The US Right despises bravery because they're scared of everything.
If you're frightened to go to San Francisco, how can you imagine someone going to a literal war zone?
There’s been bewilderment in media circles about why conservatives who’d have carried Ronald Reagan’s photo in their wallet 40 years ago seem solidly in Russia’s camp. Their barely veiled affinity for Putin manifests in contempt for Ukraine’s president Volodomyr Zelensky.
“Zelensky is basically an ungrateful international welfare queen,” opined Donald Trump Jr. on Twitter. Tucker Carlson has referred to Zelensky as a “Ukrainian strip club manager.” “Get this grifting leech out of our country please,” Matt Walsh tweeted. The male pundits who natter on about “alpha males” obsess over Zelensky’s outfits like Kim Kardashian shilling Skims.
Part of it is shared affinity for fascism. Part is knee-jerk opposition to anything deemed to be the “liberal” consensus. And with Putin having done away with ideological opposition to capitalism, what’s not to love?
In “Putin’s Useful Idiots,” writer Cathy Young considers how the animus toward Ukraine reveals the right’s desperation:
Whatever the reason, the anti-Ukraine animus on the right is quite real and widespread. (When journalist Bari Weiss, who has a largely “anti-woke” following, retweeted a Hanukkah greeting from Zelensky, the responses from her followers in the thread were mostly hostile.) But right now, it also smells of desperation. Ukraine’s cause is still massively popular in the United States, with two-thirds of Americans supportive of sending money and arms. Disingenuous laments about the poor Ukrainians exploited by American and European globalists ring hollow and false when the vast majority of Ukrainians are so clearly determined to resist the invasion. And Zelensky, as the smarter among the aid opponents, like Ungar-Sargon, can see, is a genuine hero: patriotic, incredibly courageous and charismatic, and a speaker so compelling that even congressional right-wingers who initially refused to join in the standing ovations (including Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Andrew Clyde) finally rose up during the last portions of his speech.
(Caveat: I think there are reasonable questions to be asked about the risks involved in the US sending military aid to Ukraine. These questions can be asked without the shrill obsession with Zelensky’s outfit).
When you think about it though, it makes sense. The conservative project—from Fox News to whatever the hell Charlie Kirk does—is fueled by ginned-up fear. Fear of crime. Fear of homeless people. Of disorder, of protests, of immigrants of color, of urban Black youth, rural Black youth, of attractive Somali-American lawmakers, Toni Morrison books (well, fear and racism, then).
They’ve never tried to hide the political purpose of this project: crime suddenly ended on Fox News after the midterms. Now, we’re all apparently going to die of rainbow fentanyl because of Biden’s border policies.
But if you traffic in fear, even if you’re doing it to trick the rubes or whatever, it must seep in and skew how you view the world. Night after night, Fox News airs segments depicting cities like San Francisco and New York as crime-ridden hellholes (as Radley Balko observed, the homicide rate is higher in Oklahoma).
If you’re scared of going to San Francisco, how can you possibly conceive of someone going to the front lines of a war?
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