Russia may be facing scorn and punishment from the near-entirety of the world, but Russian state media outlets have at least been able to count on one world ally for moral support: Fox News. The Daily Beast reports that Russian state media is continuing to lean hard on pro-Putin Fox News segments to boost their own propaganda efforts.
Russian state television is especially focused on Fox News military analyst Ret. Col. Doug Macgregor's Sunday advice to Ukrainian troops that they lay down their guns and stop attempting to resist Putin's takeover of their country. Russian state media has been loving that, and it's not like Fox was confused about what Macgregor was going to say. He had previously boosted Putin's attack and occupation of Crimea, and in the grand pantheon of ex-military blowhards making second careers as television talking heads, it takes a serious amount of work to find those willing to boost Putin's talking points as much as Donald Trump does.
Russian government figures have slid uncannily toward the same talking points that Fox News itself uses to push public opinion. It's been done so crudely that it's not clear which direction the propaganda is flowing, but you'll be unsurprised to learn that Russia's top intelligence officer is almost comically familiar with the language of both Fox hosts and super-for-real-American internet trolls.
Wow. It's like a Jonah Goldberg book made love to a Ben Shapiro podcast and they had horrible little rat-like propaganda babies. It's hard to look away.
But the question remains: Who's the weirdo who thought up "The Libs are trying to CANCEL Russia just for one measly European war!" and said, “Sure, let's go with that”?
Ah, who are we kidding? This is Republicanism we're talking about. Every last fascist jackass in the movement staples themselves to claims of being "canceled" at least 20 times a day. By next week we're going to have endless demands that Russian yachts be returned to their kleptocratic owners and Trump voters will be burning their iPhones and refusing to watch Disney because of Woke Corporatism's attempts to hurt a murderous dictator's feelings.
And if you think that the movement will be backing away from their overt Putin support after Putin's forces proved to be so hollowed out by Russian corruption that they can barely even drive to the places the generals have designated for destruction, remember that learning absolutely nothing about anything is now the main criteria for getting ahead in pro-Trump circles. Junior here will be going on about the dangers of our too-"woke" military, no matter how many Russian tank columns bury themselves in mud or are traded to Ukrainians in exchange for non-expired food.
We shall see. On one hand, many Fox News hosts seem to now comprehend that their previous championing of Vladimir Putin and his "smart" authoritarian rule is putting them in a much more tenuous position as the regime they admire swiftly devolves into conducting televised war crimes as means of subduing a democratic Ukraine that fought back more than the Russian Dear Leader had calculated for. On the other hand, as Monica Crowley demonstrates, none of these people can help themselves. They cannot help but see every last thing as a manifestation of one of their own imagined culture wars—even in wartime, they grouse that the enemy state is being "canceled," as if they were talking about the latest podcast host dust-up. They don't even have the ability to distinguish between partisan and non-partisan thought.
Are the Ukrainian defenders hurting Russia by teaching them Critical Race Theory? Are Ukrainian troops trying to religiously oppress their Russian opponents by getting mad when Russians bomb Holocaust sites? Tune in any given weeknight to learn the answers to these and other questions, either on Fox News or on the Russian state broadcasts using them to defend Russia's war.
