Is Putin the alt-right's friend?
President Donald Trump isn't the only American leader with a puzzling fondness for Russian president Vladimir Putin's regime.
Consider, for example, the chant that was caught on local television footage as it was shouted by several dozen torch-carrying protesters who rallied against removal of a Confederate monument in a Charlottesville, Va., park last Saturday.
"Russia is our friend!" they shouted. "Russia is our friend!"
What, many observers must have wondered, did Russia have to do with the Confederacy?
Not much, except in the minds of such key leaders of the alt-right as Richard Spencer, who spoke and carried a torch in Charlottesville, where he once attended the University of Virginia.
Spencer is widely credited with coining the term "alt-right" to describe his Americanized version of Euro-nationalism that seeks a whites-only state. He also is famous for being punched in the face in a video-recorded street attack that went viral on YouTube and for being thrown out of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) convention this spring. You know that you're way out in the far-right field when you're thrown out of CPAC.
Beneath his digital-age jargon and elegantly soft-spoken manner, Spencer offers a rehashed version of traditional doomsday visions of "white culture" under assault by a rising tide of feminists, nonwhites and other scapegoats for all white miseries.
"What brings us together," he told the crowd at an earlier rally Saturday, "is that we are white, we are a people, we will not be replaced."
Yet Spencer also shows a curiously deep admiration for Russia, which he has called "the sole white power in the world." His former wife is the Russian writer and self-described "Kremlin troll leader" Nina Kouprianova. Writing and blogging under the pen name Nina Byzantina, she regularly follows Kremlin talking points.
Like Spencer, she has defended Syria's butcher president -- and Putin ally -- Bashir al-Assad, describing reports of civilian deaths in Aleppo as "fake news."
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