I'm not an expert, I just play one on Russian TV
If you're too ridiculous for Rumble and InfoWars, there's still a time slot for you on RT and Rossiya-24.
Valeria Ratnikova of TV Rain, the intrepid Russian news channel now broadcasting from Amsterdam, profiles the Star Wars cantina patrons from the United States and Western Europe regularly featured on Putin’s state-controlled media outlets.
You will be shocked, shocked, to find out that they all believe Russia is going to win its completely justified war against the Ukrainian Nazis - though that gets a little awkward for the ones who are actual neo-Nazis ejected from hard-right political parties for being too extreme even for them - and that the United States is being hollowed out from within by drag queens and same-sex marriages.
(Side note: it’s interesting how, depending on what part of the world you’re from, the United States is either the new Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale or the new Sodom and Gomorrah.)
My favorite of the bunch is probably Scott Bennett, hailed as a former high-ranking official in the U.S. Department of Defense, who in reality never served in the military but wore a fake uniform as part of a successful scam to score subsidized housing. Then he went to jail for three years on several charges, including drunk driving.
Insert your own jokes about Russians and vodka here.
Bennett and his fellow weirdoes are far from the first Westerners making propaganda for Russia and its predecessor, the Soviet Union.
It might be June Taylor who had the most interesting back story, though.
After spending her first sixteen years in New Zealand, Taylor’s father, a dentist and devotee of the hardline Communism practiced by Enver Hoxha, uprooted his family and moved to Albania, a country then arguably more isolated from the outside world than North Korea is today.
Native anglophones were kind of thin on the ground in Tirana, and while attending university Taylor was drafted into broadcasting shortwave radio propaganda.
Really, really, boring and tedious radio propaganda. When Hoxha’s heart said “F this” and quit its job in 1985, here is how Taylor broadcast the news to the outside world:
Taylor was under no illusions about what she was broadcasting, and once got in trouble for treating viewers to a song by one of the most transgressive, shocking, unabashedly vulgar rock music icons of the 20th century:
However, rather than being a public diplomacy success story, Radio Tirana was mostly nothing more than a white elephant. In an interview with Reuters in 2002, Taylor recalled how “news arrived at the very last minute. The quality of translation left much to be desired and they were packed with boring slogans”.
Taylor admits that she knew at the time that her work was propagandising on behalf of the Hoxha regime and that everything she read was “blatantly false”.
Her efforts to lighten the mood at Radio Tirana with some transgressive Western music backfired when a colleague played some Tom Jones on a live broadcast. This led to an ingenious justification to disgruntled communist officials that because Tom Jones was a miner’s son, he was, therefore, from the “proletariat” and his music was communist-appropriate. Sadly, however, the justification did not work and the colleague was fired.
Ratnikova says Scott Bennett deserves a Netflix documentary, but I’d really like to see one about Taylor. Not many people from English-speaking countries grew up behind the Iron Curtain, and even fewer found themselves in this paranoid hermit state which feared imminent invasion by the United States and the Soviet Union and even burned its bridges with Mao after deciding he was too much of a squishy moderate.
You did a "Dan Quayle." It's actually weirdos. :-)
Although the people you wrote about here may really be "weirdoes."