Welcome the World Congress of Families conference: An international radical right wing conference that convenes to organize against the spread of progressive ideas. This is the backdrop by which American Christians learned to rationalize President Donald Trump’s behavior, take the red pill, and go down the rabbit hole that is the newly reformatted Republican party.
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For many of us Americans, understanding of Russian interference in the US begins with hacked emails and fake Facebook accounts, and ends with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. But that’s not the whole picture. As we now know, these efforts stretched back years (even decades)– and included coordination with some of the most heinous, regressive groups currently in the U.S.
One of those groups is the World Congress of Families, or WCF. You’ve probably never heard of the WCF. But over the past decade, they’ve become the leading international organization dedicated to rolling back rights for LGBT individuals across the world.
And, coincidentally, WCF has allowed Russian oligarchs, close to Putin, easy access to America’s Evangelical community via their events. Just a couple weeks ago, the WCF hosted sanctioned Russian politicians and American Religious Right figures for their annual conference in Moldova, with wonderful panels called things like ”The Challenges Facing the Sanctity of Life” and “Gender Ideology — The Latest Attack on the Family.”
Not only have these events let these sanctioned oligarchs build their own relationships with America’s Religious Right, but they’ve helped convince American Evangelicals that Russian interference is actually not that big of a deal — and that Russia is the Religious Right’s ally against so-called “godless liberals” in the U.S., even if it means subverting democracy here in the U.S.
The WCF got its start in a small Moscow apartment, just over 20 years ago. An American named Allan Carlson traveled to Moscow, and met with a couple Russian sociologists to plot out how Americans and Russians could organize a group dedicated to restore quote-unquote “tradition” to their societies. Just like that, the WCF was born. As Carlson wrote in his diary, which he sent to me, he quote “went to sleep content with the world.”
For years, the WCF kind of hung around on the fringe. Holding conferences dedicated to opposing abortion, same-sex marriage, and to supposedly protecting children. It became popular in certain circles, and ended up reportedly funded by people like Russian oligarch Vladimir Yakunin, who is one of Putin’s oldest confidants, and who’s now sanctioned by the U.S.
By the early 2010s, though, the group took on a new role. By then, relations between Russia and the West had soured. Russians were suddenly rising up against Putin, who was returning to the presidency in 2012 on the back of a fraudulent election. And in Ukraine, pro-democracy protesters toppled their thuggish president, which led to Russia invading southern Ukraine, claiming Crimea, and backing so-called “separatists” in eastern Ukraine. America led the efforts to sanction Russia — freezing assets, and banning people like Yakunin from traveling to the U.S., citing them as the key players in Russia’s attempt to upend the post-Cold War order. Suddenly, the Kremlin was looking for ways to influence American policy – and to work with sympathetic Americans.
Enter, the WCF. Yakunin, the US sanctioned oligarch, was soon joined by another sanctioned Russian oligarch, Konstantin Malofeev, whose nickname is “God’s oligarch.” Both of them reportedly started funding WCF activities. Along the way, the WCF started becoming more involved in crafting anti-abortion, anti-gay policies in Russia – the group even took credit for crafting quote “the first package of anti-abortion laws in Russia” since the Soviet collapse.
Thanks to the WCF’s work, American Evangelicals started noticing Russia. Some began claiming that Putin was the quote “lion of Christianity,” while others like Pat Buchanan began suggesting that God was on Russia’s side.
#Russia #Christians #RightWing #ChristianRight #World #Politics
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