Pro-Kremlin Telegram channels on Friday circulated a New Year’s video depicting Russian air defense systems shooting down Santa Claus’ reindeer sleigh.
The video, first shared by the Pul N3 Telegram channel, begins with Santa flying over central Moscow to the tune of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”
“Hi, Russians! Here are your presents,” says Santa Claus, sipping a Coca-Cola as the camera zooms in on his sleigh, which is loaded with rockets bearing NATO logos.
“Happy New Year,” Santa says before a missile shoots into his sleigh, causing it to explode mid-air.
Ded Moroz and Russian airpower. Image courtesy of Moscow Times
The scene then shifts to a military control room where a Russian serviceman and Ded Moroz — Russia’s version of Santa Claus — monitor the action on a screen as a traditional Russian folk tune plays.
“Is it done?” Ded Moroz asks the headset-wearing serviceman.
“Yes, it’s done. The target was destroyed,” the serviceman replies.
“Good. We don’t need any kind of foreign stuff [in our skies],” Ded Moroz says, embracing the serviceman. “Happy New Year!”
The video’s release comes just days after an Azerbaijani passenger plane crashed in western Kazakhstan, with reports suggesting it was shot down by a Russian surface-to-air missile.
Social anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova conducted an investigation and concluded that Anna Korobkova, renowned for her numerous denunciations of people advocating anti-war stances, is probably a pseudonym of Ivan Abaturov, a journalist from Yekaterinburg. The BBC Russian Service has published the results of Arkhipova’s research.
Arkhipova assembled more than seventy letters, addressed to various institutions and agencies, in which Korobkova accused doctors, teachers, human rights activists, and journalists of “discrediting” the Russian army and called for them to be brought to justice. Among the denouncer’s victims are a doctor at a clinic who made a comment to [banned opposition channel] TV Rain, the mother of an enlisted soldier killed in the war, and Arkhipova herself. In one case, a student was expelled from a university after it received a denunciation alleging that he had been involved in “unauthorized protest rallies.”
In early December 2024, Arkhipova found a page about Korobkova on Wikipedia. With the assistance of linguists, she did a comparative analysis and found that the author of the Wikipedia article was probably the same person who had written the denunciations signed by Korobkova.
Arkhipova and the investigative journalists were able to identify the author of the Wikipedia article. It turned out to be a journalist from Yekaterinburg, Ivan Abaturov.
Abaturov, as the article points out, had already been at the center of a whistleblowing scandal. In the summer of 2022, Sergei Erlich, director of the publishing house Nestor History, said that Abaturov had allegedly detected “false information about the USSR’s actions during the Second World War” in one of his company’s books. Consequently, law enforcement officials visited Nestor History’s offices.
Abaturov himself has never concealed his attitude to denunciations. In 2019, he wrote on social media that “a journalist under Stalin was a walking prosecutor’s office” and that he wanted to be one too.
When asked by a BBC correspondent whether he had been writing denunciations under the name “Korobkova,” Abaturov replied on VKontakte: “Hello. You are mistaken.” Consequently, he stopped replying to messages, and the BBC was unable to reach him by phone.
Since the beginning of their country’s full-scale war with Ukraine, Russians have filed 2,623 complaints with law enforcement agencies about anti-war statements made by their fellow citizens, the investigative journalism website Important Stories (iStories) calculated in June on the basis of open source data. So-called LGBT propaganda (487 complaints) and Russophobia (250 complaints) ranked second and third, respectively, as grounds for denunciations.
According to Important Stories, seventy percent of the complaints were written by subscribers of the anonymous Telegram channel Mrakoborets, which specializes in tracking down anti-war activists. The channel’s daily norm is a minimum of three complaints on its pages on the social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki (“Classmates”). Yekaterina Mizulina, head of the Safe Internet League, had personally written 148 denunciations, while sixty were penned by pro-Kremlin activist Vitaly Borodin.
In the autumn of 2022, executives at the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA) received a letter signed “Anna Vasilievna Korobkova.” It began as follows: “I fully support the special operation of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation on Ukrainian territory. I am against all violations of the law.”
The letter concerned an interview that Alexandra Arkhipova, who had worked for many years as a senior research fellow at RANEPA, had given to the channel TV Rain, which had been designated a “foreign agent” by Russian authorities. (At the time of the interview, the TV channel had not yet been designated an “undesirable organization.”)
In her denunciation, “Korobkova” asked the university to dismiss Arkhipova for “immoral misconduct,” which, in her opinion, consisted in the fact that in the interview with TV Rain she had “disseminated false information discrediting the Special Military Operation [sic] on Ukrainian territory.” Korobkova also suggested that the university send the evidence against Arkhipova to the prosecutor’s office.
“Korobkova” was outraged that Arkhipova did not interrupt TV Rain presenter Anna Nemzer when the latter had called the “special military operation” a “war” (“thus showing she agreed with Nemzer’s false opinion”), mentioned Facebook without mentioning that it had been designated an “extremist organization” in Russia, and uttered the phrase “before the war I would ask.”
“This is a lie, as there is no war,” the letter said.
Upon seeing the text of the denunciation, Arkhipova was surprised by how long and detailed it was. Korobkova’s letter took up two pages, and even the time codes for the points in the interview at which Arkhipova had said certain things that angered Korobkova were noted. As a folklorist and social anthropologist who works extensively with different texts, Arkhipova was struck by the structure of the denunciation and the specific language in which it was written.
“I was reading this denunciation to friends, discussing it as a phenomenon of contemporary political culture, when one of my colleagues looked at me sadly and took a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket. He unfolded it and read aloud a denunciation. It had the same wording, and was also signed ‘Anna Vasilievna Korobkova,'” Arkhipova tells the BBC.
REMEMBER RUSSIAN ‘GUN-RIGHTS ADVOCATE’ [ ] AND CONVICTED FELON MARIA BUTINA? Who doesn’t? Welp, here she is w/ your Daily Irony Supplement — and it’s a massive dose! See, as of Jan. 20 she’ll likely get a pardon and move back Stateside to improve on her spying career (hey, how could she do worse?); but in the meantime, she’s trying to get *Americans* (et al.) to go the *other* way, i.e. move to Moscow — y’know, like Our Guy Ed Snowden & his new roommate, Bashar al-Assad, who just *love* it there, right?
[WARNING: Do not watch this video immediately after a meal.]
This December, premium SUV brand TANK celebrates its second anniversary in Russia and the New Year, inviting everyone to be a part of the celebration.
Get into the festive mood on the TANK.RU website by creating commemorative cards and beginning your own journey towards the new.
TANK. Drive your own progress.
Source: Unsolicited email from Vedomosti, 10 December 2024
The fall of the Baath state in Syria is a serious defeat for Russia (and a disaster for Iran). It would however be a grave mistake to assume that this by necessity makes it a success for the United States.
Moscow and Washington may indeed now face similar challenges in Syria.
Three issues led Russia to intervene in the Syrian civil war to save the Assad regime. First was a general desire to preserve a partner state — one of the very few remaining to Russia after the U.S. overthrow of the regimes in Iraq and Libya, which helped to prop up Moscow’s international influence. Second was a desire to retain Russia’s only naval and air bases in the Mediterranean.
Third was a deep Russian fear that an Islamist victory would lead to Syria becoming a base for terrorism against Russia and its partners in Central Asia. That anxiety was increased by the presence of numerous fighters from Chechnya and other Muslim regions of Russia in the ranks of the Islamist forces in Syria and Iraq.
[…]
Thanks to our readers and supporters, Responsible Statecraft has had a tremendous year. A complete website overhaul made possible in part by generous contributions to RS, along with amazing writing by staff and outside contributors, has helped to increase our monthly page views by 133%! In continuing to provide independent and sharp analysis on the major conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, as well as the tumult of Washington politics, RS has become a go-to for readers looking for alternatives and change in the foreign policy conversation.
We hope you will consider a tax-exempt donation to RS for your end-of-the-year giving, as we plan for new ways to expand our coverage and reach in 2025. Please enjoy your holidays, and here is to a dynamic year ahead!
On Sunday, something extraordinary happened: the Syrian people overthrew the Assad regime. For years we have been waiting to share this news with you. We wanted to make sure you didn’t miss our message below.
Dear Thomas,
This is the message we have been waiting so long to write. Assad is gone. The Syrian people have toppled the Assad regime. Our hearts burst with hope today. A war criminal of the worst kind no longer has the power to torture, starve, bomb and detain people in Syria.
The regime that has caused indescribable suffering and trauma for decades no longer has the power to commit war crimes. Syrians in Syria and all over the world are singing, “Syria is for the people, it does not belong to the Assad family”. We are chanting along with them. Ragheed al-Tatari, Syria’s longest-held political prisoner, has been freed alongside many others.
We write these words thinking of so many of our friends and loved ones who we lost in the past years. Our hearts break that they’re not witnessing these moments with us.
There is much that is unknown. We have lost so much. Our dream for freedom and democracy declared almost 14 years ago was for a peaceful transition of power out of authoritarian hands into those of the Syrian people – all of us diverse and different but together in our vision for a new Syria.
At the Syria Campaign we commit to continuing to work with all those who stand with human rights, with you all, to ensure our vision for a free and democratic Syria is made real.
The hope we feel today feels something like those first weeks when we took to the streets and dared to call for freedom and dignity. We believed the world would join us to protect humanity and champion the values they claimed to hold dear.
As our committed and courageous supporters you all know the journey we have been on since then. You have been with us as we rallied loudly against the bombings of hospitals, whole communities massacred by chemical weapons, the systematic use of detention and disappearance, meant to crush our spirits. You, and hundreds of thousands of people around the world, have stood with us and made our demands for protection of civilians and justice for war crimes more powerful.
Our movement, alongside the heroes on the ground in Syria – the White Helmets, medics, women’s rights activists, journalists – and the vibrant Syrian civil society in refuge around the world – the lawyers, investigators, artists, campaigners, survivor groups and family associations, has kept the demands of the revolution loud and clear.
Today, those demands are all the more urgent. It is time for Syrians to lead a peaceful Syria. Free and democratic, vibrant and diverse.
Now is the moment for Syria and the international community to restart Syria’s stalled UN-led political process, with a clear timeline for political transition that leads to free elections, as outlined in UN Resolution 2254.
There is so much to be done. We are impatient for accountability and justice. So many people remain detained or disappeared and families across the world are now hoping to go back to their homes and cities and be reunited with their loved ones. Almost every Syrian carries pain and trauma into this new moment. It is a moment that holds such promise. It is the chance to create a new beautiful Syria.
P.S. The weeks ahead will be critical. Please consider donating to support our work towards our vision for a free, just and democratic Syria.
The Syria Campaign is a human rights organisation that supports Syria’s heroes in their struggle for freedom, justice and democracy. Read more about our work here.
Online donations by credit card are processed by Voices Project USA and are tax deductible in the United States to the full extent allowable under the law. Online donations by PayPal are processed by The Voices Project (UK) and are not currently tax deductible in the US or available for gift aid in the UK. Voices Project USA Federal Identification Number is 82-3505967.
Source: A very welcome email from the Syria Campaign, 10 December 2024
“GREETING THE NEW”: the “commemorative postcard” generated for me by TANK.RU, based on my answers to six leading questions and a photo of myself I uploaded to the website.
Since the beginning of 2023, Russians have bought more than 600 Chinese Tank SUVs. According to Autostat, from January to April, Tank dealers sold 632 cars, and the more affordable model with the 300 index is more popular than the Tank 500 — during the reporting period, the first sold 479 copies, and the second — 153 copies. Thus, the Tank 300 accounts for 76 percent of total sales, and the “five hundredth” — 24 percent. Tanks are in the greatest demand in Moscow — every fourth car of this brand (166 units) is registered in the capital. In second place in terms of sales is St. Petersburg with an indicator of 125 Chinese SUVs sold (every fifth), followed by the Moscow region – every 10th SUV is registered there. The top 5 regions also include Nizhny Novgorod and Kemerovo regions (45 and 37 copies, respectively).
Tanks are in the greatest demand in Moscow — every fourth car of this brand (166 units) is registered in the capital. In second place in terms of sales is St. Petersburg with an indicator of 125 Chinese SUVs sold (every fifth), followed by the Moscow region – every 10th SUV is registered there. The top 5 regions also include Nizhny Novgorod and Kemerovo regions (45 and 37 copies, respectively).
Official sales of the Tank 300 began only in the early spring of this year. The “younger” Tank is supposed to have a two-liter “turbocharger” with a capacity of 220 horsepower in conjunction with an eight-band automatic, the drive is only full. The larger Tank 500 model appeared a month after the “three hundredth” — it is offered with a 3.0-liter V6 engine that develops 299 horsepower and works with a nine-band automatic. The drive is also full.
“Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.” – Alexis de Tocqueville
In the Soviet Union, where I grew up, any expression of faith was met with ridicule and harassment under anti-religion propaganda. This experience deepened my appreciation for the freedom to worship and inspired DEO FAVENTE wine—a tribute to God’s grace and providence.
As we approach Thanksgiving, let us reflect on the foundation of America’s greatness: her faith in God. It is through that faith and the values rooted in His word that our nation remains a true Land of Promise, guided by His hand.
Source: Land of Promise emailing, 14 November 2024
“We chose the name Terra de Promissio, latin for the Land of Promise. because as farmers, the land is about the “promise”. The promise that every new season brings the possibility AND the hope of a bountiful harvest.”
“and as we were both born, have lived and worked overseas, It is the promise of AMERICA, one nation under god AND the American Dream. We very much appreciate what this country represents. America is truly the land of promise and we are grateful for the freedom, liberty and opportunities that these united states offers to all of us.”
Charles and Diana bought a former dairy ranch in 1999 and then over the next 3 years, oversaw the planting of 33,000 vines. During the summer of 2002, they bought a used trailer to live in and then brought Diana’s Dad and sister Alina from Russia to help manage the vineyard. We welcomed Diana’s Family to the USA with an American Flag. And from that day on, the American Flag has proudly flown every day here at the vineyard. Terra de Promissio had its first harvest in 2005 and sold to 3 wineries. In 2007, after renting a house in Petaluma, they converted a barn into a home and moved to the vineyard full time. In 2012 and 2013, they planted an additional 18,000 vines to bring the total planted acreage of Terra de Promissio to 50 acres.
[…]
Diana KARREN
Diana was born in the Soviet Union. She was a Young Pioneer in the Communist System. But in the 1980s as the Soviet Union began to collapse, she put herself thru college and at the same time, worked for western companies that were investing in the now Former Soviet Union. Her hard work and great grades paid off and she was accepted to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, where she graduated with a Masters of Business Administration in 2003.
During a two year period (2001-2003) Diana single-handily designed, gained government approvals and oversaw the planting of Terra de Promissio, while being pregnant and giving birth to Christian and doing it as a full time MBA Ivy-League student. In 2005, Diana oversaw the first harvest to Siduri, Flowers and Lynmar. In the ensuring years, as the grape production ramped up, Diana added multiple wineries including Kistler, Kosta-Browne and Willams Selyem. In 2011, Kosta Browne received the Wine Spectator’s Wine of the Year for the 2009 Sonoma Coast, which was primarily using grapes from Terra de Promissio.
Since day one, every row and block is custom farmed per each of the winemakers specific instructions. Because of this attention to detail by Diana, Terra de Promissio is now the most vineyard designated pinot noir in Sonoma County with over 10 wineries using the TdP name on their label. Beginning with the 2013 harvest, Diana began overseeing the winemaking process for Land of Promise. She now makes 4 Land of Promise Pinots and one Rosé. For more info, please click here or the link below.
In addition to managing the vineyard and the winery, Diana spends her Sunday mornings at Calvary Chapel Petaluma where she volunteers watching the babies and toddlers during the busy first service, so their parents can enjoy and listen to the sermons.
Just one week has passed since Donald Trump’s electoral triumph, and already Russian President Vladimir Putin—one of the strongman leaders Trump admires most—is messing with his head.
First, Putin waited two days before congratulating Trump on his victory. One can imagine Trump receiving phone calls from kowtowing leaders the world over—Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas, the chief of NATO, the European heads of state—all the while wondering about the man whom he’s admired publicly and privately for the past eight years: When is Vladimir going to call?
Then, in response to Trump’s claim that during their phone call, he asked—in some accounts, warned—Putin not to escalate the war in Ukraine, a Kremlin spokesman denied that the two had spoken on the phone at all. (Putin issued his belated congratulations at a news conference.)
I don’t know who’s telling the truth, a practice for which neither man has a sterling reputation. But either way, in the next few weeks, when Putin orders 50,000 fresh recruits (including 10,000 imported North Korean soldiers) to go on the next rampage—ousting Ukrainian soldiers from the thin slice of Russian territory they hold, then retaking soil across the border in Donbas province—he can tell a complaining Trump that he doesn’t recall any such conversation. If Trump thinks Putin actually will refrain from stepping up attacks on Ukraine as a friendly favor … well, maybe our once-and-future president will learn a lesson about the limits of personal relations in the face of perceived national interests early in his second term.
The final twist of this saga came on Monday, when Nikolai Patrushev, an aide to Putin who was previously director of Russia’s Federal Security Service, made the following comment in an interview with the Moscow newspaper Kommersant:
The election campaign is over. To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.
This is a mind-blowing bit of psychological warfare! The Russians are basically telling Trump: We put you in office. Now it’s time for you to pay us back.
When you woke up yesterday the idea that Pete Hegseth—a philandering morning TV host who has never run anything bigger than a frozen banana stand—could serve as the secretary of defense was the most preposterous idea in the history of the federal government.
By the dinner time Trump issued two nominations that made Hegseth look like Bobby Gates.
The Matt Gaetz appointment is getting most of the attention because of the irony. The DoJ being controlled by a man who was recently investigated by the same department for having an alleged sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl, whom he (allegedly) paid to travel with him? It’s too good.
Also, in the near term, the attorney general can a lot of damage to America. The AG has the power both to turn the state against its citizens and to shield wrongdoers from accountability.
But it’s the appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence that worries me more. Because for a decade Gabbard has looked and behaved like a Russian asset.
In four terms as a congresswoman her most notable actions were ongoing defenses of two war criminals: Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin.
Nadezhda Buyanova. Photo: Tatyana Makeyeva/AFP, via Moscow Times
A pediatrician has been imprisoned on the strength of a denunciation by her patient’s mother. The pediatrician allegedly insulted the boy’s father, who had been killed in the war. There were no witnesses to the conversation, and it seems that the decisive factor in the verdict was the pediatrician’s birthplace — Lviv. Only recently I published the file of the criminal case against my great-uncle, who had allegedly spread rumors about the fall of Soviet regime among children at an orphanage. There, too, the accused’s background was an important point of the accusation: the arrested man’s father had once been a prosperous peasant. It was obvious to the investigators (and this was explicitly stated in the verdict) that the status of “kulak’s son” was in itself proof that the charges were true.
Lo and behold we’re back where we started: a person born in Lviv is guilty of course and must have said what they have been accused of saying.
I don’t know why we should measure things off in terms of milestones on the road to a familiar hell, but this is certainly a milestone.
A Moscow court on Tuesday sentenced a pediatrician to five and a half years in prison for criticizing the war in Ukraine during a patient visit earlier this year.
Nadezhda Buyanova, 68, was found guilty of spreading “fake” information on the Russian army under wartime laws used to silence dissent.
“I believe this is absurd,” she said in court Tuesday, moments before Judge Olga Fedina announced her sentence.
Buyanova was arrested in February after the ex-wife of a soldier who was killed in Ukraine, Anastasia Akinshina, said she had criticized Russia’s role in the conflict during an appointment.
Several of Buyanova’s supporters, mostly medical professionals, shouted “Shame on you!” in the court as the sentence was announced.
“We must empathize with one another and love others,” Buyanova said in court. “But there is no paradise on earth, there is no peace on earth.”
She protested her innocence throughout the trial.
“I am a pediatrician. I do not regret a single day,” Buyanova said.
Buyanova was prosecuted despite there being no public evidence that she criticized the war. Akinshina’s seven-year-old son testified against Buyanova in court.
Monday, 18 November, 6 p.m. “Political prisoners in Russia and the Occupied Territories of Ukraine”.
Panel discussion with Sergei Davidis (Memorial), Evgeny Zakharov (Kharkhiv Human Rights Protection Group), Bill Bowring (Birkbeck, University of London) and Judith Pallot (Gulag Echoes research project / University of Oxford).
At: Montague Lecture Centre, Graduate Centre, Queen Mary University of London, 327 Mile End Road, London E1 4NS. Also on line, via Zoom.
All welcome. Event organised by the Queen Mary University, London, Centre for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies. Register on Eventbrite here.
I wouldn’t want Navalny to be remembered the way he has been remembered this past year.
I haven’t read the book Patriot yet, but I was quite upset by Mikhail Zygar’s review of it. Zygar compares Navalny to Jesus and concludes that by dying, Navalny bequeathed us an idea that would rid future generations of cynicism and teach them to believe.
This is feeble sentimentalization, in my opinion. Navalny didn’t not dream up any particular ideas. He called for action, not faith. The meaning of his sacrifice, in my mind, is practical and political, not abstract and ideological. It can and should benefit the current generation, not some future generation.
Navalny didn’t dream up a new ideal. The “beautiful Russia of the future” is a feeble image, but Navalny understood better than anyone how tyranny operates on the mechanical level. I often complain that the FSB understands better how Russian society functions than do opposition politicians, sociologists and psychologists. Navalny couldn’t be accused of this shortcoming.
He was the only person in Russian politics who talked about power relations as a two-way street. He didn’t talk about the enormous resources Putin has, but about the fact that we give Putin power. It is not the security services, the army and the tanks that give Putin power. We give Putin power.
This view evolved over the course of Navalny’s career, becoming more and more central. As time went by, it separated Alexei more and more from his colleagues in the opposition. Toward the end of his life, Navalny’s writings centered on the idea that power consists in consenting to obedience, in “obeying in advance.” We say to ourselves: I cannot disobey, because if I don’t obey, they will (notice me/file administrative charges against me/fire me/banish me from my profession/send me to jail/kill me).
Only by obeying in advance can governing by unfulfilled threat be scaled up indefinitely, to a country of 140 million people, because this means of governing doesn’t require any resources. We obey without taking resources from the state. Putin’s estimates for the war in Ukraine include every dollar, euro, and pound spent on Ukraine’s defense. They are what counts against Russian budgets, not “faith in democracy” or “anti-war sentiment.” I understand Alexei’s decision to return to Russia in this sense; I see it as logical and unusually tenderhearted on the personal level. By returning to Russia, Alexei was able to provide Russians with one more example of tyranny’s limits: Putin never had power over Alexei. Had he stayed in Germany, Putin’s power would have extended to Navalny.
Navalny was concerned not with the thoughts in our heads, but with whether our deeds matched our thoughts. I appreciate Christian philosophy, but I could never accept the postulate that a second of faith can save a person, no matter their actions — “Now thou shalt be with me in paradise,” and so forth. The Russian opposition, for as long as I’ve been watching it, wants to get to democracy approximately the same way the thief gets to paradise — by believing in it. The notion that we are democrats and decent because we believe in democracy while all remaining Russians are slaves and awful because they don’t believe in it is the main obstacle to democracy in Russia, in my mind, and the Koshchei’s egg of tyranny. A “democracy” in which only “democrats” have a stake and which only they want is an oxymoron that makes democracy impossible and tyranny in Russia perennial. Democracy cannot be for Muscovites alone. It cannot be built via media outlets in which only Petersburg and Moscow have a voice. It cannot be built without equal representation of activists, issues, and interests from other regions and ethnicities.
Late in life, Navalny hated talk about the “freewheeling ’90s” and the good Chekists/bad democrats dichotomy, which doesn’t prevent his supporters from remaining stuck in this selfsame paradigm.
Alexei started his career in Russia’s faux democracy project, which was unfair from the get-go. He entered politics as a “democratic nationalist,” desiring greatness and a better elite for Russia. It was within this same paradigm that he pursued the most successful project of his life: “fighting the regime by legal means.” By the end of his life, however, he came to realize that Russian power is held by a hypocritical elite which justifies its obedience by talking about white coats, and is not willing to share power. It is not even willing to think about being the equals of other Russians, let alone the equals of Ukrainians, for example.
This, in my opinion, is what Navalny left behind. It pains me to see how the legacy he left at such a high cost is being frittered away by films about traitors, stupid speeches, and sentimental religious comparisons.
Era yo una chiquilla todavÌa Cuando tú, casualmente me encontraste Y a merced de tus artes de mundano De mi honra el perfume te llevaste Lo hiciste con migo lo que todos Los que son como tu con las mujeres Por lo tanto no extrañes que yo ahora En tu cara te diga lo que eres
Mal hombre. Tan ruin es tu alma que no tiene nombre Eres un canalla, eres un malvado Eres un, mal hombre
A mi triste destino abandonada Entablé fiera lucha con la vida Ella recia y cruel me torturaba Yo, mas débil, al fin caí vencida
Tu supiste a tiempo mi derrota Mi espantoso calvario conociste Te dijeron algunos que a salvarle Y probando quien eres, te reiste
Mal hombre Tan ruin es tu alma que no tiene nombre Eres un canalla eres un malvado Eres un, mal hombre
Poco tiempo después en el arroyo Entre sombras mi vida dependÌa Una noche con otra tú pasaste Y al mirarme oí que te decía: “¿Quien esa mujer, tú la conoces?” Y a la vez, respondiste: “¡una cualquiera!” Al oír de tus labios tal ultraje Demostrabas también lo que tú eras
Mal hombre Tan ruin es tu alma que no tiene nombre Eres un canlla, eres un malvado Eres un, mal hombre
Yesterday we learned from a forthcoming book by veteran journalist Bob Woodward that in 2020, while he was president, Trump secretly shipped Covid-19 testing equipment to Russian president Vladimir Putin for his own personal use at a time when Americans could not get it. To be clear, this equipment was not the swabs we now use at home, but appears to be what at the time was a new point-of-care machine from Abbott Laboratories that claimed to be the fastest way to test for Covid-19.
Journalist Karly Kingsley points out that at the time, central lab testing to diagnose Covid-19 infections took a long time, causing infections to spread. Machines like Abbott’s were hard to get. Trump chose to send them to Putin—not to charge him for them, or to negotiate for the release of Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed, two Americans being held by Russia at the time and later released under the Biden administration, but to give them to him—rather than keeping them for Americans.
It’s hard to overstate just what an astonishing story this is. In 2016, Republicans stood firm against Putin and backed the arming of Ukraine to stand against Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea. But that summer, at Trump’s urging, the party changed its platform to weaken its support of Ukraine. In 2020, it appears, Trump chose to give lifesaving equipment to Putin rather than use it for Americans. And in 2024, Trump’s willingness to undermine the United States to cozy up to an adversary his own party stood against less than a decade ago does not appear to be a deal breaker for Republicans.
As Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) put it: “What has this country come to if the revelation that Trump secretly sent COVID testing machines to Putin while thousands of Americans were dying, in part because of a shortage of testing machines here, doesn’t disqualify him to be President?” He continued: “Donald Trump helped keep Putin alive during the pandemic and let Americans die. This revelation is damning. It’s disqualifying. He cannot be President of the United States.”
Increasingly, Trump’s behavior seems to parrot the dictators he appears to admire.
After 60 Minutes called him out for breaking a fifty-year tradition of both candidates talking to 60 Minutes and backing out of an interview to which he had agreed, Trump today accused the producers of 60 Minutes of cutting Vice President Kamala Harris’s answers to make her look good. He suggested that such cuts were “illegal” and possibly “a major Campaign Finance violation” that “must be investigated, starting today!” “The public is owed a MAJOR AND IMMEDIATE APOLOGY!” he wrote. Trump is trying to cover for his own failure by attacking CBS in an echo of dictators determined to control the media.
In a post on his social media site tonight, Trump appears to have declined to appear at another presidential debate with Vice President Harris. After declaring he had won the previous debate with Harris and rehashing many of his grievances, he wrote: “THERE WILL BE NO REMATCH!”
As Beth Reinhard of the Washington Post recounted yesterday, a report from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, revealed that the Trump White House prevented a real investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. More than 4,500 calls and electronic messages about Kavanaugh sent to the FBI tip line went directly to the White House, where they were never investigated, and the FBI was told not to pursue corroborating evidence of the accusations by Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez although lawyers for the women presented the names of dozens of people who could testify to the truth of their allegations.
A number of senators said the lack of corroborating evidence convinced them to vote in favor of Kavanaugh’s confirmation. As Steve Benen of MSNBC recalled, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) said at the time that it appeared to be “a very thorough investigation,” while the late Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) said that the 2018 FBI report “looks to be a product of an incomplete investigation that was limited perhaps by the White House.”
After he left office, Trump told author Michael Wolff that he had gone to bat for Kavanaugh, saying: “I…fought like hell for Kavanaugh—and I saved his life, and I saved his career.” Kavanaugh was the crucial vote for Trump’s right-wing agenda, including ending the federal recognition of abortion rights by overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
Ken Bensinger reported in the New York Times today that Trump’s team has refused to participate in preparations for a transition to a potential Trump presidency. Normally, the nonpartisan transition process, dictated by the Presidential Transition Act, has candidates setting up teams as much as six months before the election to begin vetting and hiring political appointees and working with the administration in office to make sure the agencies continue to run smoothly.
With the election less than a month away, Trump has neither signed the required agreements nor signed the transition’s ethics plan that would require him to disclose private donors to the transition and limit them to contributions of no more than $5,000. Without that agreement, there are no limits to the money the Trump transition can take. Trump has also refused to sign an agreement with the White House requiring that anyone receiving classified information have a security clearance. Currently, his aides cannot review federal records.
Trump ignored the traditional transition period in 2016, cutting off communications with President Barack Obama’s team. He refused to allow incoming president Joe Biden access to federal agencies in 2020, hampering Biden’s ability to get his administration in place in a timely fashion. Now it’s possible that Trump sees no need for a normal transition because Project 2025, on which he appears to be relying, has been working on one for many months.
It calls for him to fire most federal employees, reinstating the policy he started at the end of his term. To fill their positions, the Heritage Foundation has been vetting loyalists now for months, preparing a list of job candidates to put in place a new, right-wing agenda.
Yesterday, on California’s KFI radio station, Trump told host John Kobylt that Tom Homan of Project 2025, who as director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement oversaw the family separation policy at the southern border, will be “coming on board” a new Trump administration.
This afternoon, Trump told an audience in Scranton, Pennsylvania, that he expects to put former rival Vivek Ramaswamy into an important position in his administration. On October 7, 2024, Ramaswamy suggested on social media that he wants to get rid of Social Security and Medicare. He wrote: “Shut down the entitlement state & you solve most of the immigration problem right there. We need to man up & fix the root cause that draws migrants here in the first place: the welfare state. But no one seems to want to say that part out loud, because too many native-born Americans are addicted to it themselves.”
Trump has expressed frustration with the independence of the Federal Reserve, expressing a desire to make it answer to the president. In an interview with Barron’s, one of his advisors, Scott Bessent, has floated the idea of creating a shadow Fed chair until the term of the current chair, Jerome Powell, ends, thus undercutting him without facing a fight over firing the Fed chair.
This agenda is not a popular one in the U.S., but Trump is getting a boost as Russian operatives work to swing downballot races toward the Republicans. In a briefing on Monday, October 7, experts from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) told reporters that China and Iran are trying to influence the upcoming election and that “Moscow is leveraging a wide range of influence actors in an effort to influence congressional races, particularly to encourage the U.S. public to oppose pro-Ukraine policies and politicians. Russian influence actors have planned, and likely created and disseminated, content, particularly over social media, intended to encourage the election of congressional candidates that Moscow assesses will oppose aid to Ukraine.”
Russia, an ODNI spokesperson said, uses “influence-for-hire firms, or commercial firms with expertise in these type[s] of activities.” It also coopts “witting and unwitting Americans to work on Russia’s behalf,” to “launder their influence narratives through what are perceived as more authentic U.S. voices.”
Not all of Trump’s supporters appear eager to stick around to see if Trump will win another term. Today news broke that Patrick M. Byrne, the former chief executive officer of OverStock, who became a fervent advocate of the idea that Trump was the true winner of the 2020 presidential election, has left the country, apparently permanently, to live in Dubai. Dominion Voting Systems is suing Byrne, as is President Biden’s son Hunter. The younger Biden sued Byrne for defamation last November after Byrne claimed Hunter Biden sought a bribe from Iran.
In September, Biden’s lawyers were trying to schedule a date for Byrne’s deposition when his lawyer abruptly “claimed for the first time that Defendant has moved his residence to Dubai and if Plaintiff wanted to take his in-person deposition counsel would have to fly to Dubai to do so, to which Plaintiff responded with various related inquiries to try to resolve this matter and defense counsel stated Defendant would not be returning to the United States for the foreseeable future.”
Byrne claimed to have fled the U.S. because the Venezuelan government has put a bounty on him, but as Biden’s lawyers note, “the Defendant’s truthfulness is directly at issue.”
Lydia Mendoza, interviewed by Professor Gene Bluestein and Professor Manuel Pena at CSU, Fresno, before performing “Mal hombre.” Courtesy of the UNC Chapel Hill Folk Archives.
I was but a young girl when, by chance, you found me and with your worldly charm you crushed the flower of my innocence. Then you treated me like all men of your kind treat women, so don’t be surprised now that when I tell you to your face what you really are.
Bad man your soul is so vile it has no name you are despicable, you are evil, you are a bad man.
Abandoned to a sad fate, my life became a fierce struggle suffering the harshness and cruelty of the world I was weak and was defeated. In time you learned of my downfall how my life had become a road to hell. Some people advised you, “You can help her,” but being who you are, you just laughed.
Bad man your soul is so vile it has no name you are despicable, you are evil, you are a bad man.
Shortly after in a gully among shadows I defended my life. One night you passed by with another woman and on seeing me I heard her ask you: Who is that woman? Do you know her? And looking at me you answered: She’s a nobody and when I heard adultery from your lips you demonstrated again what you are.
Bad man your soul is so vile it has no name you are despicable, you are evil, you are a bad man.
Lydia Mendoza (May 31, 1916–December 20, 2007) was born in Houston, Texas, to musically inspired Mexican parents. During Mendoza’s first ten years the family migrated back and forth between Texas and the Mexican city of Monterrey in the state of Nuevo León, as part of her father’s work with the railroad. In the 1920s, when Lydia Mendoza’s father left the railroad, the Mendoza family eked out a living doing musical performance, first in the lower Rio Grande Valley, and then singing for pennies and nickels on the streets of downtown San Antonio, Texas. The ten year-old Lydia Mendoza began her recording career—singing and playing mandolin—in the 1920s and 1930s with the Mendoza family who recorded for the OKeh, Odeon, and Bluebird labels. As a teenager in 1934, Lydia Mendoza did her first solo recording. The recording she made that day was of the song “Mal hombre” (“Evil Man”), which she popularized, and which became closely identified with her throughout her long singing career. In her later years, she recorded with DLB Records (San Antonio) and, in 2001, issued her last concert recording as part of her published life story, Lydia Mendoza’s Life in Music.
Mendoza’s performance career stands as one of the longest in American music history, spanning from the 1920s to the 1980s when a stroke ended her performing life. Following upon her early success with “Mal hombre,” Mendoza continued to tour with her family as an itinerant performance unit that offered a variety of acts. They followed the agricultural labor routes where most of the Mexican American population worked: north to Michigan, back south to the Rio Grande Valley, later to California. Her closeness to her audiences earned her two epithets—“La cancionera de los pobres” (“The Singer of the Poor”) and “La alondra de la frontera” (“Lark of the Border”). As a grassroots idol, she was loved for her ability to articulate a working-class sentimiento (sentiment and sentience) through song and through the breathtaking visual spectacle of her flashy hand-sequined, hand-beaded performance attire whose symbolic designs announced her ancient cultural roots in the Americas. She publicly marked the enduring presence of indigenous Mexican culture even throughout historical periods (from the 1930s to the 1960s) in which public displays of Mexicanness targeted you for governmental harassment and/or deportation by Euro-American officials. Along the migrant agricultural worker routes, she affirmed and celebrated Mexicanness during those decades when eating establishments regularly featured signs that read “NO DOGS, NO MEXICANS.” Lydia Mendoza manifests the social powers of music: her natural speech-like voice, her striking physical presence, and her songs, so beloved among the communities she sang for, symbolically reclaimed and remapped a Mexican America. Mendoza always enacted a space of popular collective expression, an audible Mexican American homeland.
Throughout her performance career Lydia Mendoza adhered to the oral traditional practice of singing by popular demand: she sang what her audiences requested. That traditional practice meant that audience members called out each song and they tended to call out traditional songs associated both with that singer and with the broader norteño cultural matrix. The repertoire of songs was not unchanging, and “Mal hombre” is testament to that. Once Lydia Mendoza recorded the song—a song not originating in the US-Mexico borderlands, nor of a borderlands rhythmical style—audiences welcomed it into the changing body of “traditional songs.” Thus “Mal hombre,” whose rhythm and cadences mark its origins in distant Argentinian tango or milonga repertoires, became one of Lydia Mendoza’s signature songs; audiences requested it from her throughout her performance life. It should, however, be noted that in the course of the several decades of repeated performance, Mendoza indigenized the “foreign” rhythmed “Mal hombre” into the borderlands rhythms of the canción Mexicana. Still, after Mendoza’s performance life ended, “Mal hombre” also vanished from the borderlands circle of songs and has not been recorded by any borderlands singer since then.
“Mal hombre” was, from the onset, something of an anomaly within the Mexican borderlands musical landscape. The early sound media—recordings, radio, and later television—as well as the Euro-colonization process of the last 200 years, introduced music from far-flung places to the borderlands. There were various waves that swept through the Texas-Mexican landscape: tango, foxtrot, big band, polka, bolero, country, canción, cumbia, and more. The Mendoza family repertoire of recorded songs manifests that rich variety of song genres: ranging from the deeply rooted norteño song forms to the more fad-oriented recent arrivals. Along those same lines, Lydia Mendoza performed and recorded a rich variety of genres from the oral tradition accompanied by the full gamut of Mexican borderlands instrumentations—including the button-accordion conjunto, mariachi, guitar trio, and more. Yet Mendoza’s mainstay ultimately became her performance as a solo singer self-accompanied with her 12-string guitar.
Mendoza notably self-designated as a “norteña” (a Northerner) and as a “Mexicana,” marking her musical cultural geo-regional roots as spanning not only the northern Mexican states of Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, Coahuila, Sonora, and Chihuahua, but also what was, until 1848, the northern half of Mexico, today’s southwest United States. As a mature artist, the mainstays of her song repertoire were the hugely popular canción ranchera (ranch song) and corridos (narrative ballads). The canción ranchera genre represents an evolution of the older Mexican canción. In the ranchera evolution, the love song often tends to be infused with imagery, customs, and symbols from the deep cultural matrix of Mesoamerica. During her last concert tour in 1986-87, Mendoza sang almost exclusively rancheras and corridos. She offered for sale her most recent cassette recording “Corridos,” which included, for example, “The Ballad of Joaquín Murrieta” (1829–1853). That corrido (narrative ballad) recounts the heroic acts of an iconic California freedom fighter that organized an army to protect Indians and Mexicans against the Gold Rush invasion. There is some common ground between such historic narrative ballads and the appeal of “Mal hombre”: they are songs from underdogs who face powerful odds against them. Singers such as Lydia Mendoza carried the voices of underdogs and thus impart the life lessons they embody.
“Mal hombre” (“Evil Man”) offers a life narrative in the voice of a woman underdog who at a very young age is seduced by an evil man’s “worldly arts.” The narrative voice in the song describes various stages of sexual exploitation: her seduction as a young girl, her abandonment by the lover, her life-and-death struggle, and her eventual downfall. The song’s popularity can only be understood in the context of the rampant sexual violence inherent of our patriarchal society institutionalized since colonialism. One of “Mal hombre’s” most notable features, however, is its beautiful poetics. No sexual act is described per se. Nor does the narrator offer any realism-based specifics of her demise. In the song, a great deal is left to the listener’s imagination, such as when she references “mi espantoso calvario” (“my horrific cavalry”). The female narrative voice of “Mal hombre” embodies a protracted life struggle, a feature shared by many classical corrido underdog heroes. The redemptive quality of this song, however, has to do with the victim rising to sing, with her strong indictment of the Evil Man, and with the fact that she has the last word in the matter, hurling loaded terms at the Evil Man with this refrain:
Tan ruin es tu alma
que no tiene nombre
Eres un canalla
Eres un malvado
Eres un mal hombre
Your soul is so vile
It is deplorable.
You are a scoundrel
You are a malicious man
You are an evil man
Through songs such as “Mal hombre,” Lydia Mendoza defies the subordination of women of color. She takes a womanist self-affirming stance in a number of her signature songs, such as “Mujer paseada” (“Experienced Woman”) or “Celosa” (“Jealous Woman”). Mendoza’s traditional corridos similarly praise the deeds of collectively cherished and remembered anti-colonial historical figures omitted from mainstream history books. At all times, Lydia Mendoza expressed in song her existential ties to her people.
In 1982, Mendoza became the first Texan named a NEA National Heritage Fellow. She performed for President Jimmy Carter at the Kennedy Center in Washington in 1975. She was inducted into the Tejano Music Hall of Fame in 1984 and into the Conjunto Music Hall of Fame in 1991. In 1999, she received the National Medal of the Arts from President Clinton. Lydia Mendoza passed away on December 20, 2007, at the age of 91.
Yolanda Broyles-González is appointed University Distinguished Scholar at Kansas State University where she serves as head of the American Ethnic Studies Department. She is a Yaqui elder of the Tucson, Arizona Barrio Libre tribal community. Her book publications include El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement (UT Press); Lydia Mendoza’s Life in Music/La Historia de Lydia Mendoza (Oxford); and Earth Wisdom: California Chumash Woman (Univ. of Arizona Press).
Elections observer who left message on ballot jailed for 5 days
Marina Popova served as an observer during the elections in St. Petersburg. On Sunday, she decided to vote herself. Prior to this, she specially had herself reassigned to Polling Station No. 2213 on Lomonosov Street [where she was working as an elections observer].
Popova told Rotunda that two other people voted after her. A police officer then noticed a ballot in the ballot box on which a pacifist message [“No war!”] had been written. According to Popova, a polling board member wrote out a statement saying that it was Popova who had dropped the ballot with the message into the ballot box.
Consequently, Popova was detained and taken to the police station. There, she was charged with “petty hooliganism” and, later, “discrediting the army.” The first charge sheet says that Popova disturbed the peace because she wrote a pacifist message in large letters in bright blue ink that was seen by people at the polling station.
Popova was taken to the police station on Sunday morning and never returned to the polling station. She was taken to court on Tuesday. When her detention period expired, she went home. She was taken back to court in handcuffs—the police collected her from her home.
At the court hearing, Popova’s lawyer Alyona Skachko told Rotunda, polling board members claimed that the ballot was state property, which the observer had spoiled. As a result, Popova was fined 30,000 rubles [approx. 300 euros] and jailed for five days.
📌 Marina’s husband Dmitry Popov and two people from the United Russia party were the only observers left at the polling station on Lomonosov Street after it closed on the last day of voting. During the vote tally, Popov was forcibly restrained by persons unknown who, as he claimed, tried to strangle him. Eventually, however, the police arrived and detained Popov. At the police station, he was charged with “petty hooliganism.” It is alleged that he used foul language.
Residents of 81 federal subjects of Russia will vote in regional and municipal elections starting Friday.
The elections mark the second time this year that Russians are heading to the polls following the March presidential election. That vote, which saw Vladimir Putin win a fifth term virtually unchallenged, was marred by widespread reports of vote tampering, restrictions on monitors and pressure on voters.
But unlike the presidential campaign, Russian media coverage of this year’s regional elections has been scarce — likely the result of a deliberate government strategy of decreasing voter turnout to a bare minimum of loyal voters, an analysis published by independent election watchdog Golos suggests.
Golos analysts believe that the Kremlin is betting on mobilizing a relatively small number of voters working in the government sector and demotivating all the rest to ensure a smooth victory for its candidates.
To help you understand what else is expected in the upcoming September elections, the Moscow Times has gathered everything known about the vote so far[.]
What will the voting look like?
Multi-day voting, which was first introduced across Russia during the Covid-19 pandemic, will be implemented in most regions for the September 2024 elections. The majority of voters will have two or three days to cast their ballots depending on the region.
Some regional electoral commissions, including in the republics of Chechnya, Tatarstan and Sakha (Yakutia), have chosen to hold voting on one day on Sunday.
Twenty-five regions will allow residents to vote online via the state portal Gosuslugi, while election officials in Moscow have scrapped paper ballots altogether in favor of online voting.
Independent observers have long argued that extended voting periods and online voting make voter fraud more likely, as it becomes harder for independent monitors and poll workers to do their jobs.
Meanwhile, the CEC advised authorities in six southern Russian regions near Ukraine and in occupied Crimea to limit access to online broadcasts from polling stations, citing public safety concerns.
G[ubernatorial] elections
Residents of 21 regions, including the city of St. Petersburg, will vote for their governors.
The ruling United Russia party has struggled to secure strong wins for its candidates in these regions in the past and incumbents hoping for reelection remain largely unpopular among local populations and elites, according to Golos.
The Urals republic of Bashkortostan will also be under the Kremlin’s close watch as Moscow-backed incumbent Radiy Khabirov stands for reelection in the wake of the January protests in support of jailed activist Fayil Alsynov.
Coupled with high numbers of war casualties in Ukraine and a slew of recent corruption scandals involving Khabirov’s inner circle, those protests forced the incumbent’s approval ratings to plummet.
But as in most other regions, the Kremlin mitigated the possibility of a potential blow in Bashkortostan by not allowing a single independent candidate on the ballot.
Regional parliament elections
Members of regional parliaments will be chosen across 11 regions, including the capital Moscow, the republics of Tatarstan and Tyva and the Khabarovsk region.
This year’s election will see the participation of a record-low number of political parties with an average of 6.2 parties represented on the ballot, according to Golos.
Golos said this worrying statistic is a direct result of an unprecedented scale of repression faced by independent politicians regardless of their political views.
“[A politician] can be declared a foreign agent or convicted of extremism to be removed from the elections,” Golos wrote in an analytical report published last month.
“And if they still [manage to] register and win, there is…the possibility of being declared a foreign agent and deprived of his mandate a couple of weeks after the elections,” the watchdog said.
Municipal elections
Elections for city mayors and city parliaments will take place across 22 regions.
Abakan, the capital of the Siberian republic of Khakassia, and Anadyr, the capital of the Chukotka autonomous district, are two of only four Russian cities where mayors are still chosen through direct election.
Mayoral elections had also been set for Ulan-Ude, the capital of the Siberian republic of Buryatia, but the region’s parliament scrapped the procedure in favor of the council electors system in March.
In St. Petersburg, where 1,560 seats in the city’s [municipal district councils] are up for grabs, candidates running from so-called “systemic opposition” parties — namely the Communist Party (CPRF) and the social-liberal Yabloko party — were barred from registering en masse.
And while CPRF managed to get 25% of its original pool of candidates onto the ballot, Yabloko will not have any representation in this year’s [m]unicipal [c]ouncil[s] race.
Occupied Ukrainian and Russian territories
In annexed Crimea, Kremlin-installed head Sergei Aksyonov will stand for reelection and members of the regional parliament and the legislative assembly of the Crimean port city of Sevastopol — its own federal subject — will be voted in.
The Kremlin refused to cancel voting in the Kursk border region, where Ukrainian forces have been carrying out a bold incursion for more than a month, and where Putin appointee Alexei Smirnov is seeking to secure his mandate as governor.
The CEC instead extended the voting period to 10 days and is supplying local election officials with bulletproof vests and helmets.
Kursk regional authorities announced Thursday that nearly 27% of eligible voters [had] already cast their ballots in the [gubernatorial] election.
GROSS: So Trump recently spoke to the Fraternal Order of Police, and he urged them to watch out for voter fraud. Let’s hear what he said.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: You’re in serious trouble if you get caught trying to find out what are the real results of an election. It’s an amazing thing. Do you ever see that? They go after the people that are looking at the crime, and they do terrible things to them. But the people that committed the voter fraud and everything, they can do whatever they want to do. It’s so crazy. And I hope you, as the greatest people – just as great as there is anybody in our country – I hope you watch for voter fraud.
So it starts early. You know, it starts in a week, but I hope you can watch, and you’re all over the place. Watch for the voter fraud because we win. Without voter fraud, we win so easily. Hopefully, we’re going to win anyway, but we want to keep it down. You can keep it down just by watching because, believe it or not, they’re afraid of that badge. They’re afraid of you people. They’re afraid of that.
GROSS: Nick, is that voter intimidation? He’s telling the police that these fraudulent voters are afraid of police, implying that the police should use that fear to find voter fraud so that Trump can win.
CORASANITI: I think it – certainly, were it to be carried out – would be challenged by voting rights groups, Democrats and probably even some Republicans – that that would amount to voter intimidation. It’s also pretty important to note that a couple states have very specific laws that, you know, outlaw uniformed police officers having a kind of patrolling presence in – at polling places during elections.
And, you know, there’s a very dark history in the Jim Crow South about uniformed police officers and voter suppression within the Black community. So a combination of history and state laws and then the kind of instruction that the former president was giving to these police officers could certainly amount to voter intimidation or possibly even more unlawful behavior.
] AND CONVICTED FELON MARIA BUTINA? Who doesn’t? Welp, here she is w/ your Daily Irony Supplement — and it’s a massive dose! See, as of Jan. 20 she’ll likely get a pardon and move back Stateside to improve on her spying career (hey, how could she do worse?); but in the meantime, she’s trying to get *Americans* (et al.) to go the *other* way, i.e. move to Moscow — y’know, like Our Guy Ed Snowden & his new roommate, Bashar al-Assad, who just *love* it there, right?
