Who said Putin doesn’t have any friends?

Candace Owens speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference this year. Picture: AFP

Candace Owens, who is annoyingly described as an American conservative, is a talk-show host, who routinely touts for Putin.

In a tweet that went down a deep rabbit hole, she pondered: “Has anyone considered how pulling out of Afghanistan and starting a war with Russia are related from an energy policy perspective?”

Apparently only the all-seeing Owens could glimpse it. She mentioned the tweet on her chat show broadcast on DW, a German owned English language media company, and a tweet in response to it which suggested Candace was ignoring Putin’s aggressive intentions.

Jeremy Corbyn. Picture: AFP

“(Puitin’s) not trying to commit a genocide of the Ukrainians,” Owens said. “That obviously makes no sense because there is no difference ethnically from Ukrainians and Russians. Ukraine, Ukrainian wasn’t a thing until 1990. Ukraine, Ukrainian was created by the Russians. They speak Russian. This exposes how ignorant people are about the goals of Vladimir Putin.”

It’s difficult to know where to start with this linguistically, historically, or ethnographically. The notion that Ukraine was a creation of the former Soviet Union is mindless drivel devoid of a skerrick of fact. But Owens doesn’t let anything like a vast chasm of historical knowledge get in the way of a good pro-autocrat rant.

If Owens is a conservative, that would make Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher secret members of Victoria’s Builders Labourers Federation.

In the UK, the far left is similarly struggling to make sense of Putin’s invasion.

A group known as Stop the War has been holding rallies with the title “No War in Ukraine: Stop NATO Expansion.” Speakers have included the former Labour leader and deputy of the Stop the War Movement, Jeremy Corbyn and Corbyn acolyte, Labour MP Diane Abbott.

The line from the unelectable Corbyn and his electorally unpopular mates goes that Putin only invaded Ukraine because the western imperialist war mongers at NATO forced his hand.

But in far-left terms, Stop the War is a sock puppet, a sellout, a petit-bourgeois cohort betraying the working class. The Socialist Workers Party in the UK spit on the ground of Corbyn, preferring to embrace Putin. According to the SWP, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was and remains righteous. The Australian version of the SWP, the Socialist Alliance, has similar views. Putin might be a little bit wrong, but it was the West that made him do it. Besides, you can’t make an omelette without giving the FSB a turn with the whisk.

Meanwhile, anti-vax groups of no fixed ideological address have changed their rhetoric while adopting the same methods they used in attempts to persuade others to decline Covid-19 vaccinations.

“I’m standing on the side of Russia,” Czech anti-vax activist Patrik Tušl posted on his social media site with roughly 10,000 followers.

Prior to Putin’s invasion, the most popular Czech anti-vax group, Chcípl PES, declared on Facebook, “The US with its dollar needs a war, Ukraine with its collapsing and corrupt economy needs to find the culprit. Putin is no fool, but if genocide is occurring in the separatist republics, he will eventually have no choice but to intervene.”

In Australia, an anti-vax group with 25,000 followers on Telegram hinted at dark forces behind Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, “Although the Russia Ukraine ‘war’ has its own nefarious agenda behind it. They also used it to perfectly time the release of Covid-1984 data from the FDA, CDC & Pfizer so that it gets scrubbed underneath the rubble with little to no coverage.”

Another with 49,000 followers posted, “They are giving you a war in an attempt to make you forget about 2 years of tyranny and medical fascism. DON’T GET DISTRACTED BY THIS FAKE WAR.”

Who’s ‘they’? Big Pharma obviously, where executives might be seen poking their heads out of the turrets of Russian T-90 tanks, rolling onto the streets of Mariupol. But it doesn’t end there. It’s the deep state. It’s the Rothschilds. It’s Tom Hanks and the Clintons. It’s the cabal. It’s the vibe.

Pete Evans suggested a Russian air strike on a maternity and children’s hospital was a false attack conducted by the Ukrainians. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jenny Evans

Why, even former celebrity chef turned geopolitical analyst, Pete Evans, had a series of reposts on his Telegram suggesting a Russian air strike on a maternity and children’s hospital in Mariupol on March 9 was in fact a false flag attack conducted by the Ukrainians. One imagines this might be difficult to discern from the flood-ravaged Northern Rivers region of New South Wales but that appeared to pose no obstacle to Evans.

What is going on here? Aside from the predictable intersection of the far right and the far left in support of Putin, the anti-vax movement has fallen prone to Russian propaganda in dangerous combo with their own dark fantasies.

Russian propaganda leaves breadcrumbs of misinformation scattered around the internet knowing conspiracists will do the rest. Russian web brigades, amusingly called Gremlins, put out dribs and drabs. Conspiracists fill in the gaps.

Thus, a week after the invasion, driven by a bizarre speech from Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, claims that Ukraine had nuclear weapons started appearing here and there in dark corners of the web. But that seemed to have little impact among misinformation sites. Perhaps it was a lie of such dimension it lacked credibility even in the minds of conspiracists.

More recently, a conspiracy of US-funded and constructed bio-labs scattered around Ukraine was circulated. The role of the Gremlins is merely to put it out there. Before we knew it, conspiracists were claiming the Ukrainian bio-labs would be the source of Covid 2.0, a new and nastier infectious disease than Covid-19 and this would lead to a second pandemic in the not-so-distant future.

Putin’s only friends now derive from what political scientists call the horseshoe effect – where politically, the far left and the far right are closer to each other than either is to the middle. In simple terms, what we are seeing is the manifestation of years of anti-American sentiment espoused by the far left and the far right, rolled up in a ball, with contrived messages dripping with misinformation, all magnified by social media. The anti-vax movement around the world has as many hippies from the Green Left as it has jack-booted ultra-nationalists.

The only good thing about it is when you come across a Putin supporter these days, you can safely surmise they come from ideological extremes or, more commonly, they were shrieking about the dangers of vaccination a year ago.