Where We Are This Week
An all-Russian special!
Alexei Nalvany
Imagine the government threw the president’s leading critic into jail and removed him to a remote part of the region so that his contact with the population could be further diminished.
Hypothetically speaking, of course, imagine that the persecuted’s death was announced abruptly, that they died ‘suddenly’ according to authorities despite footage from a day earlier showing the person in question in relatively good health in contrast to the conditions in which they’ve been kept.
Now, add to this composition of injustice the fact that this person was poisoned by his government only a few years earlier. Much to the government’s chagrin, however, this person recovered and continued to be a thorn in its side - which inevitably led to his jailing and untimely death.
If you’d indulge me for a moment, compile a list of countries where you’d find this scenario to be the most plausible: the federal government, at the behest of its leader, seeks the death of its most prominent political opponent with almost no effort to establish reasonable deniability.
Done?
Are any of them the United States of America? I hate to belabor the point I made last week, but here we are again.
On Friday of last week, news broke that Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption crusader who spent his career protesting the Putin regime, had died. Navalny perished in an Arctic penal colony where he was serving a 19-year sentence for corruption. Nothing like jailing your opponent for the thing you’re guilty of.
Fans of democracy and justice across the world were justly saddened, but not surprised, by the word of Navalny’s death. Just a few months prior, Navalny went missing inside Russia’s prison system only to reemerge having been transferred to a maximum security prison in Western Siberia. Exiling dissidents to the Arctic Circle where they’ll toil away in jail cells or work camps is a Soviet tradition that Putin has found hard to dismiss.
In response to his death, protestors took to the streets in Moscow St. Petersburg, and other major cities. Though mass protests didn’t erupt, hundreds were detained by the authorities due to the demonstrations.
Russian officials, so far, are refusing to cooperate with requests from the international community for an independent investigation of Navalny’s death - I mean murder - and have balked at returning his body to his wife, Yulia Navalnaya. Additionally, in what appears to be an effort to tie up any loose ends, Russian authorities have issued an arrest warrant for Navalny’s younger brother.
Oleg Navalny was previously persecuted by the Russian government for allegedly ‘breaking Covid-19 restrictions’ or what is also known as ‘being related to an inconvenient person.’ The details of his current arrest warrant are unclear but it would be safe to assume the motivation is purely political. The whereabouts of the younger Navalny are currently unknown. Stay free, Oleg!
Alright, now, that we’re all caught up, I’ll get to the point. Putin and Russia have been in the news even more so than the last two years in the past couple of weeks due to Tucker Carlson’s interview at the Kremlin. I thought the story of the interview would be that Carlson’s journalistic integrity would be questioned by the left because he dared to interview one of the most powerful people in the world.
I was wrong. What instead has happened in the last couple of weeks has been more disappointing. After the interview aired, Russian apologists and anti-American sentiments materialized from the new right.
We discussed last week Tucker Carlson’s comments seemingly equivocating the Russian government’s deadly vindictive actions with our own. Since then, Carlson has doubled down on those statements while his examples of Russian superiority have only gotten more outlandish - but more on that later.
It’s a dangerous trend that we’re witnessing in real-time, the growing anti-American sentiment found in prominent right-wing circles, one that is ironically being spearheaded by the man himself, DJT.
Trump didn’t have much to say about Navalny’s untimely passing and was careful not to lay the blame at Putin’s feet. Which is unbelievable considering this is the president who endured bologna Russian collusion charges for his entire term. You’d think any sensible person in his position would be eager to condemn Putin’s actions but, then again, he is leading in the polls. So, what do I know?
What the former president did say about Navalny, however, was unsurprisingly also about himself. “The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” he Truthed. “It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction. Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION! MAGA2024.”
I hate all caps and the arbitrary Proper Noun designations. See what I did there?
Not one to let a bad idea go gently into the night, in a town hall event with Fox News ahead of the South Carolina primary, he reiterated how the political killing of a Russian dissident had even more to do with him and America.
"Navalny is a very sad situation, and he is a very brave, he was a very brave guy because he went back. He could have stayed away," he said. "And, frankly, he probably would have been a lot better off staying away and talking from outside of the country as opposed to having to go back in, because people thought that could happen and it did happen. And it's a horrible thing.”
Still no mention of the responsible party.
"But it's happening in our country too," Trump said. "We are turning into a communist country in many ways. And if you look at it - I'm the leading candidate. I get indicted."
You say poisoning, I say lawsuit. Same difference.
Here’s the problem: Trump isn’t entirely wrong. He’s been unfairly prosecuted and persecuted throughout his political tenure which, unfortunately, has only galvanized his supporters to rally behind him. But let’s remind ourselves of a rule that should be applied in these situations.
Two things can be alike in category but not in severity. Logan Paul and Mike Tyson might both technically be ‘boxers’ but only one of them was the baddest man in the universe and undisputed heavyweight world champion. You see what I’m saying? Donald Trump and Sean O’Malley might both attend UFC events but only one of them has a God-given gift of a right hand. Have I lost you?
Not only is it uncouth and self-indulgent to compare Trump’s troubles with Navalny’s, it’s particularly dangerous when you’re the leader of arguably the biggest political movement in the United States of America.
Maybe, before, Donald Trump gets too down in the dumps about his predicament he ought to check to see how Julian Assange is doing, the journalist he could have pardoned during his first term as president. It may be serious, but let’s not convince anyone unnecessarily that it’s a matter of life and death.
How did this happen?
I’m so glad you asked.
It’s a phenomenon I first noticed in 2016. It didn’t start as ostensibly anti-America per se but it saw swathes of Republicans decidedly less conservative. Donald Trump assumed his position as the mouthpiece of our innermost, derisive political desires. This is something I covered earlier in my post earlier this week.
Let’s be clear about something. I don’t believe this is Trump’s fault. The reality TV star has an idiot-savant skill in saying the thing people want to hear. You want him to be pro-life before he’s definitely pro-choice? No problem. You want him to use a bible as a prop in front of a burned-out church in DC? I’d wager the man has never had a Christian conviction in his life but damn it if he doesn’t have the instinct for a photo op.
As Trump - and the ghost of Barack Obama - continued to drive a wedge between the two major parties in America, their supporters became more religiously devout to their cause. The merits of any given candidate became irrelevant - see Joe Biden - as they were deemed to be good if the opposing side thought them bad, and policies followed suit.
Trump led a bourgeoning nationalist America-first movement into the White House and the fore of right-wing American politics. He showed a deftness in foreign policy that many in this new right are critically insufficient. Then came the Ukraine War and Republicans, for the first time in their history, learned about the CIA, NATO, and imperialism.
By the way, if it feels like I’m picking on the right side of the aisle it’s only because I believe the left crossed this Rubicon a decade ago. The Republican party is only the latest domino to fall. In 2019, the Atlantic ran an article titled ‘Too Much Democracy is Bad For Democracy’ arguing that political parties give too much power to voters in primaries.
The problem with this is that it coincided with the right learning of the ‘deep state’ during Trump’s first term. The same ‘deep state’ that wrongfully impeached him twice, propagated a hoax, for now, the entirety of the last seven years, and is currently seeking to jail the former president for whatever charge they can get to stick. As a species, we tend to overcorrect and throw the baby out with the bathwater. Remember when we interned 120,000 Japanese Americans in WWII?
So, the new right has now learned that a) America isn’t the obvious good guy on the world stage and b) voting our way out of this predicament is a tidal wave of an obstacle. Now, commonly held positions are that America is a fatally flawed institution that is on par with any despotic regime of the modern era or that democracy is a woefully insufficient mechanism incapable of recorrecting course.
Comrade Carlson
It’s unclear whether or not Tucker Carlson was being taken advantage of as a useless idiot or if he knew exactly what he was doing.
Last week, Tucker posted on X videos showing the parts of Moscow that he claimed ‘radicalized’ him against his own government. The content of the videos is so farcical that one would be forgiven for thinking that they were satirical. Disappointingly, however, they weren’t.
Tucker and his crew shot footage inside a Moscow train station and a grocery store that the former Fox News host used to allude to - if not explicitly assert - Russian superiority. The first part of the video shows a Stalin-era train station near the city center that is not only opulent but has been immaculately maintained.
Tucker makes the obvious comparison between the Muscovite transit hub and a New York City subway station but then intimates that the exceptional condition of the station must solely be attributed to the leadership of said country. As if one train station is an indication of how an entire populace exists. If Tucker truly thinks that this is a true representation of the country, then he should know that Pyongyang is lovely this time of year. Is this the right’s version of ‘fiery but mostly peaceful’ protests? ‘Totalitarian but clean trains.’
If that weren’t enough, he then takes the viewer shopping. First, he marvels at the shopping cart system where one must deposit money as collateral until they return the cart to its corral. He’s either purposefully being facetious or has never been to an Aldi and turned his pockets inside out for a quarter. The one piece of half-decent journalism was when he pointed out the litany of American or Western items on the shop’s shelves.
This warranted a passing curiosity about the effectiveness of sanctions but that was never followed up on - he was too excited about the Russian cookies for sale. He and his team filled the cart up with a week’s worth of groceries and proceeded to the checkout. They estimated that the cart’s contents were about what an American family would eat in a week and that it would amount to around 400 US dollars.
As it turns out, their weekly supply of groceries totaled around 104 US dollars. It’s a shocking figure when you imagine how much money you would be saving if you had your salary and could cut grocery costs by 75%. What he failed to mention, however, was that the median salary for the average Russian is 1130 US dollars per month.
So, the average Russian is spending 25% of their income on food alone and Tucker thinks that you ought to be ‘radicalized’ by that figure. By the way, $1130 is the median income which means that half of Russians are making less than that per month. This is being portrayed as a win rather than an indictment of the Putin regime.
It’s a broader trend in American politics. As I said, the American left has long abandoned the ideal of a government by the people for the people but the right is trending away from that as well. Last year, a video of a beautiful Singaporean airport went viral online and had right-wing influencers clamoring for a police state. If these people were so titillated by travel, why were they opposed to Biden’s Infrastructure Bill?
Democracy is a difficult task. This flirtation with authoritarian figures isn’t anything new in human history. Julius Caesar was widely seen as a populist; so was Napoleon before he declared himself Emperor. George Washington was offered the title of King but he was wise and gracious enough to refuse. Even the Israelites wandering the desert began to miss Pharaoh.
Democracy may not always be the most expedient of processes, but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that dictatorship bears more fruit. Unless that fruit is chandeliers in the subway of course.
Reportedly, Navalny was asked how he was adjusting to life in a maximum security prison in Siberia. “I’m freezing and starving to death for an unjust political imprisonment. I’ll never see my family again. The train station here, however, is sublime.”
To a better next week,
Cheers,
FDA