You do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to MAGA fascists

Rob chose to let this Jacobin Putin apologia speak for itself, but I am feeling less charitable, so, let’s start with the title itself:

The Media’s Neo-McCarthyism on Russia Is Getting Worse

This framing is something. What coverage has been critical of Putin has been remarkably prescient, there is no systematic state or private campaign to suppress the speech of any defender of Putin’s imperialist aggression, and Putin is a right-wing authoritarian. Other than that, the analogy is still incredibly dumb. But, jumping ahead a little bit, we know this is what this really about:

Here is the poisonous fruit of the Russiagate nonsense, which even some leftists humored, believing it to be a harmless way to undermine Donald Trump in the short-term. 

The reason some leftists “humored” “Russiagate [ugh]” is that these things are true:

• Russia ratfucked the 2016 election campaign. (And, no, not everyone accepts this even now — Tucker, for example is still pushing Seth Rich bullshit.)
• Given that the election was decided by fewer than 100,000 votes, it is entirely possible that this ratfucking was material to the outcome the election. The release of John Podesta’s hacked inbox within hours of the Access Hollywood tape dropped in and if itself could have altered the outcome of the election.
• It is extremely unlikely the careful strategic timing and framing of the Russia/Wikileaks hacks and dumps were done without any collaboration with the campaign they were trying to help win, and there is considerable evidence of such collaboration.
• You can acknowledge the importance of Russian ratfucking while also discussing the flaws in Hillary Clinton’s campaign and candidacy to your heart’s content, and the idea that it’s some kind of either/or question is very dumb. Complex events have many causes!

Anyway, to get back to the present nonsense:

There was the New York Times’ Ross Douthat, who proposed an “ideal retreat” for Washington that would see “NATO expansion permanently tabled,” among other things. Former Trump official Michael Flynn, who once upon a time appeared to have had surprisingly sensible foreign policy views before the Internet drove him completely insane, wrote that NATO’s eastward creep would be the “principal cause of a devastating war.” More recently, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) has gone further than any elected official, explicitly questioning the idea of including Ukraine in NATO, and warning that “our interest is not so strong” in Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty that it would “justify committing the United States to go to war with Russia.”

But maybe most prominent of all has been Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who as far back as December 2021 was admonishing Republicans for goading Biden into being more aggressive and using rhetoric that was “hotter and crazier and more disconnected from reality.” Since then, he’s continued to question Ukraine’s strategic value to the United States, argue against war with Russia, and compare, accurately, Ukraine’s entry into NATO to Mexico entering a military alliance with China. Carlson’s broadcasts reportedly led some Republicans to adopt his same position on the Ukraine crisis, a notable shift for a party that has typically never met a war it didn’t want to charge into.

This point has been covered well in the thread Paul links to below, but the thing about saying that Putin’s imperialist aggression is about NATO is that it’s pure nonsense, which is why the relevant talking points have been so common among the MAGA hacks Jacobin writers are always looking for find common ground with. And don’t ask me, just ask Vladimir Putin, who gave a long, rambling speech in which he made it clear that the reason for his invasion was to restore Russia’s nationalist honor, and barely even bothered to include some pro forma stuff about NATO toward the end. In addition, the idea that Tucker deserves credit for being “against war with Russia” is silly, given that the US is not going to go to war with Russia over this and nobody actually thinks it will.

At any rate, it makes perfect since for reactionary white nationalists like Hawley and Tucker to celebrate Putin’s imperialist warmongering, and to develop dishonest arguments blaming it all on other actors! What does not make sense is for an ostensibly leftist magazine to publish someone taking these takes at face value. And, no, it’s not any kind of McCarthyism to point out that these desperate defenses of Putin entirely full of shit.

…also:

I’m on the left. When I went to Kyiv to speak in 2017 many of my friends on the left assured me that Ukraine was a fascist state and only US propaganda said otherwise. When I returned, after spending days talking to politicians and journalists, I realized those claims were nuts.— Jason Stanley (@jasonintrator) February 22, 2022