Why MAGA is turning on Russia | If You're Listening

I personally find fishing extremely boring, but sometimes interesting things do happen.For example, in 2024, a group of fishermen were somewhat surprised when a cluster of cruise missiles flew right over their heads.Those missiles were at the start of a very long journey.

They've shot cruise missiles from a ship in the Caspian Sea without warning.

So we've seen Russian warships in the Caspian Sea firing long -range missiles at Ukraine.

Now, the Caspian Sea is nowhere near Ukraine.For a Russian warship to hit a Ukrainian target from the Caspian Sea, it's almost a thousand kilometre shot.It would be much easier to fire at Ukraine from the Black Sea, but the problem with that is that the Black Sea is no longer safe.For Russian ships, the Caspian Sea is much safer to access than the Black Sea.The only connection between the Caspian Sea and the open ocean is through a large Russian canal system, which Russia can use use to move naval vessels in and out.None of the other four countries which border the Caspian Sea, Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, have a canal system, meaning that the Russian Navy can essentially dominate that waterway, totally safe from Ukrainian attack.

Or at least That was the case until recently.

also struck a Russian warship in the Caspian Sea.

Ukraine has been launching these attacks on Russian vessels for a little while but in late July this year they did something a little bit different.

President Volodymyr Zelensky confirming a Ukrainian attack on an Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea.

Now this attack on an Iranian ship is strange because last time I checked Ukraine is at war with Russia And Russia and Iran are different countries.Kiev's weekend drone attack on an Iranian ship and Russian targets in the Caspian Sea has marked the first direct link between the wars in Iran and Ukraine.Ukraine says that Russia and Iran have been supplying each other with weapons using cargo ships on the Caspian Sea, assisting each other in their wars against Ukraine, the US and Israel.

Iran, from the first year of the war, gave new technology to Russia.It was Shekhy drones.They gave thousands of these drones first year of the war.But we have to be honest, Iranians and North Koreans already attacked us.

Now this decision by Zelensky to attack Iranian shipping is very interesting.because it coincided with a sudden increase in support for Ukraine from some unexpected places.

There's been a significant shift towards Ukraine in some parts of the MAGA world.

This is a change of heart among a group of people who previously did not like Ukraine at all.

Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's president and emerging dictator.

This, for example, is what MAGA influencer Laura Loomer used to say about Ukraine.

He regularly likes to call Putin an authoritarian, when he himself is no better and is in fact in many ways even worse.

And yet, this is Laura Loomer in July this year.

Having looked closely at this, I think what's happening here

is Ukraine is taking advantage of a unique moment in the history of their war with Russia.A moment that might change everything.It's a strange story involving a factional war inside the MAGA movement and Russian influence operations.And it will show just how important it is to seize an opportunity when it's presented to you.I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.I'm going to talk about Laura Loomer a bit here.

And before I do that, I want to make it clear that she's got some pretty abhorrent views.For one, she describes herself as a proud Islamophobe, but also says, I don't believe that Islamophobia is real.

I believe Islamophobia is a hoax.

I'm not going to go into all the terrible things that she said about Islam, but put it this way.By 2018, she had apparently said enough of them to get herself banned from Twitter for life.In response, she chained herself to the front door of Twitter headquarters and called out its CEO, Jack Dorsey.

What Jack Dorsey is doing with his egregious double standard by allowing for verified hateful liberals and leftists and jihadis to spew their hate and violence on social media while banning a Jewish conservative journalist like myself and millions of conservatives all across the country.He's trying to stifle speech in this country.

After continuing to pull terrible stunts and say terrible things, Luma was banned from other platforms, too.Or to use the popular term of the time, she was de -platformed.In 2020, she ran for Congress in Florida and lost.Her phone kind of just stopped ringing at that point.Nobody was interested in working with her.But then someone else got kicked off social media, too.

Twitter and Facebook.Delete it presently.Trump's extensive social media profiles after a violent mob stormed the US Capitol.

The US president was deplatformed after the January 6th attack.

This censorship is unlawful, it's unconstitutional and it's completely un -American.

Trump left the White House unsure of what would happen to him next.

Goodbye.We love you.

We will be back in some form.And suddenly, Laura Loomis started getting calls from the Russian propaganda network, RT.

When I was deplatformed, RT started reaching out to me and asking me to come on their show.And they said, why don't you have a byline on RT?And you can even write for RT. I never took any money from RT. I was never paid.But I felt, wow.

She started writing articles for them and appearing on air as a pundit.

We will be back in some form, President Trump said there.I guess, Laura, the question is, what does that actually mean?

Well, there's discussions about a potential third party.And if there's one person in the country who's capable of, you know, crushing the Republican Party, it would be Donald Trump.

And it appears that the attention she got from the Russian propaganda network did the trick because within a week, she was posting on her Telegram channel that Putin cares about protecting free speech more than the Democrat Party.Their media is better than the American media when it comes to reporting on censorship and that big tech is rigging elections more than Russia ever did.

like, oh, well, maybe they care more about free speech than my own country.

RT wouldn't be around forever.though.When Putin ordered the full -scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, they were sanctioned by the US government and had to shut down their American operations.But that didn't stop Laura Loomer from parroting Putin's argument.that Ukraine was a fascist state and needed to be denazified.

Well, as we know, our taxpayer dollars are being used to fund Nazi militias in Ukraine in their fight against the Russians.The United States government and our intelligence agencies appear to be working with Ukrainian neo -Nazis and spies.When I hear Putin say we need to denazify Ukraine, I say, wow, yeah, actually, that that is pretty that is pretty accurate.

But she wasn't alone.Heaps of right -wing influencers started to argue that President Joe Biden should give up US military support for Ukraine because it was too expensive.

We're giving $200 billion to Ukraine.We've paid enough in the wars in Europe.

We're not a European power.The US is weaker, measurably weaker because of our support.for Ukraine in this war.

I'm very much a person that from the very beginning has said F Ukraine.It's not just F Ukraine.It's F everybody until we get our house in order.

Ukraine is the greatest threat to this nation and to the world.We should rescind all funding and financing, pull out all military support, and we should apologize to Russia.

In an effort to assist some of these influencers, RT secretly funded a company in the US called Tenet Media.funneling $10 million into the pockets of various American right -wing influencers who had made anti -Ukrainian statements.Ukraine is the enemy of this country.

Ukraine is our enemy.We can prove that Ukraine, with America's help, has become a terror state.Ukraine is precisely the kind of country that we swore to fight against during the global war on terror.

The influencers apparently didn't know that the money was coming from Russia, butcash is cash and the more cash you have the further you can spread your anti -Ukraine messages.We did a whole episode on this story a couple years ago, quite a crazy story.But the thing that wasn't clear at the time back then but is extremely clear now is that these right -wing influencers are not always in agreement with each other.They did agree on a few things.They were united around the idea that Joe Biden should stop funding Ukraine.

When the October 7th terrorist attack happened in Israel in 2023, they were also basically unified around the idea that Joe Biden was doing a bad job of handling the war in Gaza.They all thought the solution to both problems, Ukraine and Gaza, was to elect Donald Trump as president again.

The moment Trump becomes president, He's on the phone with Putin, he's on the phone with Zelensky, and he says, stop fighting, we're going to talk.The fighting stops.The war's over.

If I were president, it would have never started.

Look at what's going on in the Middle East.This would have never happened.October 7th never would have happened if Donald Trump was president.

But the one thing they didn't agree on was America's relationship with Israel.And it was this particular divide that right wing influencer Tim Pool identified early on.

We're certainly seeing conflict on the right personalities that were typically more in support of Donald Trump.now feuding with other conservatives and people who are pro -Israel.And boy, is it all just breaking down in rather shocking ways.

Tim Pool identified that there is a clear, very pro -Israel faction and a separate faction of people who are not exactly anti -Israel, but more isolationist.They're critical of America entering into any foreign wars and handing over huge amounts of money to foreign countries, including Israel.Now, Laura Loomer, who is on the very pro -issue,side, describes the guys on the other side like this.

I know it sounds like a sci -fi movie, but this is where we're headed.

Yeah, so obviously she's not a huge fan of the people that she calls the woke reich.and openly calls them neo -Nazis.In most cases, these people are not neo -Nazis.So for our purposes, we're going to refer to this group as the isolationist faction.So Luma is the pro -Israel faction and her opponents are the isolationist faction.Now, the divide between the factions was mostly hidden before Trump took office again.

It became more and more obvious through 2025, and eventually it spilled right into the open when Trump joined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in attacking Iran in February 2026.The pro -Israel faction were keen to defend Israel and back this war.So their takes went like this.

President Trump really took a decisive action that needed to be taken now in this moment because he's saving millions of lives.

Certainly there are many people that are in favour of Donald Trump striking this country, taking out their leadership.President Trump is the most courageous commander in chief in modern American history.There is no question about this.

We have an Islamist Nazi enemy.that wants to build nuclear weapons to blow us off the face of the earth.I understand the Jew haters who want you to believe that this is Israel's war.

And to them, I say, go to hell.While the isolationist faction saw this move as the US entering into yet another foreign conflict, and their takes went like this.

Donald Trump has very clearly betrayed the American people.He is very clearly

The split is pretty subtle.

I hope you picked it up there.

Now both sides started calling each other very defamatory, racist and often anti -semitic names and accusing each other of being traitors, but I'll spare you that for now.But the key thing that Laura Loomer noticed was that RT, the network that had rescued her from obscurity back in 2021, was supporting the other side of her factional fight.

And they're all propping up these clips.They take clips of Joe Kent.They take clips of Candace Owens.They take clips of Megyn Kelly.They take clips of Tucker Carlson.

RT was using its accounts on YouTube, X and Telegram to to boost the opinions of those in the isolationist faction, the same way that they boosted Laura Luma's opinions in the past.Now, there's no secret why this was happening.Russia is an ally of Iran, and the isolationists were against the US military attacking Iran.So their views aligned with Russia's.Laura Luma was confused.

Oh, wow.Russia today really seems to be transforming their media operation into a clipper account for the woke right.

But here's the thing.RT hasn't changed its position at all.Since it was founded, the network has been a vehicle for promoting criticism of the US government.The difference is Laura Loomer is now kind of part of the US government.

The president called me after the strikes.We talked for about 20 minutes on the phone.And it's really interesting, you know, just chatting about several things.

Hi, Laura.Well, you are something.What spirit you have.Laura, Laura Loomer.Thank you, honey, for being here.Appreciate it.

She realized that Russia was an ally of Iran and that perhaps getting help from a Russian propaganda network that was allied with Israel's mortal enemy might be a bit problematic.

Then I started to see Putin entertain the idea of selling nuclear weapons, selling missiles and selling drones to the Iranians for the sake of attacking the United States of America.That was enough for me.Honestly, that was enough.

She was having a bit of an identity crisis and started to reconsider everything, including her position on Ukraine.

I thought, what are people going to think of me?I've been so anti -Ukraine for so long, and I have parroted these talking points thinking that I was saying the right thing and not recognizing how, as a conservative or as a Trump supporter or just as an American citizen, how I was being emotionally manipulated by propaganda online.And so I felt a little embarrassed.

Then she accepted an invitation from the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to visit his country.How was the trip to Kyiv, by the way?

The trip?It was very long.It was a good experience.I got to see a lot of the destruction when I was coming in.So it gave me good ideas to, you know, how much of Ukraine has been destroyed by Russian missiles and drones.

OK.The question I posed at the start was, how did Laura Loomer go from calling Zelensky an authoritarian, who commands a Nazi militia, to talking to him about her lovely train trip to Kiev?Well, the reason I told you this story in full is so that you'd see what happened here and what didn't happen.What happened was Laura Loomer found herself in a MAGA factional fight over the war in Iran.Russia supported her.opponents.

She then decided to support Russia's opponents.She didn't, like, finally see the light.Ukraine didn't conduct a secret influence operation to get her to take their side.The interesting element, though, is Zelensky in Ukraine saw this shift as an opportunity.See, the war in the Middle East is occupying the vast majority of the Trump administration's attention.Ukraine can make it seem like they're on the Trump administration's side of that war, then it could lead to a rapid shift in sentiment, which could help their own war effort.

For Laura Loomer, it only took a couple of months for her opinion to totally change.

I don't think that the Ukrainians and your office does a very good job at messaging how supporting Ukraine could be America first or how it's beneficial for America's national security.

And while she was in Ukraine, Luma explicitly linked the Ukrainian and Iranian wars by talking about Russia's involvement in both of them.

explosives materials and they're interchanging and sending each other weapons and materials for weapons, especially shot head drones, which are then being supplied by Iran to Russia so that they can attack and kill Ukrainians.And then simultaneously, Russia is sending them, you know, basically the explosive materials and the combustible materials so that they can make bombs and explosives to murder U .S.soldiers that are currently fighting in the war with Russia.

Now, President Zelensky has been trying to make that point about Russia and Iran sending weapons to each other even more clear by attacking those ships in the Caspian Sea which make that exchange of materials possible.

President Volodymyr Zelensky confirming a Ukrainian attack on an Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea.

He also emphasised the fact that they are willing to help the US materially in the war in Iran.while other U .S. alliesS.allies in Europe refuse.He's reported sending the U .S.

evidence they collected that Russia has been taking satellite pictures of U .S.Army bases in the Middle East and sharing them with Iran to assist with Iran's drone and missile targeting.

And with Luma's help, Ukraine has been promoting its ability to assist the U .S.with drone production.

about to produce eight million.The messages Luma and Zelensky are sending about Ukraine's military usefulness is starting to have an effect on other MAGA influencers, too.

I'm not a big fan of Ukraine.I think their government is filthy.But I will stress this.We've got an escalating war here.

There is no argument against US victory.Luma says she spoke multiple times on the phone to Trump while she was in Ukraine, and reportedly it's starting to have an effect.

We are told that Donald Trump has kind of changed his tune in the last few weeks and over the last month or so as Ukraine has started to shift the balance of things in the war.

The question is, will any of this work?Well, the conflict in Ukraine has been basically frozen in place for four years.Neither side has moved much.The Trump administration's early attempts to get both Ukraine and Russia to sign a peace agreement where both sides just keep the territory they currently occupy and call it a day have failed.Many European countries are still providing finance and weapons to Ukraine, but direct American support was cut off when Trump took office and has not restarted.Meanwhile, on the ground in Ukraine, the domestic situation for Zelensky is difficult.

in the street over his decision to sack his young, innovative defence minister, Mikhaila Fedorov, back in June because of an internal conflict between Fedorov and the chief of the armed forces.Civilian casualties have been increasing throughout 2026, with nearly 300 killed in June alone by Russian attacks.Ukraine is not a passive victim here either.All year they've been sending drones deep into Russian territory to attack oil and gas infrastructure, often creating enormous explosions in Russian cities.Zelensky calls it bringing the war home.Russia claims that these attacks have killed more than 700 civilians so far this year, including seven tourists killed on a Black Sea beach.

Now, all this is to say that the sudden shift from Trump and Team MAGA comes at a pretty good time for Ukraine, because they could really use the help.But there's a catch.While all this has been going on, the US's missile stockpiles have apparently been depleted by their war in Iran, which means they can't afford to supply Ukraine.Reuters has reported that they've virtually run out of certain types of munitions.It's a bit of a catch 22 for the Ukrainians.They rely on the U .

S.for missiles, but also the U .S.running out of missiles might mean that Trump is more keen to buy their drones.So if Ukraine is able to convince Donald Trump that helping them will help him in Iran, then suddenly Ukraine goes from being an annoying distraction to a genuinely useful ally.And that doesn't stop there.

might just give Zelensky the advantage he needs.Because here's the thing.The full -scale war in Ukraine has now been going longer than World War I. So they will really take whatever opportunity they can get.