Putin's fans in the US white supremacist movement

Shortly after Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president, the candidate made an appearance at the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Winston-Salem, supported by an all-star undercard of GOP politicians, including then-Gov. Pat McCrory, Lt. Gov. Dan Forest and one or two congressmen.

During the speeches, I wandered out of the exhibit area in the center of the floor where the candidate lobbed derisive barbs at the press to the delight of his audience. One of the most startling revelations from my foray out of the press pen was the sight of a man standing near the front who wore a long-sleeved shirt with the back covered in vivid color with the image of a bare-chested Vladimir Putin riding a horse. To many political reporters in July 2016 — certainly to me — admiration for Putin among a small number of Trump supporters seemed like a freakish but largely insignificant sideshow.

Later, a YouTube video surfaced of Greensboro area white supremacist Manuel Luxton at the Trump rally a month prior exhorting, “Stop the war crimes against Novorossiya” — a politicized term denoting support for Russia’s expansionist aims in Ukraine. The geopolitical reference might seem obscure, but it points to a striking irony: that the anti-globalist right is far more internationally engaged than the left at the moment, whether it’s American evangelicals traveling to Russia for “family values” conferences or Trump promoting Brexit.

Trump’s successful exploitation of white nationalism to build a political coalition and his strange attraction to Vladimir Putin have never quite synced up as a unified narrative. Until last week, that is, when, one day after the president’s disastrous press conference with Putin in Helsinki, the League of the South announced plans to launch a Russian-language page.

Read more: https://triad-city-beat.com/putin-fans-us-white-supremacist-movement/