TRUMPISM IS PUTINISM:

On its website, Infowars touted remarks by Tucker Carlson foreign policy muse Douglas Macgregor. Macgregor told a YouTube podcast that he was "extremely suspicious" at the "brilliant timing" and unanimous condemnation in the media of Russia's actions in Bucha, likening the condemnation to the lies used to sell the Iraq War. In the same podcast, Macgregor later said of the Bucha massacre that "it's hard for me to believe that this was a deliberate act done by the Russian military" and that "I looked at both sides of this and I couldn't come away with a certain conclusion one way or the other. There were things that didn't make a lot of sense."

During the April 4 broadcast of Human Events Daily with Jack Posobiec, the Pizzagate conspiracy theorist claimed "we can't tell what happened" in Bucha and "both sides have their grievances." The comments were boosted by The Post Millennial, a right-wing blog. Posobiec has a history of boosting Russian-backed conspiracy theories about the war in Ukraine.

Former presidential candidate Ron Paul claimed on the April 5 edition of the Ron Paul Liberty Report that he's "very suspicious of what we're hearing, just who has been doing what." His co-host Daniel McAdams repeated denial narratives, saying, "We do not know what happened in this small town," and went on to describe a timeline of events that implied Russian forces were not behind the massacre.

During a livestream on Rumble, the right-wing alternative to YouTube, militia-linked radio host Pete Santilli claimed the massacre was faked and the CIA was behind it. The episode also included a video sourced from Infowars that supposedly proved the massacre was faked.

On CrossTalk, a Christian nationalist show hosted by QAnon conspiracy theorist Lauren Witzke and Edward Szall, the co-hosts claimed Russian forces in Bucha were "helping the Ukrainians; they weren't abusing them, they weren't doing terrible things to them," as evidenced by images of food packaging alongside the dead.

Witzke also claimed to have heard rumors Ukrainians are accepting help from Russian forces and said she has "nothing but respect for Putin. And you know what, it's a daggum shame that they're doing this crap to people, that they're murdering people, just so they can paint him as this horrible leader, this tyrant." The episode, which was cross-posted to the "Stew Peters Network" page on Rumble, is titled "Ukrainian War Crimes in Bucha Exposed: Zelensky's MI6 Nazi False Flag Murdered Kids."

Tweet   @brothersjudd