Thread by @carolecadwalla

I don’t think the people who have cheerleaded this man, who have repeated his talking points & helped his political objectives should have a way back from this.

He’s just called for a ‘self-purification’ of Russia. We know where we’ve heard that before.

Maybe there’s a way back from it. But it’s not this. Farage voted in favour of Kremlin’s foreign policy for years. This claim about ‘Russia hoax’ is actually obscene.

It’s Putin’s line. Delivered with less than zero evidence. From a man who actually appears in Mueller Report

Fox TV’s Tucker Carlson is Putin’s boy. Russian TV has actually been commanded to show more Carlson. And these clips from Dec 2016 with Farage - when the details of Russian hacking op first began to emerge - show how clearly in lockstep they’ve been.

Farage blew it yesterday. He was named alongside Arron Banks in parliament by @RhonddaBryant & he failed to recognise that we are living in a new reality.

We now understand who Putin is. We can now see who blindly parrots his lines. And this, make no mistake, is Putin’s line

@BenPBradshaw was first MP to raise issue in parliament & all he did was state known facts. In Dec 2016, it was known Russia had launched cyber attacks on West. It was known it had attacked US election. It was known it had created European refugee crisis. He just said it.

But we ignored it. Even when FBI investigated it. Even when investigation included Farage.

Because Johnson’s entire political project depended on it. See how he’s forced to agree with Russian foreign minister Lavrov here. And see how Lavrov mocks him.

In this country, we fell into a political fever dream. We couldn’t see beyond tiny narrowness of Westminster. Day after day of negotiations & votes. We never lifted our eyes to see bigger geopolitical forces beyond.

And this. Will this give any of the ‘war on woke’ crowd pause? Because they have a new fanboy: Putin. The Western decadences he cites include oysters & ‘so-called gender freedoms’. Right before he calls for natural & necessary self-purification’.

It’s all very well sanctioning oligarchs but Britain needs to take a long hard look at itself. If this was 1939, Oswald Mosley would be in No 10 having shown his cuddly side in a couple of game shows & Lord Haw Haw would have knocked out a bodice ripper & be minister for culture.

I’m adding @anneapplebaum’s reflections on Putin’s words to the end of this thread. We need a revisionist history of Putin’s enablers in the West & we need to be starting it now.