It’s been a rough couple of weeks to be a Canadian far-right influencer.

According to a September 4 indictment filed by the US Department of Justice, two employees of Russian state broadcaster RT, which has been banned in Canada since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, knowingly laundered $10 million in Kremlin funding to pay contributors of Tennessee-based Tenet Media through Canadian far-right influencer Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan.

The prominent MAGA Internet stars alleged to have received Russian funding include names that will be familiar to those who spend far too much time online, chief among them Tim Pool, who received $100,000 per week, Dave Rubin, who earned that plus a $100,000 signing bonus, and Canadian Lauren Southern, whose compensation remains unknown.

According to PressProgress, Tenet released more than 50 videos of specifically Canadian content, most of which were produced by Southern, who in 2017 was detained by Italian authorities for attempting to obstruct a boat of Libyan migrants. This includes a collaboration with Harrison Faulkner, a contributor to the far-right True North website established by former federal Conservative staffer Candice Malcolm, to produce a 30-minute anti-immigrant documentary for Tenet.

The political leanings of those indicted should not come as a surprise to anyone. The worldviews of the Canadian and American far-right line up neatly with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nationalism, militarism, anti-2SLGBTQ+ agenda, and penchant for rewarding politically aligned oligarchs with state largesse.

But that hasn’t stopped some Canadian pundits from reflexively drawing an equivalency between how the far-right and far-left relate to Russian state interests, lazily conflating support for diplomacy with Russia—a left-wing position dating back to the Cold War—with outright support for Putin and his war in Ukraine, for which right-wing commentators were allegedly paid handsomely.

Efforts at equivalence

“I don’t think it’s about left and right,” Canadaland founder and publisher Jesse Brown emphasized in a September 11 episode of the podcast Short Cuts, citing RT appearances by media figures who have historically been associated with the left for their critiques of US foreign policy.

The first name Brown mentioned is Glenn Greenwald, entirely ignoring Greenwald’s growing embrace of right-wing culture war positions.

Yet earlier in his discussion with journalist Jan Wong, Brown correctly noted that RT “was, for a long time, a semi-legit place for journalists to go and do punditry or host a show.”

Conveniently omitted by Brown was left-wing journalist Abby Martin having hosted a show for RT, which she used as a platform to denounce Russia’s earlier 2014 invasion of Ukrainian territory and annexation of Crimea.

Having appeared on RT, or even hosting a show there, especially before Russia launched its 2022 invasion, is fundamentally distinct from what the US DOJ is alleging.

Meanwhile, in the National Post, the closest Marcus Kolga of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute could come to accusing the left of being complicit in Putin’s machinations was observing that in 2022, Russian Colonel Mikhail Mikushin, posing as a Brazilian academic, volunteered on the campaign of an NDP candidate.

So thin is the left’s purported connection to the alleged Russian plot that Post columnist Jamie Sarkonak engaged in some classic Soviet whataboutism by pivoting to China’s allegedly more expansive meddling in Canadian media, as outlined in the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians report on foreign interference.

The doppelganger effect

This isn’t to deny that there are people commonly associated with the left who have crossed the fine line from opposing NATO expansionism and escalation with Russia into outright support for Putin’s war.

There is a strain of crude anti-imperialism that operates as a sort of reverse neoconservatism—whereby any state that opposes the interests of US hegemony is assumed to be an inherently moral force that can do no wrong (recall the ancient proverb “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”).

In her most recent book, Doppelganger, journalist and author Naomi Klein details how the far-right has seized on the confusion and disenchantment of our age to create a doppelganger of the left that purports to be anti-corporate, anti-authoriarian and anti-war, yet is anything but.

Klein makes clear that she is not invoking the dubious liberal formulation of horseshoe theory—which posits that the far-left and far-right are fundamentally the same—but is speaking of diagonalism, which references the alliances formed between an increasingly organized far-right and disparate elements of the centre-left and far-left.

The book’s hook is Naomi Wolf—Klein’s doppelganger’s—and her transformation in recent years from a liberal feminist darling into an anti-vaccine influencer and close associate of Steve Bannon.

But Wolf is a stand-in for many nominally progressive figures who, in part thanks to social media algorithms frying our brains over the past decade, have crossed into what Klein calls the “mirror world,” adopting increasingly far-right positions in the name of progressive values.

Opposing vaccines, in the mirror world, becomes akin to supporting abortion rights; opposing trans rights becomes supporting women’s rights; outright supporting Russia’s objectives in Ukraine becomes opposing NATO and the glorification of Nazism by ultranationalists and white supremacists in Ukraine.

This all-or-nothing logic and tribalism that permeates online discourse to the benefit of social media oligarchs has caused some disturbing political transformations in the name of forming alliances to challenge the perceived established order.

Russia isn’t creating these divisions in the West, they’re attempting to exploit them for geostrategic purposes—just as, I would add, the US and its allies exploit existing discord all over the world, including in Russia and Ukraine, to promote their own interests.

But what the Tenet indictment exposes is that the far-right is where the money is. They’re the ones calling the shots. Anyone who suggests both ends of the political spectrum are equally susceptible to foreign exploitation is obscuring this reality.

Jeremy Appel is an Edmonton-based journalist and author of Kennyism: Jason Kenney’s Pursuit of Power (Dundurn, 2024). He also co-hosts the Big Shiny Takes podcast.