COMRADE-ERY:

Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson falsely told Fox News viewers that it's possible that the FBI dressed up like supporters of President Donald Trump and attacked the U.S. Capitol as part of a false flag event. It's the same kind of conspiracy that Alex Jones has been touting about mass shootings starting with Sandy Hook Elementary. Jones was ultimately sued by the parents of the children who died.

"The same people like Kevin McCarthy whose adrenaline was rushing through their cheeks in the wake of the fight or flight response when they huddled into secret locations or could recognize the danger of what they saw in the moment," said host Chris Hayes. "All of the folks, up to and including Mitch McConnell are now running cover for this propaganda."

Speaking to Hayes on Wednesday, history professor and propaganda expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat explained that she is growing increasingly more concerned that the right-wing and Russian far-right are converging on the same propaganda.

"Some of the through lines are the same as the right-wing playbook for 100 years and where the GOP and Russian far-right are converging. One of them is that liberal democracy is a failed system and brings chaos and anarchy and, so, you are trying to build an appetite for authoritarian rule," said Ben-Ghat. "And another is that liberal democracy is tyranny. So, we hear talk of Biden being a dictator and wanting to impose a dictatorship and he's going to take our guns away and make us wear masks and force-feed critical race theory."

America reclaimed some lost pride Wednesday when President Joe Biden met in Geneva with Russian President Vladimir Putin  - and did so without bowing and scraping to a smug and devious autocrat.

That's a low bar, to be sure. But it's one that President Donald Trump failed utterly to clear - to the nation's everlasting shame - when he held a meeting with Putin in Helsinki in 2018 and played supplicant to a man impervious to human rights concerns, who leads a nation with only a fraction of America's economic prowess. (California's gross domestic product is nearly twice that of Russia's.) 

The memory remains painful. After their two-hour talk, the details of which are still a mystery because only interpreters were allowed to sit in, the leaders emerged for a brief news conference, in which Trump praised Putin's "extremely strong and powerful" denial of interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. 

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