House and Senate Republicans may be divided on whether or not the United States ought to put the brakes on military aid to Ukraine, allowing Russian kleptocrat Vladimir Putin to pillage the country as he may, but the activists of the Republican base aren’t conflicted. That’s the takeaway from Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action conference last weekend—or at least, that’s the takeaway Kirk wants to push.
There’s reason for skepticism given that Kirk’s outfit is among the most unabashedly pro-fascist groups in Republicanism, is virulently pro-Donald Trump, and are such brazen liars that they might just be making the whole thing up. According to Kirk, in a straw poll of conference attendees, a near-unanimous 95.8% of them voted against supporting “U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine.”
“When will politicians learn that you can’t tell voters what to believe?” grunted Kirk. “You should listen to your voters if you want to win a nomination process.”
A few media outlets have picked this one up, but so far I haven’t seen any of them point out that Turning Point USA is a brazen propaganda outfit and it wouldn’t exactly be a shock to learn that event organizers threw out whatever the actual vote totals were and wrote up “95.8%” because it sounded better. Then again, this is a crowd of dyed-in-the-wool true believers; The seditionist Donald Trump was the keynote speaker for the conference, and in other straw poll results the crowd picked conspiracy crank Kari Lake as their favorite vice presidential choice and the JFK Jr.-like Vivek Ramaswamy as their presidential choice if Trump’s remaining classified document boxes fell on his head and killed him while he was using a yet-unsearched Bedminster bathroom.
So while Kirk could be lying his ass off about his own poll’s results, the news that over 95% of Turning Point’s willing conference attendees favor cutting off U.S. “involvement” in the defense of a European nation Putin wants to put back under Russia’s thumb wouldn’t exactly be a stunner either. This is a group that’s self-selected to be pro-Trump, pro-conspiracy, and even pro-Putin if Donald points his mouth at a microphone to demand it of them. Fascists gotta fash, and all that.
What this does again hint at, though, is that no matter what alleged Republican leaders might have to say about it, the activists in the party, as in the people who are putting in the actual legwork to boost the sedition-agnostic party into new power in 2024, are taking an anti-Ukraine stance as a given. The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake notes that the Turning Point poll came immediately after Tucker Carlson turned the allegedly evangelical Family Leadership conference to badger Republican presidential contenders into taking anti-Ukraine stances.
Blake also points out that support for Ukraine is in the 2-to-1 range among American voters in general, and even Republican voters support U.S. assistance for Ukraine, if only barely, at 52%.
So it’s pretty much only party activists that demand the U.S. leave Ukraine high and dry, and if nothing else that is what we political analysts call damn interesting. The activist base is way out of the American mainstream on this one—and it’s the activist base that turns out for events like the Family Leadership shindig and the Turning Point fascist-o-rama, so they’re the ones getting in the faces of Republican candidates who don’t toe that same line. It’s going to be a dangerous game for Republican candidates at all levels. Launching a new candidacy will either require placating the anti-Ukraine crowd now only to walk it all back later, or (more likely) will force candidates to look like absolute doorknobs as they try to evade the question entirely.
As for how those activist Republicans turned from aggressively interventionist, at first jumping from the Afghanistan War into another Iraq War while frothing for military intervention against Iran, to a new insistence that a war of conquest inside Europe and launched by would-be Soviet restorationists is none of our business?
That one’s a puzzler, and I’ve yet to hear a more plausible explanation than the obvious one. Paul Manafort and other American politicos began to make serious cash boosting Russian ambitions in Europe. Manafort’s pro-Russia ties led directly to fellow Trump booster Rudy Giuliani latching on to a pro-Russia disinformation campaign in Ukraine targeting, yet again, a Trump political enemy. Trump attempted to flat-out extort the Ukrainian government to produce so-called evidence in the plot. Trump got his crooked ass impeached for the effort. Reps. Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan, and the rest of Republicanism were tasked with defending Trump, which required new partisan claims that Actually it was Ukraine that was corrupt, and now here we are, with a vast majority of diehard Republican Party activists now basing their worldviews around two decades of post-Soviet Russian disinformation.
That’s how you end up with a Tucker Carlson, and with Turning Point USA, and with Newsmax (lol), and with claims that Jared Kushner’s Saudi billions are on the up-and-up but that Hunter Biden’s art career is where the “real” corruption lies. This is what happens when you base a whole movement around justifying every word-burp that comes out of Dear Leader’s bullshitting mouth. It gets very silly, very fast, and before you know it you’re on Vladimir Putin’s side of things and nobody can quite figure out how it happened.
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