As strange as the notion of a “California Embassy” opening in Moscow might seem, Marinelli’s movement is not an isolated phenomenon. Backed by a Kremlin-funded group that had spent the prior two years helping secessionist groups in a number of Western countries organize and network, Calexit is just one example of an understudied, underappreciated relationship between Moscow, Kremlin-tied actors, and the American fringe—both far-right and far-left. Much like the types of relations Moscow has both pursued and encouraged among the European fringe, a parallel network of quixotic secessionists, religious fundamentalists, white nationalists, and far-left activists from the U.S. have flocked to Russia. And Moscow, via both funding and proxies, has been only too eager to return the support, looking to exacerbate American domestic divisions in order to distract and hamper Washington, sapping American energies that could have been spent elsewhere. [...]
Likewise, and especially after Putin’s 2012 return to the presidency, Russia has attempted to morph into a conservative, illiberal bastion for all those opposing liberal American power. The transformation takes any number of forms: spearheading anti-LGBT and anti-abortion legislation; pushing nominal “traditional values;” dissolving the distance between church and state. (At least for those religions the Russian state approves of.) No longer able to rely on rising economic tides, Moscow has instead pushed a reactionary rubric, equating might with right in its attempt to spin itself into a great power once more—and building links to reactionary fellow-travelers all the while. [...]
To be sure, these scattered American movements are not necessarily proactive agents working on behalf of Moscow’s direct interests. Rather they, like many within the Trump campaign before them, appear to be modern incarnations of the types of “useful idiots” popularized in Soviet jargon. They may not ascribe to the Kremlin’s platform wholesale, but they, alongside their European counterparts, appear ready to gain all the support, material and otherwise, that they can from Moscow. And the Kremlin, seeing domestic wedges it can exploit in both the U.S. and the EU, appears only too happy to prop these fringe movements on both sides of the political spectrum—and to play host to a “California Embassy” as long as the Golden State remains, as Marinelli said last month from Russia, “occupied.”
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