Fox News host Tucker Carlson and other prominent conservatives who support Russian President Vladimir Putin "hate America and want it to burn," according to former right-wing media creator Matthew Sheffield.
Sheffield, who helped create NewsBusters and served as a managing editor for the Washington Examiner, took to Twitter on Wednesday to explain why some conservatives' obsession with Putin shows how the American right has "devolved into personality-cult worship."
"(Fox News host) Tucker Carlson explaining why he supports Vladimir Putin is very instructive about what being on political right means today," Sheffield wrote, sharing a screen shot of Carlson's commentary from his show on Tuesday night. "The global right no longer operates as an ideologically coherent system. Instead, it's a series of identity factions built on negative partisanship. The point of being on the right now is about shared opposition to 'out' groups. It is not about a shared positive agenda. Mitch McConnell actively refuses to run on an agenda. Donald Trump in 2020 deliberately refused to create a GOP platform. Ditto for Putin, Gabbard, etc."
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"The reactionary project has never been about creating coherent policy frameworks that are responsive to contemporary political issues," Sheffield added. "Instead, it offers identity and strong-man leadership as the solution to everything. Policies don't matter. Only the people in charge do."
Sheffield wrote that Putin's appeal to "religious authoritarians in the U.S. predates former President Donald Trump by many years." He shared a 2017 article from Right Wing Watch titled, "How the American Right Learned to Love Moscow in the Era of Trump," about how "Putin oligarchs have directly funded many Christian Right initiatives has never been more relevant."
He went on to say that the "authoritarian personality ... has has supplanted ideological conservatism and temperament in most global right-wing parties," pointing to Theodor Adorno's "Analysis of Trump’s Authoritarian Personality."
"With right-wing politics devolved into personality-cult worship, it must by necessity attack any other form of ethical system, such as traditional faith," Sheffield wrote. "It also must attack our imperfect Western republican system--not as in need of improvement, but as wholly illegitimate."
"These sweeping reactionary attacks against bourgeois liberalism have a deep resonance w/certain anarchistic leftists who hate 'the system' but who refuse to understand change," Sheffield added. "This explains why there are a fair number of people w/left-derived politics who praise fascists. It also explains why there are more than a few atheists who openly ally themselves with Christofascists. The one thing Tucker Carlson, Glenn Greenwald, and Ginni Thomas have in common is that they all hate America and want it to burn. But simple-minded centrism and deference to corrupt businesses and politicians who control the current order will not work to repeal the protean appeal of fascism. Acknowledging and working to solve the current system's problems is critical, more on which later."
You can read the full thread below.
1/n: Tucker Carlson explaining why he supports Vladimir Putin is very instructive about what being on political right means today.\n\nThe global right no longer operates as an ideologically coherent system. Instead, it's a series of identity factions built on negative partisanship.pic.twitter.com/pHINw0W7bC— Matthew Sheffield (@Matthew Sheffield) 1645648636
