. . . The right has been full of Vladimir Putin fanboys going back to the Trump administration, but here was their favorite authoritarian just cruising into Ukraine bombing hospitals and killing children. It was hard to imagine how the far right could twist itself into a pro-Putin stance when what Putin was doing was completely indefensible by any human. What I failed to imagine was the anti-anti-Putin movement.
. . . Tucker Carlson [delivered] a bizarre monologue attacking those who oppose Putin: "Democrats in Washington have told you you have a patriotic duty to hate Vladimir Putin. # Anything less than hatred of Putin is treason # hating Putin has become the central purpose of America's foreign policy." Tucker can defend himself by saying he's not for anything. He's just asking questions about why the rest of the world recoils at hospital bombings.
. . . "Masks were a training exercise. Mandatory masking was a shock collar designed to teach Americans unquestioning obedience and, of course, it worked because shock collars do work. In a single day last month we watched, for example, our entire professional class dutifully changed their Twitter avatars from mask up to the now mandatory Ukrainian flag. There was no debate about doing this, no reflection. There was not even a real conversation. They just did it. Millions of people simply assumed reflexively a partisan position in a highly complicated foreign crisis, the next crisis, and as they did it, they moved in perfect lockstep."
... a memo, titled "For Media and Commentators (recommendations for coverage of events as of 03.03)," from Russia's Department of Information and Telecommunications Support . . . noted that "it is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally." Here's a question: Does one really want a Kremlin endorsement at this moment in history?
On the flip side, there's, Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business, once a respected journalist, now a Lou Dobbs stand-in, who on Sunday related how "some people have told" her "that they feel that, at the end of the day, this administration does not see Putin as the enemy. They see him as a partner!" Are Democrats unfairly demonizing Putin or buddying up to him? Both story lines play on Fox because both story lines are completely disconnected from reality.
But it's the anti-anti-Putin rhetoric we'll be seeing more of, now that the far right has decided how to message this invasion. The conspiracy theory justifying it is as stupid as you might expect, involving Anthony Fauci, bioweapons, and, of course, the Bidens. NBC reporter Ben Collins explained it to me this way: "[QAnon] and anti-vaxx accounts trial-ballooned a new narrative that Fauci and the Bidens were funding bioweapons in what are really research facilities [in Ukraine]and it stuck with the broader far right # It doesn't matter that it's so ludicrous, not even the Russians thought to create this propaganda until after they learned about it from the English-speaking global far right. It just matters that the bad guys are the same bad guys as the ones from the Facebook memes from the last five years. And since those bad guys are fighting with Putin, Putin must be the good guy. Just ignore the dead children in the street."
In short, "biolabs" is the new "Hillary's health" or "crack pipes for racial equity" or, well, name your favorite far-right dog whistle. "Biolabs" sounds serious, but it's a silly composite of many different right-wing boogeymen. There are no Ukrainian scientific facilities that are owned by Fauci, the Bidens, or the Clinton Foundation. Sometimes, a lab is just a lab.
. . . [Representative] Madison Cawthorn . . . fired off a brain-poisoned, buzzword-laden rant straight from the fever swamps that frames Ukraine as evil and `woke.' `Remember that [Volodymyr] Zelensky is a thug,' Cawthorn ranted. `Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and it is incredibly evil and it has been pushing woke ideologies.'"
