In a speech delivered on March 25 from his office in the Kremlin, Putin criticized the West’s “cancel culture.” He charged that it was “canceling” Russia, “an entire thousand-year-old country, our people.” It was the third time in recent months Putin has blasted the so-called “cancel culture.”
Which is exactly what Trump, Tucker Carlson, and the Republican party have blasted for several years.
Putin’s fixation on transgender and gay people has also been echoed on the American right. Republican state bills aimed at limiting LGBTQ rights or discussion in schools are soaring. Last fall, months before Texas’s Republican governor Greg Abbott threatened to criminalize parents who give their transgender children gender-affirming care, Putin argued that teaching children about different gender identities was “on the verge of a crime against humanity.”
Then there’s admiration for Putin himself. Just before Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Trump deemed him “savvy,” “genius,” and “smart” for “taking over a country, literally, a vast, vast, location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking right in.”
On his Fox News program, Carlson asked, rhetorically: “Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?” But Carlson called Ukraine “an obedient puppet of the Biden state department” and suggests Putin’s invasion was nothing more than a “border dispute.”
Putin’s lies and the lies coming from America’s extreme right are mutually reenforcing. Carlson’s Fox News segments show up in Russian propaganda. And when the American site “Infowars” resurrected an unfounded Russian claim that the United States funded biological weapons labs in Ukraine, Putin repeated the Infowars story.