Don’t Let Them Tell You It’s Fair

The Belair Lip Bombs, “Don’t Let Them Tell You (It’s Fair)”

I need you to hold me
I need you to care
I need you to listen
They won’t understand
Don’t let them tell ya
Don’t let them tell ya
Don’t let them tell ya
Don’t let them tell you it’s fair

I see you look out the window
I know you’re close to the brink
A younger version of me
I lie awake and I think
So when you look in the mirror
Tell me what do you see
Starstruck, you gotta make your own luck
And I’m making a woman out of me

Well I know they think I’m funny
They’ve got all their money
Look what I’ve become
And just stop talking to me

They’re looking down upon me
A metaphorical illusion of a mezzanine scene
But don’t you quit that thing
He’s just a rich cat, subtract the judgement from him
And remember my name, remember my face
Remember the place where I came
And I’ll be out of your way

You’ve made it this far
I’ll make you a star
Hold onto my arms
And let out all the grief in your heart

Well I know they think I’m funny
They’ve got all their money
Look what I’ve become
And just stop talking to me

Well I know they think I’m funny
They’ve got all their money
Look what I’ve become
Honey I’ve never felt this free

Well I know they think I’m funny
They’ve got all their money
Look what I’ve become
And just stop talking
They think I’m funny
Got all their money
But I don’t care
Don’t let them tell you it’s fair

SOURCE: The Belair Lip Bombs (YouTube), 4 September 2025

Russia has officially withdrawn from the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture. It is a logical step. It was abnormal that a fascist state which had trampled on all norms of law and morality formally continued to be among the signatories of this Convention.

Everything has now fallen into place. A state that employs torture on a scale comparable to that of Nazi Germany or the Stalinist USSR has finally brought its de jure status into alignment with its de facto reality.

I would remind you that Putin’s Russian Federation has murdered 200,000 to 300,000 people in Chechnya, 133,000 in Syria, and approximately 200,000 in Ukraine, including tens of thousands of women, children, and old people.

Pictured above are two of the latest Russian victims of Putin’s Gulag.

On the left is Alexander Kondratov, production designer for the miniseries Liquidation and winner of the TEFI and Golden Eagle awards.

Kondratov was originally from Moscow, but moved to Kyiv in 2012.

In May 2026, he flew to Russia to get a new travel passport (what the hell for, one wonders). He was arrested immediately upon arrival at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport and charged with “high treason.”

There is little need to explain what “high treason” means in the parlance of Putin’s fascists. In Kondratov’s case, it consisted of “at least six posts” on the internet.

On 26 October 2026, Alexander Kondratov died in a prison hospital at the age of fifty-two.

Pictured on the right is political analyst Alexander Kynev.

When they arrested him, the Russian Gestapo broke his shinbone in two places and planted a kilogram of narcotics on him. He is currently being held in a cell designed for thirty-four inmates, which now houses thirty-five inmates.

The cell has a hole in the floor instead of a toilet. Kynev, who is on crutches, cannot use this hole and so has gone on a hunger strike.

The plight of these two men serves as a simple reminder: you must not be naive when dealing with a fascist state.

Fascism kills.

SOURCE: Alexander Zhelenin (Facebook), 2 November 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader

So here we are at last. After two years of Donald Trump’s Washington—the idiocy, the cruelty, the malice, the bullying, the bigotry, the hubris, the state violence, the monomania, the cowardice—it’s finally time for the president to make the first payment on the bill. Barring a catastrophic polling error (and when has that ever happened?), Americans seem set to deliver a colossal rebuke to Trump, who stormed into office last year ready to crack heads and is now doddering out the last days of his trifecta ranking asses.

The big political killer was Iran. Trump’s disastrous Middle East war fractured his coalition and doomed the country to a year (or more!) of terrible economic vibes. A week into the war, Trump’s approval rating was sitting north of 42 percent; it’s been slumping lower ever since. Nothing makes price-conscious Americans reach for their pitchforks like spiking energy prices.

But I think that the turning point in Trump 2.0 actually came a little earlier. The thing that convinced Trump he needed to beat a retreat on a core part of his domestic agenda was his fiasco in Minneapolis.

It’s only been a year, but it’s already easy to forget just how big a part large-scale state violence against Democratic protesters played in Trump’s plans in 2025. Over and over, the White House launched remarkable provocations against blue cities and states, from Los Angeles to Portland to Washington, D.C. These actions weren’t just intended to cow Democratic leaders. They were intended to stoke deliberate conflict between militarized agents of the state and people on the ground—conflict that Trump and MAGA could then repackage as content for their base.

Amid Trump’s many simultaneous assaults on the norms and laws that restrain the presidency, this content served a specific rhetorical purpose. In videos of riots and clashes with protesters, Trump’s government represented the forces of order, while those who opposed him were the forces of chaos. The law, Trump’s violence argued, wasn’t some bunch of buzzkill rules dorks and eggheads used to rein in great men like him. The law was pepper spray in an angry protester’s face.

As I wrote last October:

Trump goes out of his way to start conflicts. He wildly exaggerates the horrors of daily life in blue cities. He sends the National Guard in a shock-and-awe show of force into those same places. In the protests and clashes that result, he tells them the only way they can err is by pulling their punches. You’ve got to teach these criminals, he says, the only way they understand. They spit, you hit. And “criminals” are whoever Trump says they are.

When he ordered ICE into Minneapolis, Trump was just following the natural progression of this plan. But the plan quickly met disaster. ICE’s clownishly brutal occupation of the city spurred ever-increasing organized resistance from locals, who tracked ICE vehicles and made their job consistently irritating and difficult—blowing their cover by following them with blaring horns and shrieking blowing whistles, organizing deliveries of groceries and other materials to terrified immigrants wouldn’t have to risk leaving their homes, and so on. And videos of irritated agents lashing out at annoying but law-abiding and peaceful protesters started to turn public sentiment against the occupiers—even before things went catastrophically wrong.

And then came the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. More than anything else, these two instances of shocking police violence against peaceful protesters turned the tide. Trump and Co. wanted a constant feed of videos of police administering street justice to hooligans; instead, Americans’ social platforms were suddenly full of videos of deadly violence dealt against—in Pretti’s case—a man who had literally tried to peacefully place his body between an agent of the state and the woman he was roughing up.

MAGA’s propaganda machine tried feverishly to smear these two dead Americans as domestic terrorists and would-be cop killers. But no one was buying it, and soon even they had to admit it. Not long after, the White House announced an about-face: They were heading out of Minneapolis. From now on, federal immigration enforcement would focus on the red cities and states that would cooperate with less fuss. The blue-city occupation strategy was at an end.

I don’t mean to oversell this. It isn’t as though Trump et al. have gotten significantly more careful about the violence the state wields: Others have died at the hands of DHS agents this year, including Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine this summer. And, as our Adrian Carrasquillo reported last week, Good and Pretti’s families have never gotten accountability from the officers who killed them.

But Minneapolis’s resistance still achieved something extraordinary: At a time when Trump seemed at his strongest and they seemed at their weakest, they managed to throw him off his violent agenda simply by standing up nobly as individuals and as a community against his designs. Maybe—probably?—voters will put Democrats back in power today, and Trump will never again achieve the level of unilateral state authority that he enjoyed last year. But even if they don’t—even if Republicans beat the odds and give Trump back more or less united control of Washington—Minneapolis still gives us the model: You resist with whatever you’ve got.

SOURCE: Andrew Egger, “Trump’s Downfall Started in Minneapolis,” The Bulwark, 3 November 2026. As a proud paid subscriber of the Bulwark, I’m happy to share this essay with my own readers. |||||trr

“People Are to Blame”

Alexander Kynev: “A moment of patriotic joy. I don’t know if there is anything more bogus. Even the Young Pioneer line-ups of my childhood were more natural.”

The video Mr. Kynev has embedded on his Facebook page is entitled “Zapolarye Za Mir” — “The Arctic for Peace.” The activists identify themselves as “residents of the Murmansk Region” (and, indeed, are standing on a hill overlooking Murmansk itself.) In addition to the newfangled Russian “Z” swastika, the hoodies sported by the lead troika of “activists” are also emblazoned with the “We Don’t Abandon Our Own” slogan that featured heavily in Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and has been revived for the new invasion. ||| TRR

__________

A Perekrestok chain supermarket in Moscow. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

“People are to blame…”

I stopped by Perekrestok and was blown away. Bananas were 140 rubles a kilo, pre-washed carrots were 100 rubles a kilo.

The hypermarket itself is open until eleven p.m. nowadays, not around the clock.

“Prices have really gone up. Is this all because of the w*r?” I say to the middle-aged woman at the checkout.

“No, it’s not just because they’ve attacked the neighbors. It’s because of the people.”

“The people who unleashed it all? I hope they will be held responsible…”

“No, because of the people, all of us, who allowed this gang to take over Russia. And each of us will bear our share of responsibility for this. And bananas at 140 a kilo are still just icing on the cake… We are to blame for what happened. Everyone who let this happen. Everyone who ‘wasn’t interested in politics.'”

Source: Alexei Sergeyev, Facebook, 15 March 2022. Translated by the Russian Reader

Everyone Wants to Like and Be Liked

Mail.ru Group Speaks Out against Punishments for Likes and Reposts
Company Proposes Changing the Law and Law Enforcement Practice
Olga Churakova and Yekaterina Bryzgalova
Vedomosti
August 6, 2018

Mail.ru Group has repeatedly criticized high-profile law bills and laws affecting the internet. Photo by Yevgeny Yegorov. Courtesy of Vedomosti

Mail.ru Group, which owns the largest social networks in Russia, VK and Odnoklassniki [“Classmates”], has harshly condemned the practice of filing criminal charges against social media users for likes and reposts on social networks.

“Often the actions of law enforcement authorities have been clearly disproportionate to the potential danger, and their reaction to comments and memes in news feeds are inordinately severe,” reads a statement on the company’s website. “We are convinced laws and law enforcement practices must be changed. We believe it necessary to grant amnesty to people who have been wrongly convicted and decriminalize such cases in the future.”

Recently, the number of convictions for posts and reposts on social networks has reached a critical mass, explained a Mail.ru Group employee. Most of the convicitions are not only unjust but also absurd. He would not explain what specific corrections the company was going to propose.

“We believe current laws need to be adjusted, and we are going to make pertinent proposals,” VK’s press service told Vedomosti.

Mail.ru Group has repeatedly criticized high-profile laws and law bills affecting the internet. In 2013, for example, the company opposed an anti-piracy law. In 2015, it teamed up with Yandex to criticize the “right to be forgotten” law. In 2016, it opposed a law bill that proposed regulating messengers and search engines. But punishing people for likes and reposts has become a political issue. Members of the opposition and social activists have often been the victims of Criminal Code Article 282, amended in 2014 to allow prosecution of people for incitment to hatred or enmity while using the internet.

Communist Party MP Sergei Shargunov addressed the problem during the President’s Direct Line in June of this year.

“If Article 282 were taken literally, certain zealots would have to convict Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Mayakovsky, and have their works removed,” he said.

Putin agreed it was wrong to reduce such cases to absurdity. Subsequently, he tasked the Russian People’s Front (ONF) and the Prosecutor General’s Office with analyzing how the notions of “extremist community” and “extremist crime” were employed practically in law enforcement.

“Prosecutions for Incitement to Enmity (Criminal Code Article 282 Part 1) in Russia. Numbers of People Convicted, 2009–2017. Source: Trials Department, Russian Supreme Court.” Courtesy of Vedomosti

An Agenda for the Autumn
On June 25, Shargunov and Alexei Zhuravlyov, leader of the Rodina [“Motherland”] party, tabled draft amendments in the Duma that would decriminalize “extremist” likes and reposts. The MPs proposed transferring the violation described in Criminal Code Article 282 Part 1 to the Administrative Offenses Code, where infractions would be punishable by a fine of up to 20,000 rubles or 15 days in jail, while leaving only Part 2 of Article 282 in the Criminal Code. Part 2 stipulates a punishment of up to six years in prison for the same actions when they are committed with violence, by a public official or by an organized group. The government, the Supreme Court, and the State Duma’s legal department gave the draft amendments negative reviews, pointing out that the grounds for adopting them were insufficient. A spokesman for Pavel Krasheninnikov, chair of the Duma’s Committee on Legislation, informed us the committee would start working on the amendments when MPs returned from summer recess.

The ONF, which held a meeting of experts in July, has begun drafting a report for the president. The legal community, the General Prosecutor’s Office, the Interior Ministry, telecommunications watchdog Roskomnadzor, and the Russian Supreme Court must send their proposals to the Kremlin’s control directorate before September 15.

Leonid Levin, chair of the State Duma’s Committee on Information Policy, agreed there was a problem.

“The law is repressive, and there is no misdemeanor offense, although the Supreme Court issued an opinion that different cases should not be treated identically,” he said.

While there has been no lack of proposals, no one is in a hurry to abolish the law completely. A source in the Kremlin said dissemination of prohibited information should be punished. But a way of relaxing the law must be devised and, most important, a means of avoiding random convictions, he added.

A Demand for Liberalization
Recently, VK had been under pressure from the public due to the huge number of criminal prosecutions for posting pictures and reposts, said Pavel Chikov, head of the Agora International Human Rights Group. He argued the statement issued by Mail.ru Group was an attempt to defend the company’s reputation. According to the so-called Yarovaya package of amendments and laws, since January 1, 2018, VK has been obliged to provide law enforcement agencies with information about its users upon request, but the question of the legality of providing information having to do with people’s private lives remains open, since under Russian law a court order is required for this, Chikov noted.

Political scientist Abbas Gallyamov argued political decentralization and moderate opposition were now fashionable.

“Even the most cautious players sense the dictates of the age and have been trying to expand the space of freedom. Mail.ru Group is trying to be trendy,” he said.

Gallyamov predicted that, as the regime’s popularity ratings decline, the screws would be loosened, and the number of people advocating liberalization would grow.

Part of the political elite realizes many things have gone askew, agreed political scientist Alexander Kynev. A number of people hoped the circumstances could be exploited to push the idea of moderate liberalization. This could be a way of showing the regime was ready to talk, he argued.

“A lot will depend on what the autumn brings, on the results of regional elections. Now it would appear to be a topic that is up for discussion, but there are no guarantees. There are people in the government interested in having the topic discussed, but this doesn’t mean a decision has been taken,” Kynev said.

Translated by the Russian Reader