Episode Details

In a speech on Friday delivered from his office in the Kremlin, Putin criticized the West’s “cancel culture” which, he charged, is “canceling” Russia -- “an entire thousand-year-old country, our people.” It was the third time in recent months Putin has blasted the so-called “cancel culture.”

Which is exactly what Trump, Tucker Carlson, and the GOP have blasted for several years.

"The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated and driven from society as we know it," Trump said as he accepted his party's nomination at the Republican National Convention in 2020.

Tucker Carlson, one of Fox News’s most prominent personalities, has charged that liberals have been trying to cancel everything from Space Jam to the Fourth of July.

Putin’s fixation on transgender and gay people has also been echoed on the American right. Republican state bills aimed at limiting LGBTQ rights or discussion in schools are soaring. Last fall — months before Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott threatened to criminalize parents who give their transgender children gender-affirming care — Putin argued that teaching children about different gender identities was “on the verge of a crime against humanity.”

Then there’s admiration for Putin himself. Just before Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Trump deemed him "savvy," "genius," and "smart” for “taking over a country, literally, a vast, vast, location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking right in.”

On his Fox News program Carlson asked, rhetorically, “why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?” But Carlson called Ukraine “an obedient puppet of the Biden State Department,” and suggests Putin’s invasion was nothing more than a “border dispute.” 

Putin’s lies and the lies coming from America’s extreme right are mutually reenforcing. Carlson’s Fox News segments show up in Russian propaganda. And when the American site “Infowars” resurrected an unfounded Russian claim that the United States funded biological weapons labs in Ukraine, Putin repeated the Infowars story.

To conclude from all of this that authoritarians think alike is to miss a deeper truth. Putin, Trump, Carlson, and a growing number of rightwing commentators and activists have been promoting much the same narrative — for much the same reason.  

Remember, Putin was put into power by a Russian o