Holy shit.

[npars01@mstdn.social]

@cstross

Orban functioned as a conduit for Putin's foreign threat funding for years.

Petrostate despots and oil oligarchs fund a lot of fascism globally.

nytimes.com

(www.nytimes.com)

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/us/politics/koch-network-2024-election-trump.html

Republicans & the Epstein Class cannot resist fossil fuel public corruption.

Konstantin Nikolaev—the Putin ally behind Mike Johnson campaign donation

The Russian oligarch gave money to the Republican's 2018 congressional campaign via a U.S-based company in which he owned a majority.

Newsweek (www.newsweek.com)

The N.R.A. Spent $30 Million to Elect Trump. Was It Russian Money?

Congressional Democrats, the F.B.I., and Robert Mueller want to know why Putin-tied oligarchs took such an interest in American gun ownership.

Vanity Fair (www.vanityfair.com)

[onpubcom@techhub.social]

@cstross Gonna bet JD got paid, too.

[mmarcott@bsd.network]

@ltning @DM_Ronin @cstross

https://archive.ph/IZp17
Try there

[mokhtarstork@sciences.social]

@cstross There is a need to get down improving life rather then than to get political hang-ups. Every one comes with the same political gimmick throughout the world. We call it Democracy, but at the end of the day is there any real difference?

[ravenonthill@mastodon.social]

@cstross see https://bsky.app/profile/emptywheel.bsky.social/post/3mjhbhrv3mc22

[w6kme@mastodon.radio]

@klausfiend @GhostOnTheHalfShell @Kierkegaanks @cstross Became? I'm sure they were from the start, a lot longer ago that people imagine.

[gimulnautti@mastodon.green]

@cstross Viktor Orban’s Hungary was more meaningful to MAGA than you think. Steve Bannon and many others visited there frequently, and many think-tanks operated from there!

[klausfiend@mstdn.ca]

@W6KME @GhostOnTheHalfShell @Kierkegaanks @cstross The first CPAC was during the tail end of the Cold War so I think it's reasonable to assume it wasn't always a Republican-flavored Gathering of the Juggalos, and at least once serious policy discussions occurred. (No offense intended to any Juggalos who might be reading this.)

[jeffmcneill@hachyderm.io]

@cstross @pluralistic And CPAC was taking the money

[timolaine@mastodon.green]

@graydon @cstross This fits nicely with @anneapplebaum's thesis in Autocracy Inc. All these autocrats form a network of mutual assistance.

Some nodes, like Putin, are more important to the network, I guess. Orban was mostly a satellite?

[xs4me2@mastodon.social]

@cstross

A treasonous crime and Orban and his whole regime should pay for this.

[militant_dilettante@mastodon.social]

@cstross a person, whose Telegram channel I'm reading since 2022, has this take: every known (far-)right politician contemporary to us is a scam, a fraud, a con artist, a grifter, and a thief. This heuristic more or less holds, with almost no exceptions.

[militant_dilettante@mastodon.social]

@graydon @darkling @cstross pretty grim point of view. Fundametally correct though (well, I give it inordinately high probability of being correct). And, as with many other general things, it came to different parts of the world at somewhat different times.

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@militant_dilettante I suspect there used to be some who weren't, who genuinely thought they were doing the right thing for their nation … and they got shoved out of the way or trampled by the mob. And then there's Liz Truss, who *believes* every scam, fraud, and grift they feed her and earnestly regurgitates them without understanding what it's really about (she's the comic relief on the lecture circuit).

[militant_dilettante@mastodon.social]

@Kierkegaanks @cstross wouldn't be surprised, if from Russia. The balding little man was, and is, very fond of spending our nation's endowment on such things.

[ghostdancer@mastodon.sdf.org]

@cstross The main far-right party in Spain Vox is known for their ties and money coming from Hungary.

[militant_dilettante@mastodon.social]

@cstross oh, yes, there might be some types of "true believers", and there might be some incredibly gullible persons. I think, we have both locally, within the so called "Z-movement" for example, and in other places.
Liz-Who-Didn't-Outlive-A-Head-Of-Salad?

[fgbjr@indieweb.social]

@cstross @militant_dilettante If Liz wanted to remedy her public image, she could (pay whatever gatekeeping fee they charge and) join Reform, and then attend a public event with a Comic Relief nose-pincher.

[militant_dilettante@mastodon.social]

@fgbjr @cstross Would the Reform take her, though? Taking into account that her campaign slogans/punchlines would be something along the lines of "I WILL CUT YOU, SALAD!!"

I might be using an incorrect grocery term for a leafy vegetable, a refrigerated specimen of which had outlasted Truss in her shooting-star-like career as a Prime Minister of the UK. English is obviously not my first language.

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@fgbjr @militant_dilettante Or she could flee to Dubai or Argentina and publish a tell-all autobiography explaining how she was recruited by the KGB in the upper fifth at Roundhay Grammar School in Leeds and groomed to destabilize the UK by her controller, one V. Putin. At which point … she wouldn't be *popular*, exactly, but her reputation for ineptitude and stupidity would instantly flip upside-down.