Micah Loewinger: This is on the Media's midweek podcast. I'm Micah Loewinger. Former president, current candidate Donald Trump is back in the news with more incendiary comments about Russia.

News clip: The former president told his supporters yesterday that he would encourage Russia to do "whatever the hell they want to any NATO member country that did not meet its spending obligations."

Micah Loewinger: He compared his own legal woes to the trials of recently deceased Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny.

Donald Trump: I got indicted four times. I have eight or nine trials, all because of the fact that I'm-- I know this. All because of the fact that I'm in politics. [crosstalk] It is a form of Navalny. It is a form of communism or fascism.

Micah Loewinger: Then in a Fox town hall, he praised Russia for being a war machine.

Donald Trump: They defeated Hitler, they defeated Napoleon. They're a war machine.

Micah Loewinger: Trump's Russia's suck uppery is not unique to him. Not long after Putin launched the war in February 2022, far-right conservatives and white nationalists gathered in Orlando, Florida for the America First Political Conference. There, its founder, Nick Fuentes, whose white supremacist YouTube channel was suspended in 2020 for hate speech, questioned diversity in America.

Nick Fuentes: They say about America, they say, "Diversity is our strength." I look at China and I look at Russia. Can we give a round of applause for Russia?

Micah Loewinger: On the messaging app, Telegram, Fuentes referred to Putin as, "My czar." On the conservative Christian radio show, Crosstalk, far-right activists and QAnon supporter Lauren Witzke, who ran against Delaware Senator Chris Coons in 2020 tied Putin's nationalism to his Christian identity.

Lauren Witzke: Russia is a Christian nationalist nation, so I actually support Putin's right to protect his people and always put his people first, but also protect their Christian values. I identify more with Putin's Christian values than I do with Joe Biden.

Micah Loewinger: Senator Mitt Romney had some choice words at the time for his colleagues, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar for attending Fuentes' far-right conference.

Sen. Mitt Romney: I'm reminded of that old line from the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid movie where where one character says, "Morons. I've got morons on my team." I have to think anybody that would sit down with white nationalists and speak at their conference was certainly missing a few IQ points.

Micah Loewinger: To mark the two-year anniversary of Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we revisit Brooke's interview with investigative journalist Casey Michel, about the appeal of Russian autocracy for a certain breed of right-wing zealot.

Casey Michel: You have elements of white nationalists, you have elements of far-right organizations in the United States, prominent far-right voices, this hodgepodge of right-wing or hard-right groups that all coalesced certainly by the mid-2010s into supporting Putin and his expansionism, and we still see evidence of that today.

Brooke: One of the oldest is probably Pat Buchanan, a former speech writer for Richard Nixon. I think you've called him an intellectual flag bearer of paleo-conservatism. He said, "In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia's flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity."

Casey Michel: Certain moments do stick out to you as signal flares about where things are going. Pat Buchanan asking out loud, "Is God now on the Kremlin's side? If so, should American Evangelicals, should the American right be supporting Moscow over Washington, supporting Russia over the US?"

Brooke: Richard Spencer, a white supremacist, has described Russia as the sole white power in the world, although it isn't because it's multiethnic like we are.

Casey Michel: One of the great ironies in following all these white nationalistic figures and their over-weaning support for Putin lusting after this strongman type in Washington is they have a very particular view of Russia and of Putin in particular. He is a white masculine Christian European leader. They don't usually refer to him as a dictator, but that's obviously what they see him as, pushing back against same-sex marriage, pushing back against any kind of expanded understanding of notions like gender identity. They do not understand that Russia is this remarkably diverse country with great numbers of ethnic and religious minorities. I think they have this image that Russia's a white man's paradise for them without actually realizing what it's like on the ground in Russia itself.

Brooke: You write that David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the KKK has said Russia is the key to white survival, and that other far-right figures should go there to better learn how to grow their movements here.

Casey Michel: David Duke lived in Russia for a number of years and we still have very little idea of what he was actually doing over there. We know that his book, this incredible racist tract, was sold in the Duma bookstore, the bookstore for the Russian Parliament. We still don't have any idea about the kinds of connections he made, the kinds of potential funding that he received in addition to all these other white nationalistic figures whose links were still beginning to sift through to figure out how some of these groups may be involved in ongoing interference efforts here, certainly in 2016, but by no means limited to that election.

I think David Duke is symptomatic of the hard right Christian nationalist, white supremacist contingent over the past two decades gravitating to, of all places, the Kremlin, which is such a whiplash from where things were during the Cold War, obviously when the Soviets were around. It is a 180 that I still haven't wrapped my mind around.

Brooke: You spoke to Cole Park, an LGBT researcher with Political Research Associates, who told you it's difficult to say who is inspiring whom, but there's a lot of cross-fertilization, it seems going on.

Casey Michel: These are mutually reinforcing dynamics. You have those in the United States that are watching this incredible demographic change take place. They're watching, in 2008, the election of the country's first Black president. They're watching things like same-sex marriage become legalized and beginning to search out other sources of inspiration and support for what they see as traditionalist values.

While in Russia in the late 2000s and the early 2010s, you have the consolidation of power in Moscow. You have any kind of dreams of broader democratization falling away. You have the return of Putin to the presidency in 2012, and all of a sudden, you see these elements of this outreach looking for broader fertile audiences to spread Moscow's message.

What we see taking place, especially by the early 2010s, is this activation of these different networks targeting American white nationalists, far-right separatists, and secessionists, American evangelicals, and all of a sudden you begin looking into these interpersonal linkages, these organizational linkages, funding linkages and funding mechanisms to specifically groom and hopefully activate these white nationalist contingents in the United States to sow chaos, to lead to potential bloodshed, and if Putin would have his way, potential state fracture in the United States itself.

Again, remember Putin very much blames the United States of America for the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fragmentation into 15 new countries.

Brooke: As to when all this began, you say it was the late 2000s and the early 2010s that were an inflection point. Of course, you can't underestimate the impact on these extremists of having a Black president.

Casey Michel: This is exactly where Donald Trump emerges from. Trump rose to political prominence claiming that Obama was born outside of the United States. It's this broader rubric of racist, racialist pushback against the way that the country is going, and into the breach these Russian-funded figures and organizations step. Certain oligarchs networks, organizations reaching out and building bridges to Americans on the far-right and the hard-right, and building these kinds of-- they call it the traditionalist international, building this broader movement to a greater degree than they probably ever thought.

Brooke: You've said that at a 10,000-foot level, the goal of the Christian white nationalists here is to find and elect a Putin-style figure with a similar political dynamic to unify various Christian nationalist groups.

Casey Michel: It is as clear as day that these organizations and groups and networks like nothing more than to have, whether it's Donald Trump or some other similar figure in power in the White House. If they can't get their way, they're willing to lead separatist or secessionist movements and do what they can to, if nothing else, throw sticks in the spokes of America's broader democratic experiment of alliances and of the West's broader efforts to push back against things like the aggression we are now seeing out of Moscow and all the bloodshed in Ukraine.

Brooke: You've also written that the white nationalist, Matthew Heimbach, he's the head of the Traditionalist Workers Party, considers Putin to be the leader of the free world and seeks to create a global network called Traditionalist International. What is that and how hypothetical is it?

Casey Michel: Thankfully, we are a long way away from the realization of the Traditionalist International, but the fact that we do see support for it in the United States, in Europe, and certainly out of Moscow is something that we have to continue watching. At the end of the day, it's exactly what we've been talking about. It is the entrenchment of Putinist-style regimes in Washington, Ottawa, London, Brussels, and elsewhere.

Brooke: Let's talk about what happened in 2015. The leading lights of Europe's far-right, including members of Austria's Freedom Party, people from Sweden, Netherlands, Austria, the UK, they got together in Petersburg. You say this meeting was one of the most notable gatherings of Europe's xenophobic far-right, but was it significant?

Casey Michel: It was, again, one of these signal flares where you realize that there is far more organization, there's a far greater depth to these networks than would seem at initial blush. Usually, these organizations, they operate in a domestic context. You don't see these international gatherings, anything like this magnitude, except once in almost in a generation. That just so happened to be in 2015 in Russia in St. Petersburg. These groups didn't come back to Washington or come back to Athens or come back to Oslo and all of a sudden began implementing legislation.

One of the things that we have seen time again out of Russia, is an ability to build these bridges across Europe, across North America. Brooke, I don't think there's any surprise that while that conference was happening, the same exact type of transatlantic transnational conference was happening of separatists and secessionists in Moscow, many of whom are also on the far right from places like Spain, like Italy, including Texas secessionists flying over to Russia to coordinate with all these other separatists organized out of Moscow.

Brooke: What happens if we ignore Putin's role as a global leader for white Christian nationalism?

Casey Michel: I do want to encourage listeners to maybe broaden their aperture about what potential outcomes we may be facing later this decade. I'm not saying anything like this is going to happen during the midterm. It's not going to happen in the run-up to the next election, but this is a period of drastic change coming ahead of us. Any number of outcomes is possible.

I'm not at all saying that this white Christian nationalistic outcome is the one that's staring us in the face, but there's certainly a possibility in which say Joe Biden runs again in 2024, wins again, Donald Trump refuses to concede, and we see an expansion of the January 6th type violence, and what flows from that? I have no idea.

Brooke: Thanks. Casey.

Casey Michel: Yeah, Brooke. Sorry, that was a depressing answer at the end.

Micah Loewinger: Casey Michel, is a writer and investigative journalist and the author of American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History. Brooke spoke to him two years ago at the outset of the War in Ukraine. Tune into this week's big show. We're going to be exploring the accusations of bias in the media when it comes to covering the war in Gaza. I'm Micah Loewinger.

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