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Beyond Trump and Putin: The American Alt-Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies
The Kremlin has various links with leading far-right figures undergirding Trump’s candidacy.
Casey Michel
In late August, in a speech delineating white nationalist support for Donald Trump, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton unveiled a new title for Russian President Vladimir Putin: “
The Grand Godfather of Extreme Nationalism.” With the sinecure, Clinton sought to directly link the odious policies of her Republican counterpart — namely, mainstreaming a racialized, white supremacist discourse the United States had not seen at such levels in a generation — to those brought to bear under Putin’s third term.
The epithet built upon one of the pillars of Clinton’s campaign which, in turn, built upon the
primary campaign of former GOP contender, and current Ohio governor, John Kasich. That is, in addition to
Trump’s outright praise for Putin’s leadership, as well as his
murky, secretive financial ties to those close to the Kremlin, Clinton tied Trump to the Kremlin’s campaign of stoking
hyper-nationalistic movements throughout the West.
As a rhetorical device, the title remains a flurry of brilliance. Not only does the terminology help highlight the
Kremlin’s kleptocratic coterie — with Putin as don, as
mafioso — but it also further emphasized Clinton’s grasp of Moscow’s policies, and the motivations therein. As seen with Hungary’s Jobbik, with France’s National Front, with Greece’s Golden Dawn, those far-right movements sprouting throughout Europe have found a counterpart in Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party. And much as Trump has aped the rotted, regressive policies of Putin-friendly leaders throughout Europe — see:
Hungary’s Viktor Orban — so, too, has he helped give a national platform to the groups and movements that have not only fueled a resurgence of white nationalism in the United States, but who have gone out of their way to praise, of all international leaders, Putin. These groups, as noted in Clinton’s speech, include the “alt-right,” a gathering of fascists and white nationalists who would Balkanize the United States or who would return the country to a bygone era of white supremacy, but also extend to the secessionists and Christian fundamentalists further propping Trump’s campaign.
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Of course, certain critics of Clinton, ranging from
Trumpian outlets like Breitbart to
lefty journalists with little grasp on post-Soviet developments, tabbed her speech as conspiratorial, or as baseless fear-mongering. But those voices overlook the breadth of evidence linking American far-right groups to Kremlin-friendly policies, and in certain cases directly to Kremlin financing. While the phenomena of fascistic, hard-right support for Moscow within Europe has been well-documented elsewhere, most especially by
Anton Shekhovtsov and
Alina Polyakova, among others, the parallel networks and linkages within the United States have seen depressingly little coverage. Indeed, while “praise of Putin by [Europe’s] far-right leaders” becomes “commonplace,” as
Polyakova wrote, so, too, has the pro-Kremlin fealty from far-right leaders in America, almost all of whom uniformly back Trump.
It doesn’t take much work to follow a trendline threading the Kremlin, most especially under Putin’s third term, directly to the leading far-right figures undergirding Trump’s candidacy. Take, for instance, Matthew Heimbach,
tabbed by ThinkProgress as the “most important white supremacist of 2016.” The founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party and an unabashed anti-Semite, Heimbach
espouses views not even Trump has deigned to offer, including the removal of birthright citizenship and the creation of white ethno-states. (The Southern Poverty Law Center has described Heimbach as “
The Little Fuhrer.”) Heimbach has become one of the leading voices behind the expansion of the “alt-right” Clinton detailed. In a recent rundown of the “alt-right’s” main proponents,
Yahoo! offered Heimbach top billing.
While Heimbach has offered vocal support for Trump this year — he
was cited in a violence-related lawsuit, stemming from his actions at a Trump rally in Kentucky — there’s one leader he appears to admire more than the rest. As Heimbach, who has
expressed support for the Kremlin’s “Novorossiya” project in Ukraine,
recently told me, “Putin is the leader, really, of the anti-globalist forces around the world,” adding that Putin’s Russia has become “kind of the axis for nationalists.” Citing the creation of a “Traditionalist International,” a far-right counterpart to the Soviet-era “
Communist International,” Heimbach also noted that Alexander Dugin,
the neo-fascist ideologue behind the Kremlin’s push toward “
Eurasianism,” gave a (recorded) speech at the 2015 unveiling of Heimbach’s party. And as Heimbach
told Al Jazeera, “Russia’s our most powerful ally.”
Heimbach, who has
cultivated links with
hard-right nationalists internationally, originally intended on visiting Russia earlier this fall to attend the
World National Conservative Movement conference. But that conference, organized by the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM), has been postponed until next spring. (One of the far-right groups who will refrain from visiting the conference is the John Birch Society, who told me that the United States “should not be partnering with countries [like Russia] that are enemies to American liberty.”)
However, other leading members of the “alt-right” have already visited Russia, at the behest of organizations linked with the Kremlin. To wit,
Jared Taylor, one of the foremost proponents of “
race realism” in the United States and someone who has already
recorded robocalls on behalf of Trump, arrived at a conference in St. Petersburg in 2015 to
rail against American policy. Taylor was joined by
Sam dikkson, another prominent face within the American’s white supremacist base, who praised Putin’s geopolitical policies. The conference, like the one recently postponed, was organized by RIM, which itself was an
outgrowth of efforts from groups like Rodina, a Russian political party founded by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin.
Meanwhile, David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and perhaps America’s most well-known white supremacist, has likewise visited Russia and has not been shy of his praise for Moscow’s policies under Putin. As the Anti-Defamation League found, Duke has noted that he believes that Russia holds “
the key to white survival.” Added the ADL: “In Duke’s eyes, Russia presents an unmatched opportunity to help protect the longevity of the white race.” (Like Heimbach,
Duke also has noted ties with Dugin.) For good measure,
Richard Spencer, one of the foundational actors within the United States’s “alt-right” movement, recently and strangely lauded Russia as the “
sole white power in the world.”
But it’s not only the primary proponents of white nationalism, or white supremacy, in the United States who have constructed links with Kremlin-tied groups, or who have heaped praise upon Putin’s Kremlin. Moscow has also continued its financing of movements that would sever American unity. To wit, in September, the Kremlin helped finance the second-annual
“Dialog of Nations” conference, in Moscow. Much like 2015’s iteration, this year’s conference hosted a gathering of Western organizations that would secede from their respective countries. And the plurality of these groups came, perhaps unsurprisingly, from the United States. (One prominent secessionist who didn’t attend the conference nonetheless announced he
preferred Putin to Clinton.)