I’ll say this upfront: I think it’s most likely that Vladimir Putin, or elements of his regime, had Russian dissident Alexei Navalny killed.
I’ll say this upfront: I think it’s most likely that Vladimir Putin, or elements of his regime, had Russian dissident Alexei Navalny killed. Putin is certainly capable of bumping off the political opposition — and with Navalny directly under Putin’s thumb, having been thrown in prison and then dropping dead suddenly at 47 years old, when he’d already been poisoned once with the chemical nerve agent Novichok, and then his body being withheld from his family — it’s hard to look any guiltier than Putin and his people do.
Navalny was caught on film conspiring with Western intelligence agencies attempting to unseat Putin. From our perspective, that might make him a hero. From Putin’s, he was a domestic enemy. We don’t have to leave aside our disgust at what happened to Navalny to note that in the Russian way, what happened to him makes an ugly kind of sense.
That’s how they roll in Russia.
I also think that Navalny’s death plays — though I would imagine there were lots of reasons closer to home why Navalny would be killed by the Putin regime — as a profound boot to the testicles of Tucker Carlson. Carlson, after all, had barely left Moscow after interviewing Putin, making the statement and following up with video to the effect that the Russian capital is a nicer and better-run place than most major American cities, and then he was immediately humiliated by Navalny’s death.
Kurt Schlichter, writing at Townhall on Monday, was spot on in noting that Carlson’s basic point was that those cities are horrifically run, and whether Carlson is correct in comparing Moscow to New York isn’t the point. New York isn’t run as well as it should be, and the people who run New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland, St. Louis, Detroit, New Orleans, and pretty much all of the big blue shitty cities don’t care about running them well.
What they care about is power and graft — and running a city into the ground, chasing away its tax base, and replacing it with federal swag that carries zero accountability, is a pristine way to achieve both.
Power and graft have replaced the dollar as the going currency among America’s ruling elite, and that’s a damn shame, because power and graft are the currencies of totalitarian, kleptocratic, and lawless regimes — something ours is rapidly descending into. The examples are legion, but one that just showed up in Washington state has offered a clear view of just how ridiculous things have become:
It could be a lot harder to find affordable and durable car tires under a bill being considered in the current legislative session.
The bill would give the Washington State Department of Commerce the authority to ban tires it deems inefficient and bad for the climate. It would apply to any replacement tires for cars and light-duty trucks under 10,000 pounds. It would also give the Department of Commerce the ability to fine people anywhere from $100 to $10,000 for violations.
“At the end of the day, we’re facing a climate crisis, and we need to use as many possible tools to get ourselves out of that,” Democrat Representative Chipalo Street told the House Transportation Committee. “This is one way to increase the gas efficiency of some of our vehicles.”
There is zero evidence by anything remotely close to a credible source to indicate that “inefficient” tires play a measurable role in predicting the weather over the next century. The stated justification for that bill is nothing short of gibberish. But that’s not what’s really going on — what’s really happening is that the radical leftists at the Washington state Department of Commerce would, thanks to this bill if it were to pass, have the ability to make supplicants out of tire suppliers and vendors in that state, something they will monetize to the hilt both above and below the table.
That might be a bit more subtle than using nerve agents on the political prisoners, but when it comes to power and graft, the general societal outcome isn’t all that different. And besides, using tires as a stealth means of practicing petty tyranny on the citizens is about as subtle as it gets from the modern Democrat Party; the American state, which is supposed to be our financial capital, has just used its judiciary to effect a bill of attainder on one of its most prominent former citizens for “fraud” that contained no victim and no harm.
