The woke right goes 'sightseeing' in Moscow: The Candace-Dugin affair

In late May, the undisputed queen of right-wing woke, Candace Owens, announced on X a trip to Russia. The excuse was so crude that it caused countless mockery on networks: a "family vacation" to St. Petersburg to visit Orthodox cathedrals, accompanied by her husband George Farmer, who, she clarified with disarming candor, "regularly travels to Russia to fish."

St. Petersburg, she explained, had long been on her "bucket list": She wanted to see churches, report on Russian Christian society and contrast it with the places she considers hostile to Christianity. Regarding those who criticized her eventual meeting with neo-Rasputin Dugin, she argued that this was outdated Cold War propaganda or simply "Zionist history." But the alibi crumbled almost immediately.

Researcher Ryan Mauro wrote in a series of posts on X that Owens was among the speakers at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF),  Russia's largest state-run business and policy forum, known as the "Russian Davos," which convenes some 20,000 representatives from 140 countries each year, with Vladimir Putin personally participating in its plenary session. Among the other participants at the same event was Alexander Dugin.

The Kremlin, for its part, confirmed that Putin would use the margins of the forum to meet with heads of international news agencies, highlighting the event's role as a media influence operation for Moscow. The reaction was immediate, even from within the pro-Trump circles. Laura Loomer retweeted Mauro's revelations and extended on them in a lengthy thread, asking who was funding the trip and pointing out that the only way to enter a country under a State Department Level 4 travel advisory is for the Russian government to have invited her directly. Loomer further alleged that Owens and her husband had previously met with Dugin in Italy. Ben Shapiro, co-founder of the Daily Wire, from which Owens was fired in 2024, called the trip "ideological subversion."

Owens, far from clarifying anything, responded from Moscow by sharing photos in Red Square and writing that the city was "incredibly beautiful and orderly," very different from the "media descriptions." Not a word spoken or published by Owens is outside her twisted agenda. The millionaire podcaster has become a leading voice in antisemitic conspiracy theories and right-wing anti-Zionism, amplifying extremists and extremist rhetoric especially since Oct. 7, 2023. This accommodating turn does not reflect her origins. A decade ago, Owens described herself as a progressive and criticized the Republican Party. She reconverted in 2016, after a scandal surrounding a failed anti-cyberbullying platform and began criticizing progressive movements. That shift drew the attention of Alex Jones and Charlie Kirk and catapulted her to conservative stardom.

In 2020 she joined Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire as an anchor. In 2024 she was ousted from there amid escalating antisemitic rhetoric that included Holocaust distortion; since then she has operated without editorial brakes. Her recent drift accumulates positions that are difficult to fit into any framework of political rationality. She maintains that time travel exists, among other delusions. She lies shamelessly and has no problem in being exposed: she knows that those who believe in her are willing to believe in anything. The amoral use she made of Charlie Kirk's murder, the harassment of his widow and a number of other similar abuses have allowed her to climb in views and clicks; her audience now seems to delight in her wacky mischief. One, in which she claimed she could prove that French President Macron's wife was actually a man, eared her an ongoing libel suit.

This last point has a grotesque spin-off: Dugin devoted an episode of his Substack to praising Owens for such "tough journalism" and speculated that her research would have pressured Macron to reduce his support for "NATO's proxy war in Ukraine." The "Putin mastermind" did not disguise his satisfaction.

Candace and Alexander Dugin deserve it. This shady character is the leading ideologue of contemporary Russian imperialism, known in international relations circles as "Putin's brain" or "Putin's Rasputin". A regular figure on Russian state television channels, Dugin is the intellectual architect of neo-Eurasianism: the doctrine that justifies Russian territorial expansion as a civilizational mission aimed at defeating the decadence of the West, Atlanticism embodied by the United States and Western liberalism.

His best-known work, Fundamentals of Geopolitics (1997), is considered almost required reading for Russian military and foreign policy elites. In it he articulates a vision of Russia as a fallen superpower that must restore its imperial destiny, constituting a conservative bastion against the liberal order led by Washington. His Fourth Political Theory (2009) proposes a conservative-revolutionary ideology that seeks to overcome communism, liberalism and fascism, offering instead an ethnically based neo-Eurasian alternative. The news website Geopolitica, created by Dugin, was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury as a key pillar of Russia's global disinformation and information warfare infrastructure.

SPIEF: The "Russian Davos" as a propaganda platform

SPIEF is, as Mauro described it, "a hotspot of the dirtiest Russian intelligence activities." Putin uses it as a platform to project to the world the narrative of a resilient, economically vigorous Russia and leader of an alternative multipolar order to the West. The fact that Putin met in parallel with heads of international news agencies on the sidelines of the same forum underscores its function: to capture voices, to legitimize narratives, to broaden the reach of the Kremlin's message.

That a powerful American influencer with millions of listeners appears as a speaker on that stage is alarming in itself; if she is also presented as an "independent" and "critical of the establishment" voice, it has enormous legitimizing value for Moscow and a call to arms for Washington. It is not the same thing for Putin to say that Russia is a superior and orderly civilization as it is for an American whose voice is widely heard and amplified, who came "on vacation" and was "genuinely surprised" by the beauty of Moscow.

There is one element of the ideological context that deserves special attention, because it is what makes it possible for figures like Owens to find a common language with the Kremlin: Russia's systematic use of anti-colonial discourse as a foreign policy weapon. Since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Putin has constructed a narrative, convergent with that of the Islamo-left and the isolationist, illiberal right, in which Russia occupies the place of the colonized people and the West that of the colonizer.

In Putin's Sept. 30, 2022, speech, in defending his claims to annex Ukrainian regions, he claimed that Ukraine's plan for Russia was "the same fate that the "colonialist" West wants to inflict on the entire world." Recent academic research has documented how this anti-colonial narrative is a deliberate strategy: It is projected especially toward the Global South (with sub-Saharan Africa as a privileged target) to construct the image of Russia as heir to the anti-colonial movement of the 20th century and leader of a "de-Westernization" of the international order.

The paradox is overwhelming, but effective: The state that invades, occupies and annexes foreign territory presents itself as a champion of the decolonization of peoples. The state that shells Ukrainian civilians is presented as the defender of the oppressed against imperialism. And the influencers who attend its forums, praise its cities and share panels with its ideologues become amplifiers of that narrative. The Kremlin makes use of Western voices saying that Russia is not what the Western media portrays; what better than a propagandist with pretensions of being "independent?"

Figures like Owens, Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes have constructed a way of doing politics that mimics the grammar of leftist activism but pursues at any cost the scandal that keeps them at the top of the popularity stakes. They borrow from the critical intelligentsia the suspicion of power while pretending to defend Christian civilization; their discourse is cathartic and resentful, not intellectual. That is why, when the evidence leaves them exposed, they turn contrasting of data into proof of persecution. This mechanism is what makes figures like Owens especially useful for Russian propaganda: They are genuinely difficult to discredit from the outside because they have built their entire identity on the basis that the outside lies about them.

The Owens-Dugin case matters because it illustrates how Russian ideological penetration works in the right-wing woke media ecosystem: a convergence of interests between figures seeking an audience and a state apparatus that needs international legitimization, but above all they share an enemy: liberal Western culture. The mechanism had already been put to the test with Tucker Carlson, who traveled to Moscow twice in 2024, declared that the city was "much nicer" than American cities and argued that the coverage on Ukraine was deeply biased. The mechanics are identical in both cases: trip presented as journalism or tourism, photos in iconic locations, staged awe at Russian "civilization," attack on those who question the trip as part of the "establishment."

This is the dangerous grammar of right-wing woke applied to geopolitics. And it is, too, exactly what Moscow needs: Western voices marveling at its regime while giving visibility and legitimacy to the ideologue of the Putinist project, and portraying those who point out the problem as agents of the Zionist establishment. Russian agents are not necessary for the operation to work. It is enough for them to be what they already are.