A blogger in Moscow

Johnson had met Lavrov the previous year at the International Russophile Movement Congress in Moscow. He and the other foreign visitors, the former Fox personality Judge Andrew Napolitano and the Elon Musk favorite Mario Nawfal, are the sorts of figures the Russians have long cultivated — rejects from the American mainstream that still have some mainstream credentials, ideological fellow travelers, oddballs sympathetic in some way to the Russian point of view. In Moscow, Johnson said, he was a minor celebrity, since he’s made appearances in the Russian media before. Napolitano — “Judge Nap” — was a bigger star, recognized in Red Square, he said.

Johnson is a curious figure: Valued in the media for his voluble disagreements with the status quo after 9/11, he became a sort of an exile after pushing the allegation in 2008 that Michelle Obama had used the slur “whitey.” He now says he heard it from the Clinton aide Sid Blumenthal, who was reportedly retailing the story. “This was a political hit job, and I was dumb enough that I got used,” he told me. (This was a forgotten controversy from a simpler time — these days, that sort of politics makes you a celebrity.)

Johnson has also been banned from YouTube. He said he makes most of his income as a firearms instructor, though he’s also been paid a bit more than $9,000, according to foreign agent filings, by an obscure company based in the United Arab Emirates to make his podcast, Counter Currents. He said he’s resigned to his marginal status in the US, far from the old cable news spotlight. “You recognize that Russia is a formidable power that needs to be dealt with — suddenly you’re a tool of Putin and the Kremlin,” he said. 

Johnson is right about one thing: There’s been shockingly little effort in US media to understand how Moscow sees the world. “Can you name me one person who appears on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, ABC, CBS, or NBC or is quoted in any of the mainstream papers that presents Russia’s position?” he asked. “Tucker may have a handle on it. I’m not sure about anybody else.”

American politics has largely been deaf to everyone from Russia’s exiled independent media to Western Russia correspondents like the FT’s Max Seddon, who wrote recently that “what qualified support Putin has given for Donald Trump’s ceasefire proposal belies a set of maximalist demands that remain essentially unchanged since the Russian president ordered the invasion of Ukraine three years ago.”

And Lavrov’s warnings to Johnson and his friends — basically, that Russia isn’t ready for anything like the deal Trump is offering —have largely been ignored. When President Trump said this weekend that he is “pissed” at Putin, it may have surprised both Democrats, who may have imagined he had a secret deal with the Russian leader, and Trump’s own supporters, who have heard for a year that the new president would swiftly end the war.

“We used to celebrate our so-called free press, and now it’s a one-sided propaganda campaign,” Johnson groused of American media. And I was warming up to his point of view when he told me the biggest surprise about his trips to Russia has been that it’s an “open society.”

Wait, I said — they’ll drag you off to jail if you protest!

“There’s a little bit of that — but look at the mirror here in this country,” he replied, echoing the US president’s claims about Jan. 6, 2021. I want to hear no lessons about oppression in Russia until we clean up our own f**king act!”

“We’re in a goddamn glass house,” he continued. “And now under Trump, if you come out and you’re pro-Hamas, you can be deported. Well, you know what? I’m pro-Hamas. There goes my freedom of speech!”

• One journalist who listens to what Putin says is The New York Times’ M. Gessen: “Putin wants nothing less than to reorganize the world, the way Joseph Stalin did with the accords he reached with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945. … How do I know Putin wants this? Because he has said so. In fact, he, Lavrov and a cadre of Kremlin propagandists and revisionist historians haven’t shut up about Yalta for more than a decade.”
• A sweeping Justice Department investigation last year accused two employees of the state-backed outlet RT of funneling millions of dollars to a US company widely reported to be Tenet Media, the brand behind right-wing influencers like Tim Pool and Benny Johnson, to push pro-Kremlin messaging.