Douglas Murray thinks so. I don't.
I am hardly alone among conservatives in stating that I greatly admire Douglas Murray, a fierce opponent of wokeness, defender of Israel, and author of such must-reads as The Strange Death of Europe and The War on the West. And that is why his latest piece in The Spectator, titled “The MAGA Movement is Wrong on Ukraine” is such a disappointment that I felt compelled to respond (the article is behind a paywall, unfortunately, but I have excerpted the key selections below).
“How can the right be so wrong? Or at least portions of the right – especially the American right – when it comes to Ukraine?” Murray asks and then explains.
He places the roots of the MAGA movement’s reluctance to embrace the Ukrainian cause in the revelations about Hunter Biden’s corrupt business deals in the country back in 2014. Then Ukraine appeared on the Right’s radar again when Trump was impeached over a 2019 phone call with its President Zelensky. These two events, Murray argues, cemented in the mind of the Right the notion that Ukraine “was simply a corrupt country.”
Then came Russia’s invasion in February 2022, and for a while establishment Republicans leaped to defend the Republican principle that tanks, as Murray puts it, “should not be allowed to roll with impunity into an allied country… At the start of the invasion, the normal conservative view prevailed: Ukraine had been brutally attacked, had stood its ground, and was admirably fighting back.”
“But all the while,” he continues, “an upcoming generation of mainly online MAGA Republicans could be seen veering in a different direction.” Murray argues that there was an element of the Right who weren’t entirely convinced that Putin was Dr. Evil. For example, influential strategist Steve Bannon hailed Putin as a defender of Christianity and an opponent of wokeness.
Then the Right, Murray writes, became bored with “the near-universal admiration for Ukraine – specifically for Zelensky. These people understandably hate the idea of narratives being pushed on them, and they noticed that many of the lost souls who had been putting BLM flags in their Twitter bios were now posting Ukraine flags.”
Fact check: true so far. It is also true that the Right “became additionally irritated that unheroic and distinctly unmasculine figures such as Justin Trudeau of Canada were suddenly able to present themselves as wartime leaders.” But then Murray says the Right suspected that “if Biden, Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron and every other hated left-wing ‘globalist’ was shimmying up to Zelensky, there must be something wrong with him.”
The full-throated support of the globalist Left (and establishment neo-cons) is not the only reason the MAGA Right was and is skeptical of Zelensky (although it’s reason enough). Anyone with eyes to see can tell that Zelensky is an opportunist and former actor who very much revels in playing the role of a modern-day Churchill, and who has a vested interest in perpetuating the admiration of Western elites and the flow of money and arms from America and NATO.
Then Murray claims, rather exaggeratedly and dismissively, that --->READ MORE HERE
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How can the right be so wrong? Or at least portions of the right – especially the American right – when it comes to Ukraine? To begin to grapple with this you have to go way, way back to Donald J. Trump’s first term in office.
In that time Ukraine came to the public’s consciousness just twice. The first occasion was when Trump and other Republicans began to make hay over the business dealings of Hunter Biden. Since 2014 the then vice-president’s son had been sitting on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma. He was earning around $1 million annually to advise a company in a sector about which he had zero expertise. Why might a foreign company want the son of the vice-president on their board? Obviously – as all the investigations have shown since – so that the Biden name could bring contracts, grants and other support to Burisma.
The only other time Ukraine came to the attention of the American right was in 2019 when President Trump had a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump’s political opponents claimed that he had used the call to tell Zelensky that American aid to the country could be contingent on Ukraine helping to expose the Biden family’s financial dealings. Trump was impeached over the call but acquitted by the Senate. But these two events started to embed the idea on the right that Ukraine was simply a corrupt country, which had enriched and cooperated with its own political opponents.
This was all that Ukraine meant to most MAGA Republicans until Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
For a while the old guard of the Republican party asserted itself in the Senate and the House. With Trump in exile and fighting a thousand legal battles, Republican lawmakers such as Lindsey Graham fought to be more pro-Ukraine and anti-Putin than the next man. Some people might think that was cynical, but it was largely an assertion of a Republican principle: which is that tanks – and especially Russian tanks – should not be allowed to roll with impunity into an allied country. But all the while an upcoming generation of mainly online MAGA Republicans could be seen veering in a different direction.
For these people, the question of whether Vladimir Putin was a bad guy was not settled. During the peak of Biden’s presidency and woke, Putin became for some of them a focus of admiration. While the West had turned away from traditional values – not least the Christian faith – here was a leader who spoke in defence of such values. Shortly before Russia’s invasion, Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon was podcasting with Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater. ‘Putin ain’t woke,’ said Bannon at one point. ‘He’s anti-woke.’ ‘The Russian people still know which bathroom to use,’ added Prince.
You might say that all this was part of the inevitable over-correction to the period of woke. But these memes gathered force online. At the start of the invasion, the normal conservative view prevailed: Ukraine had been brutally attacked, had stood its ground, and was admirably fighting back.
Then several things that are typical of our age began to occur. The first was that the online right became bored with the story and wanted to move it along. Being an essentially reactionary movement, they also began to get bored of the near-universal admiration for Ukraine – specifically for Zelensky. These people understandably hate the idea of narratives being pushed on them, and they noticed that many of the lost souls who had been putting BLM flags in their Twitter bios were now posting Ukraine flags.
They became additionally irritated that unheroic and distinctly unmasculine figures such as Justin Trudeau of Canada were suddenly able to present themselves as wartime leaders. When the Zelenskys did things like the Vogue shoot, they were doubtless simply trying to keep the plight of their country in the western public eye. But the online right started to find this stuff risible and smelly: if Biden, Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron and every other hated left-wing ‘globalist’ was shimmying up to Zelensky, there must be something wrong with him. --->READ MORE HERE
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