Reactions to Russia’s war in Ukraine have become a perfect demonstration of the “horseshoe theory,” according to which the extremes of Left and Right must converge. Amid overwhelming international condemnation of Russia and sympathy for the Ukrainians’ courageous resistance, Putin-friendly voices blaming the West, NATO, and particularly the United States for the invasion have come from the usual left-wing opponents of American and Western “imperialism” (including the Democratic Socialists of America) and from right-wing opponents of “globalist elites.” But in this instance, the voices on the Right have been louder and more numerous.

On February 23rd, as Putin ordered Russian troops into Eastern Ukraine and President Joe Biden announced the first round of sanctions, Fox News host Tucker Carlson delivered a stunning monologue on his highly rated show, in which he claimed that Americans had been brainwashed into regarding Putin as their enemy. Pushing every hot button of the culture wars and dismissing Putin’s attack on Ukraine as a “border dispute,” Carlson urged his viewers to ask themselves:

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? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? … Is he trying to snuff out Christianity?

This sermon pleased the Kremlin so much that it was later replayed, with a subtitled translation, on state-controlled Russian television.

It was hardly the first time that Carlson had weighed in on the Kremlin’s side of the conflict. “Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which, by the way, I am,” he declared back in 2019. Last month, just a few days before the invasion, he jeered at “Democrats and some low-IQ stooges in the Republican Party” who were arguing that Americans had a “moral obligation … to support the nation of Ukraine in its battles against Russia” because Ukraine is a democracy. It was really, he argued, all about President Biden’s son Hunter being handsomely paid to lead a “massive lobbying effort” on Ukraine’s behalf. (Apparently, that explains why Congressional Republicans pushed for weapons to be sent to aid Ukraine’s fight against Russia-sponsored separatists in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014, while the Obama administration opposed such a move.) Carlson then invited his guest, political scientist Richard Hanania, to explain that Ukraine is not a democracy at all but a “dictatorship” because, among other things, it has shut down TV channels that broadcast Russian propaganda.