In Knowledge Fight’s breakdown of Alex Jones’ February 27, 2022 episode, Jones pivots from blaming "globalists" (Soros, Gates, Biden) for Ukraine’s crisis—citing CNN clips and aid conditions—to framing Putin’s invasion as a noble resistance against LGBTQ+ policies and "Hollywood," ignoring Ukrainian sovereignty. He praises Lukashenko’s authoritarianism while dismissing Russian protests as Soros-backed "false flags," then predicts Moldova/Baltic invasions without critique, all while mocking dissenters as irrelevant. The hosts expose his performative outrage and ideological bias, revealing how his conspiracy-driven lens justifies Putin’s war while demonizing the West, underscoring his role as a propagandist rather than an analyst. [Automatically generated summary]
But I have recently, at the behest of no one and without telling anyone, embarked on a little comic strip adventure of my dog Jake traveling through a series of dumb little situations.
And I finished my story again without telling anybody.
So engaging with Alex's material is often difficult because it draws you in.
People who want to see his stupid prediction video as proof that he works for Russia are already past the point where Alex wants to lure them to because they've adopted his fundamental premise, namely that he did actually predict this war.
Whether you see that video and herald him as a prophet or you accuse him of being a foreign asset, either way, you're playing his game.
Both conclusions feed into his own attention economy and involve a belief that the things that Alex says are worth paying attention to and not just random bullshit he throws out.
So I would be cautious.
I want to caution people to not fall into the opposite trap.
But what you're seeing is a massive conventional World War II style invasion of Ukraine.
And I'm not lionizing the Russians or Putin, but if they wanted to clear out those areas, they would just drop heavy munitions on them and cluster bombs.
But because they don't want a high civilian casualty, they are facing massive casualties with their infantry going in to the areas because they have been ordered to attack people that have guns after they've got them in their sights or they're being fired upon.
And so that is why there is a large Russian death toll.
From what I've been seeing, I would imagine there's 20,000 dead Russian troops, not 5,000, like the Ukrainians are saying.
And I would imagine there are also tens of thousands of dead Ukrainians, but you're not going to ever be hearing about that.
I have very little patience for Alex saying that he doesn't lionize Putin after the whole pageant last week where he's going on and on about Putin being the most honest world leader and someone Alex couldn't find faults with.
Alex right now is trying to moderate his insane admiration for Putin.
And it's just an affectation he's putting on because Putin is invading a sovereign neighbor and things are getting a little serious.
Or maybe before, even though he will give lip service to trying to appear more moderate.
When it's just threats flying around, that's the time to be emphatic in your support.
But once civilians are being killed, it's time to pretend to be a neutral party so you don't end up having people make you feel bad for supporting the guy who's doing the invasion.
It's entirely possible that the fatality counts are higher than what's being reported now, but pretty much every report you see on that, on the number of casualties includes that caveat that while hostilities are ongoing, it's really hard to get precise numbers.
For that reason, I don't really take too much of an issue with Alex's insinuation that the current numbers may be low.
I think his speculation of how far off the reported numbers are might be a little loose, but the thing I find more morally objectionable is his claim that you'll never hear about the higher death tolls.
Alex is so addicted to conspiracies that he just injects them into almost every sentence that comes out of his mouth.
Part of this is probably due to him being an idiot, but there's an element of this that's actually a pretty clear strategic tactic designed to train his listeners to be distrustful of every source of information that isn't him or something that Alex has indicated is one of the good ones, like gateway pundit or natural news.
It's super toxic stuff, and it's just meant to insulate the audience in a bubble where they can't take seriously any reporting or information that proves the central Infowars narrative to be wrong.
Alex has to spread Spread distrust of all other media sources because he's rightly scared that if his audience actually took in a broader scope of sources for information, he'd be fucked.
And so one of his primary, even subconscious behaviors is to constantly inject insinuations or outright claims that you'll never know the truth about various things.
There is something fucked up about being a part of the American media consumer base insofar as because the United States has committed so many war crimes and has either lied about it or tried to obfuscate or tried to hide or any number of those things.
Alex can say, you know, well, when they go in there, they want a low civilian death toll so they don't cluster bomb.
No, cluster bombing a fucking city is a war crime, a literal war crime.
You can't just blase say, oh, they don't want to have a high civilian.
And I think that, you know, to the point that there's a fine criticism to make of U.S. foreign policy and the wars that we've had, it doesn't really have a bearing on whether or not this is right.
Yeah, yeah, I'm just saying that that's part of how the media allows us to speak of it as though it's not something that should be treated as you cannot cross that line.
Not like, oh, they don't want to.
I mean, like, literally, you cannot.
And the problem is that we have, and that doesn't bear on this, but that does bear on how we talk about it, if that makes sense to you.
So weird how this position has evolved from real bombastic yelling about Putin being great to cowardly middle-of-the-road bullshit about both sides having problems.
This isn't a serious position Alex has.
He just knows that he can get his audience to excuse and justify Putin's extreme crackdowns on journalists and protesters by pointing to his own cancel culture narratives that he's trained the audience to respond to.
That's essentially the game that's being played here.
He uses established talking points as a crutch to get the audience closer to being on Putin's side than they would be if Alex were just reporting actual information.
And I said that the globalists are going to try to stage cyber attacks against themselves, and that once they've done that, they could really ratchet up things with the Russians that could lead to a regional tactical nuclear war and then probably a full-scale nuclear war because of just the satanic evil running our world.
So this is probably going to be Alex's talking point moving forward, that these were his positions as it was related to the standoff and then the invasion of Ukraine.
For one thing, there wasn't really a consistent position Alex has had through any of this time.
Like, he waffled around and made shit up all over the place.
But there are some elements that popped up more regularly and you can use as kind of a guiding through line through what he was talking about.
One of Alex's beginning points on this whole thing was on February 8th when Alex watched an approximately one-minute clip posted in a Daily Mail article of the speech that Putin gave, and he decided that Putin was on the brink of firing nukes to destroy all of Europe.
So Alex enjoyed that narrative quite a bit because it allowed him to descend into really long and vivid descriptions of how nuclear war would kick off.
And maybe we all kind of deserve to be nuked because of abortion or whatever.
Even prior to this, but escalating as the tensions rose between Russia and Ukraine, Alex's central theory was that a false flag was going to be run by Biden in order to gain support for himself during the midterms or take attention away from the trucker convoys, which Alex was insisting was the key to defeat the globalists.
This is the narrative he was selling on February 11th, on the day that Biden announced that he would not send troops into Ukraine to fight Russia because that would be a world war.
Now, if you put this together with all the other pieces, it would take an hour to go through.
I'm just going to give you the answer from my view rather than rattle off all why I think that because it would take the whole show, what we've got left.
But here's one big slice of the equation and why we know this and why this is so bad and so horrible.
And even has me having an anxiety attack right now because I love my children.
I love peace.
I love justice.
And if you think they're just going to let us beat them on this whole lockdown thing and go away, you're crazy.
So from there, Alex's coverage was mostly about justifying Putin taking military action in the Donbass region because according to Alex's fake version of an interview Soros did on CNN, Soros had actually overthrown Ukraine.
He parroted all of Putin's talking points about how NATO was attacking Donetsk and Luhansk, which Alex reported as areas that should be part of Russia or were rightfully being occupied by Russia.
He repeated the claims that the kindergarten was shelled.
That was actually a false flag pulled by Ukraine.
He claimed that Western forces were going door to door, killing people in an ethnic cleansing of the Donbass region.
He did literally everything he could to make sure that the audience thought that if violence did break out, it only happened because the West was so evil and it forced Putin to respond.
Here's the bottom line: the globalists believe Putin, when they launched offensives into Eastern Ukraine to drive the Russians out, and then now into other areas the Russians control, they're in the south.
That when they finally attack Crimea, the Russians will have a red line and that Putin will be deposed by hardliners if he doesn't attack back.
And so Putin's being driven into a corner to be induced to fight back, which will then be called a war.
Putin had absolutely not bitten off more than he could chew at any point up till this point, according to Alex.
And that wasn't even Alex's stance after the invasion.
On February 24th, Alex had to deal with the fact that he'd been duped by Russian propaganda and that Putin was definitely planning to invade the whole country while saying publicly that he wasn't going to do that, which Alex repeated as truth to his audience.
But even at that point, when Alex was shown to have been very wrong, he still wasn't saying that Putin had bit off more than he could chew.
Alex was very insistent that Putin had already won the war because he had paid off the Ukrainian leadership, so Russian forces would just be up against no resistance at all.
Putin's troops raise Russian flag in Ukraine as Z-tanks, which have come from the east, and O-tanks that come from Belarus, enter deeper into the nation.
And there is no real resistance because just like the U.S. bought off the Iraqi leadership in Gulf War I and Gulf War II, 90 plus percent of their generals, you see that Putin has already done his work and has already paid off the Ukrainian military.
And that's why the Russians know they can roll right in and face almost no resistance.
Alex never said that Putin had bitten off more than he could chew.
He was constantly expressing solidly pro-Putin talking points that revolved around the idea that Putin needed to take over the Donbas in order to protect the Russian speakers there.
Even after Putin invaded the entire country, Alex was rationalizing his actions by pretending the whole thing was a piece of theater, where Zelensky was a double agent in on it with Putin and there would be no Ukrainian resistance.
This bullshit he's saying now is an attempt to whitewash his actual positions because he doesn't want to own any of that shit moving forward.
He wants his initial positions in the lead up to the invasion to appear far more moderate than they actually were.
I will grant that Alex has been saying that there's going to be a cyber false flag for a really long time, even prior to this standoff.
Like in our last episode, we played a clip from July of last year where he and Leo Zagami were insisting that a false flag cyber attack was right around the corner.
This isn't actually a meaningful prediction, though, and it's just Alex laying the groundwork.
So in case there ever is a cyber attack he needs to pretend isn't real, he can claim that he was predicting a false flag cyber attack and this is it.
Russia is invading Ukraine, but the situation is really that the West and NATO are attacking Russia by supporting Ukraine and levying sanctions.
There's no other way to really look at this other than Alex just hates Western democracies and would like to see the international community thrown into chaos.
Yep.
Also, he can fuck right off with this, unlike the media, I actually play clips bullshit.
CNN for weeks has been advertising every break, breathlessly, an Alex Jones special tonight, 10 p.m. Eastern, 9 p.m. Central, that I was going to watch live and comment on here, but my family's more important, and World War III is more important, and the crisis going on is more important.
And it's obscene for CNN to air something like that during a time like this.
It's not because I'm scared of it.
It'll make us get more viewers.
And they have a small audience, but still, we'll take them.
And I already know it's regurgitated lies.
They sent me questions and wanted me to respond to it.
Of course, I didn't because it's all BS, but I saw the questions.
Russia has in its ethos invasions by the Huns for hundreds and hundreds of years, invasions by the Muslims for over a thousand years, and then Napoleon and Hitler.
And 20 million Russians died in World War II.
Look it up.
22 million Germans died.
The Russians killed about 18 million of those.
So imagine it's not just like, okay, we lose 600,000, 700,000 people in World War II or 60-something thousand in Vietnam, and everybody felt it and knows it.
It was a real war.
But Russia lost 20 million people in World War II.
And so it is in the consciousness.
And that's what Putin said.
He said, people always try to bully us.
They always come up on our borders with weapons.
And for the first time ever, Russia is not going to wait till you attack.
And if you want to have a nuclear war, let's go ahead and have it.
He actually says that in a 27-minute address.
He also says, you want to sexualize our children.
You're a bunch of pedophiles.
Hollywood's a bunch of devil worshipers.
You want to destroy men and women in the family?
And we're done.
You want a nuclear war?
Let's just have one.
I mean, it's unbelievable.
I don't even know what we're supposed to say at this point.
When you've been robbed 300 times in your past, you know, the moment that somebody looks like they're going to rob you, you run them down with your truck.
It's just another in a long string of Alex's very clear attempts to justify Putin's invasion without having to take on the intellectual and moral responsibility of giving a full-throated endorsement of it.
The second thing, though, is far more interesting to me because what Alex is doing is lying about Putin's speech in order to create the image that he's threatening nuclear war inspired by the very same things that Alex feels are central to his battle against the globalists.
I'm fairly certain Putin would be assassinated immediately if he were to go up and give a speech about readying nuclear weapons while saying, You want nuclear war?
What Alex is doing here, and I find it hard to believe it's an accident, is transpose the feelings the audience has towards him onto Putin.
If you're an InfoWars listener, you recognize all of those talking points, that the globalists are pedophiles trying to sexualize children, that Hollywood is run by devil worshipers, that the globalists want to destroy men and women and the family.
They recognize them because they're things that Alex yells all the time.
And the audience has been trained to believe that Alex yelling these things is a form of him fighting for them and their very lives.
There's no way to slice this other than to say that Alex wants the audience to not only admire and support Putin, he wants them to view him as a person who's motivated by and fighting for the same things that Alex is and has been all this time.
You can't get somebody to go from anti-interventionism, war is bad, to immediately be like, Putin absolutely has to murder all of these people in order to protect himself from the West.
You have to have an intermediate step where you say, his grievances are real.
This is a fucked up mentality, but it's really not too far off from some of the ways we've seen Alex frame Putin in the past.
What makes this particularly troubling is that Alex is employing this rhetoric in response to news that Putin has raised the alert level of nuclear weapons.
It's really hard to tell what's going on with Alex and what's behind these completely insane things he's saying this week, but it kind of feels like him getting his audience to either support the idea of using nukes or to rationalize after the fact that, you know, they may not like that Putin used nukes, but the globalists who want to destroy men and women just left him no choice.
Whatever the case is here, this was one of the more disturbing clips I've heard on Alex's show in a bit.
There have been more shocking and disgusting clips, but this was psychologically worrying.
This involves Alex clearly talking about himself when discussing Putin, trying to get the audience to believe that Alex's words were coming out of Putin's mouth.
And I also think that the laughing at the end there was Alex being surprised that he went that far.
I kind of suspect that he even shocked himself with his ability to go that low.
I just think that what you have is a situation where the argument is pro-Russia in as much as it's saying don't get involved in terms of sending military aid to people who are being invaded.
And Alex claims that he's bragging about overthrowing the government of Ukraine for money, which he wasn't.
That's just bullshit.
And the other piece of evidence Alex has is that clip of Biden saying that he was threatening to withhold aid unless Ukraine fired the corrupt prosecutor.
And that's it.
That's all the evidence Alex has to back up Putin's legitimate claim that Ukraine is a puppet of Soros and the West.
So they make all these thug claims, act all tough, ship in $10 million of weapons, $5 million last year, attack all these Russian-held areas, and the Russians are just like, okay, I mean, I guess we'll attack back.
Because they created a proxy government, had a guy that was a TV star that was the president as the TV star host, and then they install him and do all this, and Russia went crazy.
Doesn't mean I agree with it, doesn't mean I like it, but that's the left always doing whatever they want.
And now here's Biden just a couple days ago not knowing who he is.
So then these foreign adversaries see this, and this scares them even more that there's such incompetent leaders, and they say, well, screw it.
So, yeah, like prior to this, Alex was claiming that he's going to show the Ukrainian argument and the Russian and the NATO side.
But then he just played the Soros and Biden clips, the conspiracy shit we just talked about.
It's just trying to justify the argument that Russia is cool to invade.
And then he says that, which is clearly making more justifications.
Alex is trying really hard to do literally everything in his power to create the feeling in his audience that this invasion was absolutely justified and everything Putin does is good.
While occasionally saying that, yeah, I don't condone this.
He wants to have plausible deniability.
It's probably a really good strategy on his part since he's evoking the feeling that he wants in his audience and he's supporting Putin's agenda while at the same time creating a number of clips where he's saying that he isn't in favor of this.
If he ever needs to pretend that he was against the invasion in the future, he's leaving a paper trail of things he can take out of context and put in a compilation that people will be tricked by in the future.
I've tried to explain to people for a long, long time how serious things are.
And I understand we've been raised in a country that's been so free and so open that we're domesticated and don't get how much danger we're in.
But all of that shaved up freedom and all that saved up liberty and all that saved up security that we had in the bank, ladies and gentlemen, is almost gone now.
And at a certain point, there's probably no reason to even talk about this anymore.
I'm going to go.
I'm going to go.
I'm not mad.
I'm going to go home and be with my family.
Folks, you just enjoy yourselves and knock yourselves out.
I'm serious.
I'm gone.
I'm out of here.
And it's not that I'm mad at the crew.
I'm mad at anybody.
I just can't do this anymore.
I can't pretend anymore.
I can't go along with it.
The globalists are going to destroy the whole planet.
I'm telling you, I am starting to think that maybe the amount of effort it takes to twist your brain to a place where it's okay for Putin to invade and murder a lot of people is going to really fuck your head up.
Terraform everything so you can start all over again.
Oh, I don't know.
No, I mean, isn't it, isn't it like, wasn't Childhood's End, like at the end of it, the aliens could only breathe if the environment was degraded to a certain extent.
Yeah, that is something that, like, when you talk about the CNN documentary, like, I don't want something that's going to portray him as the big, bad, evil kind of mastermind.
There aren't more universities coming out with evidence that COVID was made in the lab.
And it's all nonsense.
That's just Alex reading more headlines about the same underlying story that we talked about on the last episode.
And incidentally, though, three new preprint studies have come out that trace the epidemiological history of COVID.
And all of them very strongly point to a natural origin of the virus coming from the Hunan seafood market.
We'll have to wait until those go through the review process, but they take different approaches to looking at the question and each strongly suggest natural origin and strongly point away from the idea that it came from a lab.
The personalizing of this stuff that Alex is doing is really scary, though.
The dumb conspiracies about COVID being a bioweapon were kind of abstract enough that most listeners in the past could generally see it as kind of a detective game they were playing, trying to put these evidence pieces together so they could finally stick it to games.
The fake and way over-the-top emotional outburst that Alex performed there was essentially in service of creating strong feelings that then he could shift over to being used to justify Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
It's a tactic where he's trying to create this very strong negative feeling about these globalist villains that he pretends he's fighting, which is so much stronger than any feeling the audience might have about Putin.
How could you come down on Putin who didn't make this bioweapon?
See, Russia's the new American because they captured America.
You can't have a free open country because everybody else might want that.
See, what's happened is people used to love these rants, but they're not good for me when I do them.
And I stopped doing the rants over the years.
You notice?
But then I get pissed.
I got to walk off the show because I don't want to start doing this.
I mean, I'm not going to stand here and watch George Soros and Barack Obama blow the damn planet off because they got some kind of satanic fetish with it.
See, I told you I was going to focus a cover the noosh.
I'm going to behead myself.
I'm going to take deep breaths.
And we're going to go through all of it in the next hour.
In this country, the conversation that is supposedly happening on this episode, you couldn't really say anything that would be more of a way of Alex saying Putin's best.
Yeah, I mean, if that was the type of audition tape that would really get you extra work, you know, that's not quite the performance that you want to have the world see.
And if I have to, I'll push the great Owen Schroyer back in 30 minutes so I can cover all this because I got ready to cover all this and I got prepared probably a little too much.
Anytime I prepare 15 hours for a show, it's the weekend.
But I don't ever stop working.
I apologize.
I have to learn.
I've got to just prepare for a couple hours.
That's enough.
Instead of literally reading three times more than what you see on my desk here, I read.
At least three times.
Thousands of pages.
And thousands of videos and photos.
Hundreds of videos.
I just, oh my God.
But you don't need me to tell you how screwed you're being screwed.
It is funny to imagine this in any other context being an acceptable thing.
Like, imagine you show up for a college course and the professor just screams at you through the entire thing about nothing related to the subject matter.
It's like, look, I studied too much to prepare for this course.
I got really upset earlier, and I'm not going to apologize anymore for it.
Like I told you, I apologize.
I'm going to be calm now and I blew up.
But that's what I wanted to do.
And it's an acting out.
Like, quite frankly, God made us this way to get upset when things are going on like this so that everybody just doesn't take what's going on as normal.
think that it makes it worse that he's clearly aware of that and willing to just be like yeah that was me putting on a show i mean that is uh that's almost weird to admit It's weird to say that out loud.
Well, and especially because he was so unable to actually even do the acting out thing.
It's kind of like the old clown who can't do his routine.
So there's, like, I've brought this up a couple times, and it's because Alex does as well.
He thinks that he can get away with saying that he's looking at all sides, looking at the NATO side, looking at the Ukrainian side, looking at the Russia side.
I'm going to do my best to show all the news that's happening from the Ukrainian side, the NATO side, and the Russian side.
I've got a bunch of clips, a bunch of articles, and a bunch of things to get to.
But let's just start.
And again, this is in Russian, but there's subtitles for TV viewers.
If I stop and start it, it'll take too long.
So I'm just going to play it so it's on record so people know he said it because I show you what I'm about to say, what I'm about to claim has happened, and then I will paraphrase what Putin said.
So I got to say, after what we've seen here today, I'm super confident that Alex is going to be totally fair and impartial and give equal weight to the Russian, Ukrainian, and NATO positions.
Yeah, like I said, this is the speech where Putin declared war.
So what Alex is doing is he's going to be uncritically playing and endorsing Putin's propaganda campaign where he was trying to rationalize invading Ukraine.
So here's what that part of the speech actually said.
Quote, properly speaking, the attempts to use us in their own interests never really ceased until quite recently.
They sought to destroy our traditional values and force us, force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration because they are contrary to human nature.
Naturally, this leads to Alex picking up the ball and translating this into being support for his transphobia, which might be a fair reading of Putin's words in some way.
So one of the things that's really interesting about this particular passage from Putin's war speech is that it can be used to appeal to really any variety of bigot.
If you hate trans or gay people, you can hear degradation and degeneration as a being about that community.
At the same time, if you're a racist, you could see it being about multiculturalism.
Or if you're super anti-immigrant, you could see it being about an attitude of openness towards refugees and asylum seekers.
If you're a misogynist, you could see this being about feminism.
If you're anti-abortion, you could see this being about that.
This passage that Alex is playing is essentially a Rorschach test for a person's bigotry.
And it seems pretty clear that Alex is deeply committed to his hatred of trans people.
Also, if you follow the chain of logic here, then what Alex is saying is that George Soros made people in Ukraine trans, and that Putin was worried that he'd do the same in Russia, so he had to invade.
Right.
This is the kind of incoherent nonsense you have to imply when you can't just come out and say that you love dictators and want a one-world government, but one that's authoritarian against the people who you consider to be part of out-groups and benevolent towards you and your in-group.
And I will be here live tomorrow with a Monday show, but I have decided, even though this major war is going on, that I'm going to take off a few days because I've got to really think about what's happening and just somehow disconnect.
Because here's the problem.
Just like I know this is happening to you, probably.
One of the big complaints that the international community has with Lukashenko isn't that he's dumb.
It's that he really seems to like torturing political dissenters.
The 2020 election, where Lukashenko won his sixth term, though most of the world and a lot of Belarusians believe very strongly that that election was not a fair election.
Oh, yeah, it ended up leading to a lot of protests.
According to Human Rights Watch, quote, at least 8,712 people were detained in connection to protests between November 2020 and October 2021.
In August 2020, the government decided that there was no reason to open an investigation into 4,644 claims filed by victims of torture by the government, which usually is a fairly strong indication that they don't want to have to talk about all the torturing that's going on.
Also, considering that Belarus is now at war with Ukraine also, it really makes it clear how incapable Alex is of providing anything close to impartial coverage here.
And I was involved also in meeting Vladimir Putin both in Moscow in 2002 briefly and in the early stages when he was still a mayor in St. Petersburg, I remember.
I would like to, just because it's fun, I like to imagine that every part of Leo's mythology is something that he believes simultaneously, as opposed to he's done a bunch of different grifts over the years.
But that's, I mean, it just goes to show the cravenness and the depths that these con artists will go to in order to come up with their new mythology, which is part of it is done in service of getting rid of that old one that kind of sucks.
I want to straighten up this propaganda that is coming out of Russia with thousands of people getting arrested.
I mean, Russia has a population of 144 million people who back President Vladimir Putin.
If 3,000 people get arrested, and those 3,000 people I know for sure belong to organizations that are Western organizations financed by the West, they, of course, get money also by George Soros.
It's not relevant for Neo-Russian of the working class.
I mean, honestly, like, we're at a point where I'm even willing to entertain the thought of Alex being like, well, listen, I'm going to be broke in America soon.
It's a rare instance where I can see little pieces of it and what he's doing makes sense and the little propaganda games.
But the overarching point of it, I can't really see.
I don't know what the benefit of this is other than maintaining the idea of him as a champion of these anti-SJW kind of memes and narratives that he has.
That's the only thing that I see as being worth it for him to preserve in Putin.
I mean, I think the only, maybe, maybe here's what I'm thinking.
Maybe it is at a point where they're just pot committed with Putin and they can't admit they were wrong.
They can't just say I was wrong.
So they're at a place where they've built up Putin and Trump as both being super cool dudes who are absolutely above board and not at all lying to the global community at all times.
Having a multipolar world where there was a big, ominous villain and the consistent threat of nuclear war really, really did wonders for the anti-communist community.