How MAGA Republicans are helping Putin spread 'pervasively negative messaging' about Ukraine: report

06 December 2022

Some conservatives have joined liberals and progressives in being scathing critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Never Trump conservatives like MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, Washington Post columnist Max Boot and The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes have never been shy about railing against Putin. And the late Republican Sen. John McCain, near the end of his life, vehemently lambasted then-President Donald Trump for defending Putin and making a “conscious choice to defend a tyrant.”

But in the MAGA movement, it hasn’t been hard to find far-right Republicans who have a bizarre affinity for Putin. Trump is one of them, and former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon has praised Putin for being “anti-woke.” Lauren Witzke, the Delaware Republican and QAnon supporter who lost badly to Sen. Chris Coons in 2020, has applauded “Putin’s Christian values.”

In fact, some pro-Putin voices in the Russia media view various MAGA Republicans as sympathetic figures when it comes to the invasion of Ukraine.

In an article published by The Guardian on December 6, journalist Peter Stone reports, “Ever since Russia launched its brutal war in Ukraine, the Kremlin has banked on American conservative political and media allies to weaken U.S. support for Ukraine and deployed disinformation operations to falsify the horrors of the war for both U.S. and Russian audiences, say disinformation experts. Some of the Kremlin’s most blatant falsehoods about the war aimed at undercutting U.S. aid for Ukraine have been promoted by major figures on the American right, from Holocaust denier and white supremacist Nick Fuentes to ex-Trump adviser Steve Bannon and Fox News star Tucker Carlson, whose audience of millions is deemed especially helpful to Russian objectives.”

Republican critics of U.S. aid to Ukraine in Congress have been “useful” to the Kremlin during the invasion, according to Stone.

“Pro-Moscow video materials from the network RT, formerly Russia Today — which early this year, shuttered its U.S. operations — have been featured on Rumble, a video-sharing platform popular with conservatives that last year, received major financing from a venture capital firm co-founded by recently elected Republican Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance and backed by billionaire Peter Thiel,” Stone reports. “As Republicans will control the House in 2023, the influence of these Ukraine aid critics in Congress and Moscow-friendly media on the right led by Carlson is expected to increase. But analysts say they’re unlikely to block a Biden Administration request to Congress in mid-November for over $37bn in emergency aid for Ukraine, although they may try to pare it back.”

Stone notes that Fuentes, who recently dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, has a “long record of cozying up to Putin.” In March, Fuentes declared, “We continue to support czar Putin in the war effort.”

Bret Schafer, a senior fellow with the Alliance for Securing Democracy, told The Guardian that although there is more support for Ukraine than not in Congress, it isn’t hard to find MAGA lawmakers who are vocal in their opposition to Ukraine aid.

Schafer explained, “Marjorie Taylor Green’s introduction of a resolution to audit aid to Ukraine is entirely unsurprising given the pervasively negative messaging about Ukraine coming from the right flank of the GOP over the past three months…. Although most members of Congress support Ukraine, the loudest members do not. And their voices are dominating online spaces.”

Megan Squire, deputy director for data analytics at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), cited Rumble as a hotbed of anti-Ukraine disinformation.

Squire told The Guardian, “Alt-tech platforms such as Rumble are actively peddling the anti-Ukraine talking points of their heavy users, many of whom have been deplatformed elsewhere. A simple search for ‘Ukraine’ in Rumble today shows that the top search results are for a Steve Bannon video where he promotes Marjorie Taylor Greene’s demands for an audit of Ukrainian relief funds, and junk news site Post Millennial, which is using Rumble to promote clips from a similar story from Tucker Carlson.”

Andrew Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is highly critical of the pro-Putin talking points coming from Carlson and other far-right opinion hosts at Fox News.

Weiss told The Guardian, “The audience for Fox News commentators like Tucker Carlson, who frequently spreads pro-Russian narratives, is obviously orders of magnitude bigger than that of new niche players like Rumble that often carry Russian disinformation. Such platforms are far more impactful than the more sneaky techniques that the Russian propaganda apparatus employs these days.”

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