Schindler: Richard Spencer and His Kook-Right Ilk Are Agents of Russian Influence

[highplainsdem]

http://observer.com/2017/08/charlottesville-alt-right-counterintelligence/

Nothing about the weekend’s ugliness has received more criticism than our president’s stunning inability to condemn these neo-Nazis and their violence. Why Donald J. Trump singularly failed to rapidly denounce Fields and his ilk is a troubling question—not to mention one that’s difficult to answer. After all, the kook-right is tiny in numbers, are hardly major campaign donors, and are repulsive to normal Americans, so why would any president delay condemning them?

The Nazified far-right thereby has joined the highly select pantheon of people whom President Trump won’t denounce no matter how badly they misbehave—whose only other member is Vladimir Putin. It bears examining whether Trump’s stunning silence may not be a coincidence.

Our extreme right, with very few exceptions, are super-fans of the Russian president, in whom they see a strong, traditional leader who runs the world’s only white nuclear-armed great power. Their websites brim with adulation for Putin as a demigod who resists the Western social justice agenda with more than words. That this depiction of Putin may not be entirely true matters not a whit to his ardent alt-right fans.

-snip-

Take the case of Richard Spencer, who was in Charlottesville as the de facto leader of the rising far-right in our country. Young and photogenic with his famously fashy haircut, Spencer too is a strong Putinphile, exuding praise for Russia and its strongman leader to anybody who will listen. His connections are more than ideological, however. His wife, Nina Kouprianova, is a Russian far-rightist herself with Kremlin connections.

As Nina Byzantina on Twitter, she is a full-fledged Kremlin troll who reliably follows the Putin line on virtually any issue, foreign and domestic, while Kouprianova has also served as the English translator for Aleksandr Dugin, a quixotic political theorist and self-proclaimed “geostrategist” who functions as Moscow’s ambassador-at-large to the Western extreme right.

-snip-

To anyone versed in Russian intelligence tradecraft, Spencer and those of his kook-right ilk who espouse nakedly pro-Kremlin views, are at least agents of influence, to use the proper Chekist term. However, there are connections between Moscow and the Western far-right which are more troubling than mere ideological fellow-traveling.

-snip-

There are no publicly known cases of American right-wing radicals receiving terrorist training from Russian intelligence, but this may only be a matter of time. Across Europe, Kremlin ideological outreach to far-right circles has led to military training and the supply of weaponry. The weekend tragedy in Charlottesville was at least partly inspired by Moscow’s propaganda. If we don’t start to take this problem seriously, like Europe we will soon be facing more and worse extremism with a distinct GRU footprint.

[uponit7771]

1. Amen, this sounds so much like Putins LGBTQ hating Russia

[shraby]

2. What a nest that Mueller and the FBI has to ferret out for un-American activities that are designed

to overthrow our democracy.

[blm]

3. Putin gained complete control by aligning with white nationalists, Russian Orthodox church,

and militant motorcycle gangs. When he very publicly targeted gays and media critics before the Winter Olympics, some thought he'd be vulnerable to backlash from civilized citizenry, but, instead, he endeared himself to his base and solidified it - just as Trump has been doing.

[Raster]

4. You'd think the Russian Orthodox Church would be against Putin and his dictatorship...

...but no, he's cut them pretty much the same kinds of deals he's got with his oligarchs... and to boot, they are patriarchal, misogynistic and EXTREMELY HOMOPHOBIC. They seemed to form a nice, symbiotic partnership.

[sharedvalues]

5. The media here needs to stand up for the truth

And I think we can prevent a Russian rerun.

The president has overplayed his hand with this racism stuff. Americans are waking up to both the racism and hate that has long been in the GOP, as well as the billionaire GOP donors that now benefit from that racism and hate.