Say what you like about Vladimir Putin; he may be slaughtering innocent Ukrainians, but, on the plus side, he has never once called the Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson a racist. Last Tuesday, Carlson, who is reportedly paid $10m (£7.5m) a year for his piercing insights and analysis, told Americans that they had been brainwashed into thinking Putin was a baddie. Think critically, Carlson instructed his depressingly large audience. Ask yourself this, he posited: “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? … Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs? These are fair questions – and the answer to all of them is no.” To be clear: these are inane questions and the answer to all of them is: “Turn off Fox News before the rest of your brain turns to mush.”
Carlson, it should be said, has significantly toned down the pro-Putin rhetoric in the past few days. What is noteworthy, however, is the fact that Carlson is far from the only person on the US right to have a soft spot for old Vlad. While Donald Trump has called the Russian attack on Ukraine “appalling”, he has also called Putin’s actions “genius”, “savvy” and “smart”.
While I haven’t called up every white nationalist group in the US and Europe for comment, it is fair to say the Russian premier has a fervent fanbase among the far right in the west. Why is this? They love what he has done with Russia. They love the way he has dismantled women’s rights. They love his attacks on gay and transgender people. They love his dismissal of western liberalism. Their values align perfectly.
There is also a whiff of antisemitism in the right’s support for Putin. On Sunday, for example, Wendy Rogers, a Republican state senator in Arizona, tweeted about the Ukrainian president: “[Volodymyr] Zelensky is a globalist puppet for Soros and the Clintons.” “Globalist” and “Soros” are well-established dog whistles, of course. (Zelenskiy is Jewish.)
Rogers’ comments on Zelenskiy came shortly after she attended a white nationalist convention in Florida, where she praised Nick Fuentes, its Holocaust-revisionist organiser, and proposed hanging “traitors” from “a newly built set of gallows”. A very normal thing for a politician to say! Fuentes, meanwhile, urged the crowd to applaud Russia and had them chanting: “Putin! Putin!”
It is not just the racism, homophobia and misogyny that the right love about Putin: it is also his muscle. A Yahoo News/YouGov poll from January found that 62% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents reckon Putin is a “stronger leader” than Joe Biden; that number rises to 71% among those who name Fox News as their primary source of cable news. Putin’s bare-chested photoshoots have done their job, eh?
While I have absolutely nothing good to say about Putin (or his biceps), we should condemn him without lapsing into simplistic narratives of good versus evil. The right may be full of unthinking Putin fanboys, but there are also a number of liberals who seem to think that Putin is uniquely bad. They are quick to rationalise invasions and occupations when a western country or a western ally is the aggressor. Many liberals care deeply about Ukrainians, as we all should, but aren’t quite so bothered about Yemenis, Syrians or Palestinians. The west should condemn Putin – but it could also do with thinking more deeply about its own actions.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
