The Putin Agenda is Doing Just Fine

 

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the rhetoric coming from the vandals is utterly bonkers. As usual, it’s all lies, but it’s also a sideshow. It’s there to distract us.

None of what’s really happening is about DEI, though the rhetoric about it is hot and thick. Nor is it about woke, trans women playing sports, or anything about efficiency, waste, fraud, or abuse.

Yes, the vandals value the degradation of non-whites, non-Christians, non-citizens, and non-men. And yes, the deep well of cruelty we see bubbling to the surface wouldn’t surprise anyone living in, say, the thirteenth century.

Nonetheless, that’s all a sideshow. The main event, what this is really about — and the lens through which we all need to see it — is exactly as Nancy Pelosi once put it:

“All roads lead to Putin.”

If the atrocious actions we’ve seen from the vandals in the last month have one thing in common, it’s that they all, without exception, harm America and benefit Putin.

There can now be no doubt that Trump is a Russian asset. How he got that way is fully documented — with new information as recent as last week — but it’s no longer important.

Yes, there is kompromat, no doubt. Yes, the pee-tape alluded to in the Steele Dossier probably exists. But I’m sure there’s dirt far worse in the archives of Russian intelligence. Trump knows Putin could, at any moment, expose him for the traitorous stooge he is.

But it's not clear if Trump understands that nobody cares any more. He no longer needs to fear public exposure of anything. No new — or newly discovered — Trump depravity could possibly surprise anyone. He’s beyond blackmail. The more depraved he is, the more his followers will worship him, and the more everyone else will shrug their shoulders and go back to panicking.

But Trump’s impunity aside, he has apparently been conditioned to do Putin’s bidding quite instinctively. If there’s any move Trump can make that’s pro-Russia or anti-America, he’s right on it. The crueler the better.

The trouble for Putin is that Trump seems to be descending into a cognitive neverland that nobody can predict. And even at the top of his game, Trump had neither the smarts nor the attention span to execute the sort of systematic destruction Putin has in mind.

That’s where Musk comes in. We know Musk spoke with Putin regularly before the election, and we know that everything Musk is doing is of direct benefit to Putin. So while it’s unlikely Musk is taking direct orders from Putin, they are clearly on the same page.

But what does Putin have in mind here? What’s driving him to upend our entire society for no apparent reason?

The name Alexander Dugin keeps coming up among the Russia watchers, and his new prominence in fascist circles goes a long way towards understanding what makes Putin tick.

Dugin is a nutjob’s nutjob, a prodigious writer of political claptrap, Russian-style, who has, in effect, laid down the ideological underpinnings for Putin’s world-domination plans.

His philosophy — if you can call it that — places Russia at the moral center of the universe, and does so at the expense of everyone else. As James Verini writes in The New Yorker:

[Dugin] inveighs against democracy, secularism, individualism, civil society, multiculturalism, human rights, sexual openness, technology, scientific rationalism, and reason in general, which he rejects in favor of the mystical revelations of the Russian Orthodox Church. 

Sound familiar? Substitute ‘Roman Catholic’ for ‘Russian Orthodox,’ and it sounds just like Project 2025. I’m quite sure that’s not a coincidence. I’m quite sure Dugin has an avid following among those “intellectuals” at Heritage Foundation.

Dugin speaks of the evils of “Atlanticism,” by which he means the decadent forces of the West, as embodied by the economic and military alliances of North America and Western Europe. Which is to say NATO.

In 1997 he wrote what we can think of as a Putinist manifesto. Though it predates Putin’s reign, Putin has thoroughly adopted it, following it almost to the letter:

[I]t is necessary to counteract US Atlanticist geopolitics at all levels and in all regions of the world, trying to weaken, demoralize, deceive and, ultimately, defeat the enemy as much as possible. It is especially important to bring geopolitical turmoil into the US domestic reality by encouraging all kinds of separatism, various ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements of extremist, racist and sectarian groups that destabilize internal political processes in the USA.

This, in so many words, is the Putin Agenda. It goes a long way toward explaining stuff like Brexit and the 2016 election. Like Manafort and Deripaska. Like Rudy’s adventures in Ukraine. Like Wikileaks. Like all those years of sliming Hunter Biden.

It explains the traitorous behavior of a number of Republican congressmen, most of all Tommy Tuberville, who used his Senatorial privilege to block all military promotions for nearly a year, leaving vacancies in the military command structures that never got filled. And guess who’s filling them now.

It explains the destruction of USAID, as well as Musk’s hack of government payment systems. It explains the ongoing purge of federal agencies, and the appointments of Kennedy, Hegseth, Gabbard, and Patel. Most of all, it explains Trump’s disgusting betrayal of Ukraine.

All of this vandalism is aimed at the degradation of our economy, our security, our livelihoods, and our health. And none of it serves any useful purpose to anyone but Putin.

Seen through this lens, it’s not hard to conclude that the entire Republican party, right down to its individual voters, is a Russian asset. They are all advancing the Putin Agenda. They are all doing Putin’s bidding, whether they know it or not. It’s at best ignorant, at worst treasonous.

The worst offenders are the GOP congressmen. They all know, perfectly well, that their $5 trillion tax cut — and the extreme austerity it will usher in — will be an economic Cat-5 hurricane, swamping the entire country. They all know how much it will impoverish, and in many cases kill, their own constituents. They all know how much it will compromise national security and play directly into Putin’s hands. They even know, if they’re not total idiots, how dangerous it will be on a personal level, for themselves and their families. But never mind, they’ll vote for it anyway.

So yes, the Putin Agenda is doing well for itself. It’s amazing to see this country being re-imagined in Putin’s image, by people who share Putin’s values. People whose principal joy in life is to bring misery to as many humans as possible.

This is what we’re up against. This is the underlying agenda for everything we’re seeing. We’ll all need to see it for what it is.