Putin's American Cheerleaders
The Russian dictator is flat-out evil. What does that tell us about his full-throated apologists in the U.S.?
In Ukraine, each passing day brings more war crimes, more atrocities, more carnage. Children are dying. Hospitals are shelled, schools, theaters. For the last few days, the focus of that horror has been Mariupol, a delightful seaside city Ukraine refused to surrender to the Russian occupiers. Already half-ruined, already without power and water, Mariupol may well be shelled into non-existence.
“What I saw, I hope no one will ever see,” said Manolos Androulakis, the last EU diplomat to leave the besieged city. “Mariupol will become part of a list of cities that were completely destroyed by war—I don’t need to name them: Guernica, Coventry, Aleppo, Grozny, Leningrad.”
Leningrad: Putin’s home town. That sadistic little man knows exactly what he’s doing.
On February 24, what seems a lifetime ago, the Russian dictator explained that the invasion of Ukraine was meant “to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime” and “to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine” and “to bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians.” These were shameful lies a month ago, and they ring even more falsely now.
Insofar as the carnage has any purpose at all, the atrocities in Mariupol, as with every other battleground in Ukraine, are intended to shock the victims with raw, indiscriminate brutality. Russia wants Ukraine to cry uncle. There is no higher moral purpose behind the Kremlin’s invasion, and certainly not its tactics. This is pure and savage evil, full stop.
The doors of perception have been cleansed, and the world sees Vladimir Putin for what he is: a monster.
Putin has always been a monster, of course, always been a heartless little shit. He came to power through violence and cruelty, he consolidated power through violence and cruelty, and he wields his power through violence and cruelty. He was like this in 1999, at the start of the Second Chechen War. He has not mellowed with age.
His allies in Russia all knew what he was from the gate: Semion Mogilevich and the other mobsters, Sergei Lavrov and the other diplomats, and every last one of the oligarchs, sanctioned or otherwise.
What of his apologists in the West, then? Are we really to believe that they didn’t realize what sort of heinous creature they were dealing with?
Now that Putin’s mask has fallen away for good, we must look at his American cheerleaders with the same clear eyes—especially the ones who still make excuses for him, “both-sides” the conflict, promise offramps, undermine President Biden and the Ukrainian war effort, and treat Vlad the Puny as anything less than Hitler 2.0.
Donald Trump
The KGB cultivated Donald John Trump beginning in the early 80s. By the time of his return from Moscow in 1987, he was already parroting Soviet talking points. Also in the mid-80s, he began to launder money for the Russian mob—his life’s work and his financial bread and butter.
The Russians and the subverted GOP joined forces to install him in the White House. He allowed the Russian jackals Lavrov and Kislyak into the Oval Office, where they all enjoyed a good laugh at our expense. He bent over backwards to praise Putin. He fluffed him in Helsinki. Whenever he met him at some or other summit, the two of them snuck off like horny teenagers at a middle school dance. He did everything in his power to cripple NATO.
As recently as last month, he lauded Putin’s “genius” and “savvy” for invading Ukraine. Trump is not just a puppet; he’s a puppet for a genocidal madman. He knows this, and he likes it, because he envies Putin his absolute power.
Tucker Carlson
Tucker Carlson so effusively disseminates Kremlin propaganda that he is a staple of Russian state TV. As Julia Davis often reports, the Russians just broadcast clips of the show with subtitles, no editing required. He stated early on that he was on Putin’s side in this conflict:
And he has not backed down, even when called out on his pro-Putin stance:
This should not be a surprise. Tucker went to Hungary and fluffed the Moscow-aligned dictator, Viktor Orbán, who was formerly a bag man for Mogilevich. This was after two years of disseminating disinformation about covid, exacerbating the pandemic.
I don’t know why Tucker Carlson is doing this, if he’s being bribed or blackmailed or if he just genuinely admires evil, murderous psychopaths. But at this point, there’s little question that he’s a traitor—however much he or his Epstein-buddy pals dislike the term applied to him.
Rupert Murdoch
Earlier this month, Rupert Murdoch turned 91. He did not repent on his birthday. He kept on doing the dread work of despots, dictators, and destroyers of the planet. He continues to platform Tucker Carlson and the other Putin boosters on Fox News, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity:
Murdoch is a wretched traitor, not just to the country, but to humanity itself. He is accelerating our collective doom. Few individuals have done more harm to the species than Jerry Hall’s husband.
Ron Johnson & Co.
The Fourth of July Traitors, as I call them, are the eight Republicans who went to Moscow on Independence Day 2018, and came back as what, in a piece written in December 2019, I identified as a “sleeper cell.” I might have said “fifth column.”
Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has been the most egregious disseminator of Russian propaganda—his ardor for Putin knows no bounds—but three other Fourth of July Traitors joined him in voting against the Senate Ukrainian aid bill: John Neely Kennedy, Steve Daines, and Jon Hoeven.
Rand Paul
Rand Paul was accused of working for Vladimir Putin on the floor of the Senate by John McCain in March of 2017. No new evidence has emerged to refute the late Arizona Senator’s analysis—although it is now clear why McCain was so concerned.
As I discussed in a January 1, 2019 piece at Medium, Paul hides his pro-Kremlin bias behind anodyne policy positions:
Rand Paul visited Moscow on 6 August 2018. His stated reason for making the trip: engagement. “The world is a complicated place, we are in close proximity to Russia in Syria and other places, and I think it would be a very big mistake not to have open lines of communication,” he said — preposterously, given the cozy relationship between Trump and Putin. . . .
“Engagement,” he explained, “is vital to our national security and peace around the world.” It was in service to “engagement,” in fact, that the trip was paid for by the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank underwritten by the Koch brothers.
He’s still playing this game—making uncontroversial statements while simultaneously propagating a Russian viewpoint:
Marjorie Taylor Greene
Yes, she’s a garbage human whom no thinking person takes seriously. But Empty G1 crossed the line from ugly speech to straight-up rooting for the enemy, while trying to couch her Kremlin talking point in humanitarian dress:
Madison Cawthorn
Speaking of garbage humans no thinking person takes seriously, here is Dr. Strangelove As a Young Man calling Zelensky a thug, in a clip played on Russian state TV over and over like it was “Old Town Road:”
Mike Flynn
The only generals in the history of the United States who betrayed the country more brazenly than Gen. Flynn are Benedict Arnold and Robert E. Lee. Whether useful idiot or commander of the fifth column, Flynn has been in bed with the Russians since they invaded Crimea in 2014.
Weird for a non-Putin apologist to declare Russian victory in a war everyone with eyes can see Putin is losing, bigly:
Tulsi Gabbard
Although the GOP has been completely taken over by pro-Putin, pro-Trump traitors, it’s not just Republicans carrying water for Putin. Tulsi Gabbard has done so for some time, and continues to do it despite the atrocities in Ukraine.
Here she is spewing a debunked conspiracy theory with Kremlin origins. This, too, made it onto Russian TV:
But then, a person who buys what this guy is selling must be an easy mark for the Kremlin’s professional chaos agents.
Again, Putin is the monster who has ordered his soldiers to attack civilians, to bomb hospitals and schools, to eradicate whole cities. He’s the genocidal maniac who did this:
Make no mistake: his American cheerleaders are complicit.
Asha Rangappa made up “Empty G.”
I am truly a child of the cold war..Just 6 when Cuban missile crisis, happened,and I lived in Miami 90 miles away...Miami became a fortified Barracks,and MoMA and PaPa were on edge..The TV scarred me and scared me.Our MassMedia let this infiltration happen..All of them for the tax cut Rump gave them.We in turn let him and Jared empty the taxpayers treasury.👿500BILLION missing PPP$.We are on the precipice again 💣
OMG spot on! And what an EXCELLENT post. I'm in the middle of reading Gulag (Anne Applebaum) and it frightens the shit out of me. I'm sure Putin would love to live Stalin's days all over again. WHY CAN'T FOX be SHUT DOWN? This is driving me nuts. And the rest of those morons need to be held accountable, Never to Hold a public office again, and really should be tried, sentenced to life for the rest of their lives. Thankful the USA don't have confinement camps but maybe they should just be sent to the East coast of Russia for the rest of their lives. FREE Alexi Navalny!!!