The bizarre Russian prophet rumored to have Putin's ear

As befits a practitioner of the horseshoe theory, Dugin can capably mimic and channel anti-liberal broadsides from both the left and the right. Some passages in his writings could have come straight from Jacobin magazine, arguing that liberal capitalism is responsible for the slave trade, Native American genocide, and environmental catastrophe, or that liberalism seeks to assimilate everyone to the standards of the “rich, rational white male”; other passages could have been penned by Sohrab Ahmari, such as the warning in Fourth Political Theory that liberalism’s rejection of tradition and constraints on individual freedom logically leads to “not only loss of national and cultural identity, but even of sexual identity and, eventually, human identity as well” (my translation). Then, just when you expect Dugin to defend sexual traditionalism, he invokes a gender-norm-smashing paradigm that has one left-wing commentator wondering if he is an “undercover queer theorist.”

But keep reading, and you will find text that sounds more like the musings of a genocidal maniac. For instance, the comments about the evils of unchecked liberalism in Fourth Political Theory are followed, a few paragraphs down, by this discussion of the coming battle that will happen when “the metaphysical significance of liberalism and its fatal victory” is fully understood: “This evil can be vanquished only by tearing it out root and branch, and I do not rule out the possibility that such a victory will require wiping off the face of the earth those spiritual and physical territories where the global heresy which insists that ‘man is the measure of all things’ first emerged.” In case the location of those “physical territories” is unclear, the next line urges a “world crusade against the USA and the West.”