The Tea Party has a longstanding love affair with Putin. I wonder if Russia

[pnwmom]

has been helping the Tea Party for years.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/01/06/tea-party-putin-moscow-ukraine/

year ago, well before U.S.-Russia relations began their precipitous unraveling, conservative pundit Pat Buchanan set right-wing circles in the United States abuzz by suggesting that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “one of us” — a paleoconservative defender of traditional Christian values and a foe to “homosexual marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and the whole panoply of Hollywood values” personified by Barack Obama’s America.

Even while opposing Moscow’s subsequent annexation of Crimea and its strong-arm tactics in eastern Ukraine, prominent far-right voices — from Sen. Ted Cruz and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to many at Fox News — gleefully lauded Putin’s strength and decisiveness as hallmarks of a “real leader.”* Other pundits, meanwhile, pontificate over what this apparent paradox says about the Tea Party, the libertarian movement that has arguably consumed the Republican agenda.

But no one has considered what the comparison says about Putin’s Russia. Both Tea Party America and Putin’s Russia share patriotic and ultraconservative Christian worldviews, which each fears is under threat from liberal forces both at home and abroad. This fear — even among a passionate, educated, and politically savvy population — is reinforced by partisan media outlets that fundamentally recast history to confirm rather than challenge preconceptions and that spin outlandish conspiracy theories in the process.

SNIP

In Russia, Putin’s conservative base also gets its news from a singular partisan perspective: broadcasts on state-run television. With a near-total monopoly on the airwaves, pro-Kremlin TV is like Fox on steroids. Since 2011, attacks on independent publishing, television, radio, print, and even social media have dramatically narrowed the space for independent journalism and debate. From its dominant perch, pro-Kremlin media has dramatically shaped public opinion with its omnipresent, fear-laced narrative of a Russia besieged politically by the United States, culturally by liberal European values, and demographically by darker-skinned immigrants crossing the porous southern border — themes no doubt familiar to American conservatives.

SNIP

[Hortensis]

1. Of course? :) We also know the GRU and FSB infiltrated the NRA and

the gun lobby in congress, as well as other, less known routes of infiltration, state and federal. I thought the Kochs dumped all but the ones in congress most eager to keep their seats because of they broke loose and tried to shut down the government. Now it seems likely they were also cut loose to disassociate from this kind of thing.

I remember that 2015 article, just didn't know then how serious the problem was. I also remember when this same kind of people gave patriotism a bad name. Bad as they were, I never doubted their sincerity then, but now?! My head's swiveling from horizon to horizon wondering what they'll fall in behind next.

THE SECOND COMING -- W. B. Yeates

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[SHRED]

2. I modified their flag

[Turbineguy]

3. I believe the Russia connection

goes way back. When Great Britain was the major World power, the Czar's Okrana worked against them. In the early years of Bolshevism the Cheka set up a fake organization to undermine the Soviet government. Conservative western politicians jumped on board. Until Stalin put an end to it, western governments were paying for Russian intelligence operations.

Obviously, conservatives lend themselves to be the best useful idiots. It is my view that the KGB during the Brezhnev years had an operation going. Eventually this resulted in the Tea Party.

Putin, being an old KGB man, would be intimately acquainted with this sort of history.

He knew what worked and what didn't, and Trump is now president. A lot of institutional knowledge has gone into this coup.