over Putin in a recent YouGov poll. There is one measure that strongly predicts one’s views on the conflict, however: vaccination status.

According to a survey by EKOS, 42% of people who refused a COVID-19 vaccine do not believe that Russia is committing war crimes in Ukraine in spite of extensive documentation by Amnesty International and others. Given the precedent for the movement of Russian propaganda in far-right misinformation channels and the prevalence of COVID-19 misinformation in the same channels, one can reasonably conclude both cases of misinformation came from the same place.

Carlson has similarly praised Putin along the same lines. He’s even outright stated that he’s rooting for Russia in 2019. While there are ideological reasons for why a person on the far-right such as Carlson would praise Putin– as shall be covered later– he most clearly shows his hand in this clip. His case is fairly simple: don’t hate Russia, hate China. Besides an admittedly fair point about shipping well-paying jobs overseas, he hits the usual culture war beats complaining about Critical Race Theory and cancel culture, conspiracy theories about China manufacturing COVID-19, and racist stereotypes about eating dogs. In line with Trump’s comments about and policies towards China during his presidency, Carlson clearly sees China as the US’s main geopolitical rival, not Russia. Never mind the increasing alignment of China towards Russia in the context of the invasion. Why Carlson wanted to focus on China rather than Russia is beyond the scope of this post, but he beat that drum until his sudden termination this April.

Carlson is far from the only figure on the far right to defend the Russian invasion or parrot Russian propaganda. Some, like Jordan Peterson, follow the exact same line of justification as Putin in arguing the invasion was necessary to push back against encroaching Western values, namely so-called “wokeism”. Yes, he really said that. I genuinely wish I could say I think Peterson is too smart to really believe this, but he makes such an impassioned case that there is no way he is anything but sincere.

Jokes aside, Peterson probably made this argument in part because he really believes it, and in part because he now works for the Daily Wire and needed to somehow relate the invasion back to the culture war. It’s also probably because Jungians are insane, but that’s neither here nor there. 

Then there’s Michael Warren Davis at the American Conservative, who argued this week that “Western elites” hate Russia so much because it’s experiencing a rise in religiosity and is “mean to the gays.” Granted, this magazine is not known for hosting top minds, but the article is nevertheless illustrative of the rhetorical line of what you might call the New American Right towards the war.

While this is all well and good for establishing the affinity of Trump, Carlson, and other emerging figures on the authoritarian right for Putin, it doesn’t explain how a strongman on the other side of the planet managed to captivate them so thoroughly. One piece of this puzzle lies in their shared ideology.

Our Tasks: Putin and the Godfather of Russian Fascism

Remember the anti-LGBTQ policies of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán? They aren’t without recent precedent.

In 2013, Russia passed a law that imposed fines upon anyone that gives minors information on “nontraditional sexual relations” or even holds a pride parade. This was widely seen as an attempt to ingratiate himself further with the Russian Orthodox Church (whose patriarch recently blamed the invasion on the fact that Western liberal countries hold gay pride parades). Indeed, Putin directly justified the invasion as necessary to provide a bulwark against the erosion of traditional values by an encroaching West; in other words, we needed to invade Ukraine because Westerners will make our children gay. Putin even seems to have taken a page from certain American Evangelicals in decrying the “Satanism” of the US in a September 2022 speech. Although this specific rhetorical shift is a recent development, his affinity for far-right politics has deep roots.

On the eve of the Crimean invasion, everyone in the top brass of the Russian state received a copy of a book of political essays by a Russian philosopher born more than 130 years before. As Yale historian Timothy Snyder writes in his essay God is a Russian, the work of Ivan Ilyin is some of the most widely studied and cited philosophy in Russian politics (Russian “thinker” Aleksandr Dugin, which the BBC called the “brains behind President Putin’s wildly popular annexation of Crimea”, is also heavily influenced by Ilyin).

While there is far more to Ilyin’s philosophy than is possible to cover here, Snyder broadly summarizes his thought as Russian Christian fascism. After his 1918 expulsion from Russia by the Bolsheviks, Ilyin became enraptured by Benito Mussolini and went on to use his earlier work to create a metaphysical, and later ethical, justification for his own brand of Russian fascism. Following a stint in the civil service of Nazi Germany, which he initially praised but was later exiled from, Ilyin came to believe that Russia was a uniquely “innocent” and unified nation. 

In Ilyin’s thought, most nations of the world had become spiritually corrupted by the march of history, atomizing on a spiritual and cultural level. Russia was the exception. Individual Russians were not individuals at all to Ilyin, but parts of an organic whole: organs that make up a body, fingers that make up a fist. In his model for Russian fascism, the people and the government of Russia would be united in an “organic-spiritual” whole. This, however, meant that Russia faced a constant onslaught from the rest of the world as Western liberal values such as individualism and secularism constantly threatened to corrupt it with their doctrine of disunity. 

Ilyin further argued that the only way to defend against this as well as achieve his dream of a totally unified Russian state was the appointment of a totalitarian dictator that controlled all aspects of government. As Snyder writes, allowing the people to choose their leaders would only interfere with destiny, and was as irrational as allowing “embryos to choose their species.” In other words, what Russia was, is, and will become is pre-determined by its own nature and inseparable from its existence. Putin has gone to equally great lengths to establish the connection between Ilyin’s thought and his policies, quoting him in interviews and ceremonially returning the exiled author’s remains to Russia in 2005. In other words, Putin does not justify his authoritarian rule and the invasion of Ukraine with homophobia and Russian nationalism alone but contextualizes that homophobia within a broader vision of Russia’s world-historical destiny to battle against the degeneracy of Western values. 

Although it is Russia’s unique destiny alone to become the last unified nation, Putin likely does not discount the importance of making friends and allies. Following this, the Kremlin has gone to great lengths to establish allies for itself among the various far-right movements and parties of Europe.

Putin and the International Far Right

As a series of emails obtained by New Lines Magazine show1, the Kremlin sought out relationships with and assisted various far-right politicians and their organizations across Europe, including Marine La Pen’s National Rally and the German Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany). The far-right politician Matteo Salvini even came into the crosshairs of Italian security forces after an exposé showed his attempts to get covert funding from the Kremlin in 2019. Nevertheless, few politicians would dare to speak out in favor of siding with Russia for various reasons, chief among them that it would be political suicide: polls show their voters strongly disapprove of both Russia and Putin.

Most politicians and commentators now go with the much safer option of being merely anti-Ukraine rather than pro-Russia, such as Viktor Orbán in his declaration that Ukraine cannot win and should just give up. To be clear, questioning the wisdom of NATO involvement in the war does not make one a shill for Russia, but coming from this crowd, their true motivations and dishonesty are clear. Overall, these leaks beg the question as to what the Kremlin’s endgame is. If none of the politicians Putin spent so much time strengthening ties with can openly support him, what does he hope they can do? The short answer is just what they are doing now: not explicitly defending Russia but merely attacking Ukraine.

“Not one more penny for Ukraine” has become a familiar rallying cry for politicians that traditionally tended towards hawkishness. Carlson did it, as did Missouri Senator Josh Hawley. Clearly, not everyone who opposes aid to Ukraine is a far-right talk show host or GOP Senator, and that is the plausible deniability both of them count on. Peace doves these men are not.

Conclusion

The ideological battle lines of the Russo-Ukrainian War are far more complex than Russia and the far-right vs Ukraine and everyone else, but war is messy. Anarchists and anti-fascists volunteer to fight in the same army as the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. The Azov Battalion was widely admired and supported in far-right circles in the West, but the general pro-Russian stance of the Western far-right may complicate their reputation. Some Western leftists equate any US or NATO involvement in an international conflict with imperialism, not seeing the obvious contradiction in calling resisting an invasion imperialist. Others see their involvement as entirely unproblematic and worship Zelensky as a hero, even if he has used the opportunity to pass anti-worker laws. Reality has a nasty habit of resisting the ideological schemes we attempt to impose on it.

A final question remains: what is it with fascists and Putin, anyways? Sure, there are the sweeping anti-LGBTQ laws and nationalism, but there’s clearly more to it than that. The simplest answer is often the best: they admire the fact that Putin is a strongman that uses force to get what he wants. Strongman admiration has been part and parcel for fascists since the days of Hitler and Mussolini, but the secret ingredient is in the use of naked violence. I have cited this David Graeber essay before and I will do so again just for the brilliance of his insight into far-right psychology: all fascists primarily speak the language of force. Thought, debate, and negotiation undermine the true potential of the nation’s power, which is found in war. Part of the reason Putin invaded Ukraine is the same as for why Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and Hitler Poland: a grand national adventure awaited the raza and the volks. They were incapable of losing since they were superior, and those who couldn’t defend their lands didn’t deserve to have them.

Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson promoted Russian propaganda because it upholds a worldview where the masculine strength and virility of “the West” are dangerously depleted, but can and must be restored by a strongman. Just don’t ask them how well that’s turning out for Putin right now. Or, for that matter, how well it turned out for Hitler and Mussolini.

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