President Donald Trump isnt the only American leader with a puzzling fondness for Russian president Vladimir Putins regime.
Consider, for example, the chant that was caught on local television footage as it was shouted by several dozen torch-carrying protesters who rallied against removal of a Confederate monument in a Charlottesville, Va., park last Saturday.
Russia is our friend! they shouted. Russia is our friend!
What, many observers must have wondered, did Russia have to do with the Confederacy?
Not much, except in the minds of such key leaders of the alt-right as Richard Spencer, who spoke and carried a torch in Charlottesville, where he once attended the University of Virginia.
Spencer is widely credited with coining the term alt-right to describe his Americanized version of Euro-nationalism that seeks a whites-only state. He also is famous for being punched in the face in a video-recorded street attack that went viral on YouTube and for being thrown out of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) convention this spring. You know that youre way out in the far-right field when youre thrown out of CPAC.
Beneath his digital-age jargon and elegantly soft-spoken manner, Spencer offers a rehashed version of traditional doomsday visions of white culture under assault by a rising tide of feminists, nonwhites and other scapegoats for all white miseries.
What brings us together, he told the crowd at an earlier rally Saturday, is that we are white, we are a people, we will not be replaced.
Yet Spencer also shows a curiously deep admiration for Russia, which he has called the sole white power in the world. His former wife is the Russian writer and self-described Kremlin troll leader Nina Kouprianova. Writing and blogging under the pen name Nina Byzantina, she regularly follows Kremlin talking points.
Like Spencer, she has defended Syrias butcher president -- and Putin ally -- Bashir al-Assad, describing reports of civilian deaths in Aleppo as fake news.
Former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, who has eagerly embraced the alt-right movement, has traveled to Russia several times to promote his book The Ultimate Supremacism: My Awakening on the Jewish Question, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Rising self-described white nationalist Matthew Heimbach also has praised Putins Russia as the axis for nationalists, according to an interview by Business Insider. I really believe that Russia is the leader of the free world right now, he told the news website. Putin is supporting nationalists around the world and building an anti-globalist alliance, while promoting traditional values and self-determination.
Heimbach leads the Traditionalist Workers Party which, like Spencers American Policy Institute, is listed as a white identity hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Leading American alt-right figures like race realist Jared Taylor also attended a right-wing conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, two years ago, organized by a fringe nationalist Russia group. Taylor, according to Business Insider, called the United States the greatest enemy of tradition everywhere.
It may be only coincidental that white nationalists cheer Russia as our friend two days before President Trump was reported to have revealed highly classified secrets to two high-ranking Russians in the Oval Office. But both episodes raise questions about how much Putin may be actively engaged in sowing divisions in this country.
We know from past behavior that Putin cares much less about what we Americans think of him than what his own people think of him. With his tightening despotic control over speech and Russian media, he promotes a return to the dominant Mother Russia of the czars and the Soviet Union.
The computer hackers and fake news purveyors who serve as an underground propaganda army in his behalf aim to undermine the Wests faith in democracy and its institutions. When it comes to corruption, human rights and empire-building, Putin wants you to believe that Western democracies are no better than his Russia.
President Trump curiously seemed to defend that line in an interview with then-Fox News anchor Bill OReilly. Trump boldly suggested that we were no better than Putin when it comes to being a killer. Thats breathtaking.
If nothing else, we know that Putin is delighted to see us Americans divide ourselves against one another. Thats how he gained almost unquestioned control in Russia. Dividing Americans against one another is something that the alt-right also is delighted to do. The rest of us need to show them, in the words of the late Rodney King, that we still know how to get along.
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Is Vladimir Putin the alt-right's friend? - Newsday