From The Power Worshippers (Katherine Stewart, 2019) pp252-3
With so much to celebrate and a world waiting to be conquered, the mood in Verona is both belligerent and triumphant. Warning the crowd of the urgent need to “break the ice cap of political correctness,” Arsuaga said, “Please try to make liberal politicians and decision makers fear you.”
“We are not medievalist throwbacks,” Turley added. “We are the future. We are the prolife, pro-child, pro-family future, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, the secular world can do about that.”
As I listen in on the ebullient discussions in Verona, it strikes me that the imagined future of the global holy war looks a lot like the present in Russia. “In the Russian Federation the Orthodox Church has risen to a prominence not seen since the days of the czars,” Steve Turley says in reverent tones. The enthusiasm of the crowd is palpable when Archbishop Antony of Vienna and Budapest, a young bearded man with a magisterial affect, rises to deliver a message from the Patriarch of Moscow, which he reads out in Russian.
Alexey Komov, a ubiquitous figure at the congress, seems determined to spread the Russian formula for church-state union around the world. He sits on the board of Arsuaga’s CitizenGO and participates, along with two American activists, on a World Congress of Families panel on homeschooling. Komov, who litters his amiable presentations with casual references to “covfefe” and other terms of endearment for the American far-right, seems to have an intimate familiarity with the nuances of America’s right-wing political scene. With his charming demeanor and youthful good looks, he reminds me of Maria Butina, the Russian student at American University who ingratiated herself to right-wing politicians through her embrace of America’s pro-gun lobby and National Prayer Breakfast and has now been convicted for conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent. Komov assisted the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), along with the IOF and other organizations, in bringing a Global Home Education Conference to Russia in May 2018. The HSLDA’s founder and former chairman, Michael Farris, currently serves at the CEO and General Counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom. Like Brown, Farris too appears on the 2014 leaked membership list of the Council for National Policy.
“By networking with Russians, the HSLDA — now America’s largest right-wing homeschooling association — has provided the Kremlin with a new avenue of influence over some of the most conservative organizations in the United States,” writes the journalist Casey Michel, who has reported on the links between America’s far right and Russia for ThinkProgress and other media outlets. Russian ties to groups like the HSLDA demonstrate the Kremlin’s broader attempts to hold sway over American policies.
According to Michel, Komov has worked with Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian oligarch with links to pro-Russian military and political leaders in eastern Ukraine. Malofeev’s television station, Tsargrad TV, which was launched with the help of former Fox News producer Jack Hanick, has provided a platform for the disgraced right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin. Dugin advocates for the establishment of a network of authoritarian, traditionalist ethno-states with Moscow at its center.
The World Congress of Families got its start over twenty years ago when American and Russian activists and academics gathered in Russia to study issues of mutual interest. In 2018 the congress took place in the former Soviet republic of Moldova. In 2016 it was in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where members praised Putin’s Russia and the Orthodox Church as defenders of “Christian civilization” against a secular, decadent West. Looking around at my fellow conference-goers, it occurs to me that if the Russian government wanted to manipulate the politics of the West as effectively as it controls its own population, it could hardly have found a more useful collection of people.
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