Kremlin intelligence is manipulating the far-right. It’s time to push back.
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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.
Although our country has always had white supremacists, Russia has given them renewed focus and energy, as well as a ready-made worldview. This take on the world includes overt white nationalism which despises the United States as a decadent and multiracial society. The Moscow menu suspiciously includes support for a range of foreign issues such as adulation of Bashar al-Assad and his nasty Syrian regime.
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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.
Although Dugin possesses little actual influence in the Kremlin, he is highly esteemed among his legions of foreign fans, who detect in his mystical racist screeds a genius which others cannot. He plays a key role in propaganda outfit controlled by Russian intelligence which I detailed last year:
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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.
In Europe, security services have tracked the activities of Russian military intelligence, known as GRU, and in recent years their operations have included violence. Russian football hooligans who caused mayhem in Europe last summer, leading to dozens of casualties, many of them seriously injured, included known Kremlin special operatives—some of them possessing GRU tattoos.
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This problem is hardly confined to Hungary. German counterintelligence has noted strange connections between GRU operatives and neo-Nazis in their country, using martial arts clubs as cover for recruiting Moscow-friendly radicals. Things have moved even farther along in Sweden, where a failed bombing of a refugee center in January turned out to be the work of two Swedish neo-Nazis who had received military training in Russia from GRU instructors.
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.
Therefore, it’s imperative that we tackle domestic extremists with our full counterintelligence arsenal, meaning identifying Kremlin secret operations which support the extreme right in our country then neutralizing the before this cancer metastasizes further. Although it’s painfully evident that the Trump White House will do no such thing, the longer we wait to tackle this problem, the worse it will get, and more lives will be lost.
- Discussion
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"It bears examining whether Trump’s stunning silence may not be a coincidence." https://t.co/B9OugvLFLr
— John Schindler (@20committee) August 14, 2017
"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"
— Felt (@MrFelt_) August 14, 2017
Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to "leak" into the public. One last shot at me.Are we living in Nazi Germany?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 11, 2017
Tweet Aged to Perfection. Bet Intel Community appreciates irony here, @20committee https://t.co/L7zsCKaqZp
— J.R. McGrail 📎 (@JRMcGrail) August 14, 2017
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