Here’s a bizarre story: the Kremlin-funded news network RT yesterday interviewed an American fascist denouncing (alleged) Ukrainian fascists for anti-Russian attacks. The Daily Caller reports:

On Monday night, Russian scholar Nina Kouprianova — who also goes by Nina Byzantina — appeared on the Putin’s English-language propaganda outlet “Russia Today” to discuss what the Kremlin calls a Ukrainian fascist massacre of over 40 allegedly pro-Russian supporters in the southern city of Odessa.

Kouprianova suggested the pro-European government in Kiev was “concealing the identities of the people” who participated in the killings — which RT consistently describes as members of “Right Sektor,” a supposedly Ukrainian fascist-nationalist group.

More:

But regardless of whether “Right Sektor’s” involvement in the Odessa killings and the broader fight against Russian separatists can be proven, RT’s reliance on an American white nationalist to condemn the group speaks to the media organization’s lack of credibility.

Kouprianova is married to Richard Spencer, a former journalist who now heads the National Policy Institute, an explicitly white nationalist organization which seeks the forced Europeanization of North America.

The DC reveals that Kourprianova has translated into English some of the work of Aleksandr Dugin, a contemporary and highly influential Russian neo-fascist. From Foreign Affairs:

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, ultranationalist ideologies were decidedly out of vogue. Rather, most Russians looked forward to Russia’s democratization and reintegration with the world. Still, a few hard-core patriotic elements remained that opposed de-Sovietization and believed — as Putin does today — that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. Among them was the ideologist Alexander Dugin, who was a regular contributor to the ultranationalist analytic center and newspaper Den’ (later known as Zavtra). His earliest claim to fame was a 1991 pamphlet, “The War of the Continents,” in which he described an ongoing geopolitical struggle between the two types of global powers: land powers, or “Eternal Rome,” which are based on the principles of statehood, communality, idealism, and the superiority of the common good, and civilizations of the sea, or “Eternal Carthage,” which are based on individualism, trade, and materialism. In Dugin’s understanding, “Eternal Carthage,” was historically embodied by Athenian democracy and the Dutch and British Empires. Now, it is represented by the United States. “Eternal Rome” is embodied by Russia. For Dugin, the conflict between the two will last until one is destroyed completely — no type of political regime and no amount of trade can stop that. In order for the “good” (Russia) to eventually defeat the “bad” (United States), he wrote, a conservative revolution must take place.

His ideas of conservative revolution are adapted from German interwar thinkers who promoted the destruction of the individualistic liberal order and the commercial culture of industrial and urban civilization in favor of a new order based on conservative values such as the submission of individual needs and desires to the needs of the many, a state-organized economy, and traditional values for society based on a quasi-religious view of the world. For Dugin, the prime example of a conservative revolution was the radical, Nazi-sponsored north Italian Social Republic of Salò (1943–45). Indeed, Dugin continuously returned to what he saw as the virtues of Nazi practices and voiced appreciation for the SS and Herman Wirth’s occult Ahnenerbe group. In particular, Dugin praised the orthodox conservative-revolutionary projects that the SS and Ahnenerbe developed for postwar Europe, in which they envisioned a new, unified Europe regulated by a feudal system of ethnically separated regions that would serve as vassals to the German suzerain. It is worth noting that, among other projects, the Ahnenerbe was responsible for all the experiments on humans in the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps.

Dugin has some important and valid insights about the failures of liberalism and market capitalism, and the need to rediscover tradition. But it’s all packaged as an explicit form of, well, Russian national socialism. Kouprianova reportedly help translate one of his books into English. The DC concludes:

So while tweeting videos on Ukraine with headlines like “Fascists Out!” and decrying alleged pro-Ukrainian fascists on RT’s airwaves, Kouprianova has little problem palling around, translating and even marrying fascists and white nationalists from other countries — including Russia.

Kouprianova seems to keep her association with Spencer and other white nationalists under wraps, perhaps making RT’s reliance on her analysis understandable. But for years, RT regularlyfeatured Spencer himself on anti-American segments —  most recently in a clip attacking the U.S. for souring relations between America and Russia.

Read the whole report here.  Spencer, incidentally, is not a Christian, but describes himself as a Nietzschean.

A big problem with these people is that they take kernels of truth — philosophical, geopolitical, etc. — about the failures of the liberal, postmodern order, and spin grand theories out of them that amount to justifications for neofascism, race hate, and modern forms of national socialism.