I mean, yes?
Conservative movements across the world have implicit and explicit Russian support. The explicit version is simple: right-wing politicians and especially right-wing lobby groups taking Russian money, even indirectly, as we’re seeing with the NRA in the US.
Since Russia isn’t the former USSR, and certainly isn’t China, and doesn’t have the resources to either directly project power or peddle soft-power at scale (like China’s Belts & Roads) they’re reduced to a kind of crab-bucket foreign policy, degrading everyone else and making them less effective so that Russia can achieve it’s goals with less impediment.
Implicit is scarier: because right-wing politicians are on the take, they’ve started making Russian talking points part of their identity, and because the right has an all-or-nothing attitude to political identity, supporting Russia has become a tribal shibboleth on the political right. Smith, even if she isn’t paid in rubles, depends on keeping her protofascist base engaged, which means she needs to say all the right things: deny vaccines, deny climate change, engage in antintellectual banter and side with Russia over Ukraine.
Are we surprised?
Makes sense given Marlaina Smith’s comments in the past.
