In the wake of President Trump’s disastrous press conference with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Trump’s most vocal supporters have already figured out how to spin it into a net positive for the U.S., i.e., “It’s better to be friends with Russia than enemies.”

Another group of Trump supporters, the white supremacist/neo-Confederate League of the South, are taking it a step further: they want to appeal to the white Christian nature of Putin’s Russia.

As Right Wing Watch points out, LOS is now devoting a whole section of its website to the Russian language.

In an announcement from the group’s president Michael Hill, LOS is making a point to recognize “that the Russian people and Southerners are natural allies in blood, culture, and religion.”

“As fellow Whites of northern European extraction, we come from the same general gene pool,” Hill writes. “As inheritors of the European cultural tradition, we share similar values, customs, and ways of life. And as Christians, we worship the same Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and our common faith binds us as brothers and sisters.”

“We Southerners believe in societies based on real, organic factors such as shared blood, culture, and religion, and all that stems naturally from these salient factors in the human experience,” he continues. “As fellow White Christians who are grounded in the sublime traditions of our common European cultural heritage, we believe that the Russian people and the Southern people are natural allies against the destructive and impersonal impulses of globalism.”

Adulation for Russia is nothing new when it comes to white nationalists. As Right Wing Watch pointed out last year, Alt-Right leader Richard Spencer referred to the country as the “most powerful white power in the world.” Even former KKK grand wizard David Duke said that Russia holds the “key to white survival.”

From Right Wing Watch:

Putin has supported right-wing nationalist movements across Europe. In 2015, Jared Taylor, the American proponent of “race realism,” took part in a conference in St. Petersburg that gathered activists from Europe’s far right. There Taylor declared the United States “the greatest enemy of tradition everywhere.” Also in attendance was former KKK lawyer Sam Dickson, who praised Putin’s efforts to preserve “[the white] race and civilization.”

According to the head of the white nationalist Traditional Workers Party, Matthew Heimbach, Putin is the “leader of the free world” who has helped turn Russia into an “axis for nationalists.”

“Russia’s our most powerful ally,” Heimbach said in 2015. “Imagine what could happen to our party when Russia takes interest.”

We’re getting a taste of that now.

Featured image: Michael Hill (YouTube)