It’s time to check in with some of our favorite New Right luminaries! Given that they have openly admired Putin for his anti-gay posture (whether the cuddly ex-KGB agent takes his bigotry seriously or not is another question), the Ukraine invasion has been a bit of an embarrassment. How are they handling it?
The consensus seems to be to convince us that they are foreign policy realists, not pro-Putin bootlickers. They don’t support the invasion, but they fear the consequences of doing much about it. Furthermore, they are extremely concerned that they will be treated as traitors and pariahs if they don’t rock along with the wave of popular sentiment against the Russians. As they see it, the left is always out to shut them up; the invasion will just give them a plausible excuse.
The second point, as usual, is pure projection; like Trump, the New Right is always ready to falsely accuse the left of the kind of censorship that it openly longs to impose on those who don’t support what they would call traditional religious values. On the first point, I don’t buy it; most of these people supported the Iraq War at the time (some say they have repented of it). They aren’t pacifists or realists; they just want to fight their battles against liberals and gays at home and Muslims and the Chinese in the rest of the world, not against someone they see as a fellow traveler.