Then there was Joe Kent. Kent is a 41-year-old former Green Beret running for Congress against Washington Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler — one of 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Trump in 2021 over the Jan. 6 insurrection. By contrast, Kent, who has received Trump’s endorsement and received financial support from Peter Thiel and Stephen Wynn, spoke at the “Justice for J6” rally in September in Washington, where he declared, “It’s banana republic stuff when political prisoners are arrested and denied due process.” He says that he is running against “the establishment” and frequently appears on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show and Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. Addressing the conference via video, Kent explained, “Our political establishment is dead set on driving us into a catastrophic conflict with Russia.” More lethal aid to Kyiv and cyberattacks on Russia are a path to war. “We must be pragmatic,” he said. His pragmatism appears to consist of granting Putin what he covets: “Putin has laid out what he wants in Ukraine — a decent starting point,” and his demands for control over Donetsk and Luhansk are “very reasonable.” Like Vought, he singled out the neocons for blame. “The neocons on the right,” he stated, are “power drunk, bloodthirsty and cannot be trusted. Biden is sleepwalking to war.”…

Several of the panelists either avoided talking about Putin or largely elided the brutality of his attempted subjugation of an entire people. But more than a few appear to harbor a conciliatory view of Putin’s prowess that was first enunciated by Patrick J. Buchanan eight years ago in a column in the American Conservative. Buchanan asked, “Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative? In the culture war for mankind’s future, is he one of us?” The question was pretty much rhetorical. Buchanan’s argument was that America, not Russia, was the bad guy in the world. According to Buchanan, “President Reagan once called the old Soviet Empire ‘the focus of evil in the modern world.’ President Putin is implying that Barack Obama’s America may deserve the title in the 21st century. Nor is he without an argument when we reflect on America’s embrace of abortion on demand, homosexual marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and the whole panoply of Hollywood values.”