Useful idiot Tucker Carlson went to Russia to fawn over the clean subway and the Aldi-style shopping carts, and to interview President for Life Vladimir Putin last week.
In the days after the interview was posted on X, an Egyptian journalist asked Carlson why he hadn't asked Putin about the imprisonment of Alexei Navalny, unjustly imprisoned in a Siberian concentration camp, or about the murder of dissident journalists, politicians, business leaders, and Putin's own military generals. Tucker whinged, “Every leader kills people, some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people, sorry, that’s why I wouldn’t want to be a leader.”
Then Navalny turned up dead at the age of 47, three years into his 19-year prison sentence.
Even the National Review and Wall Street Journal were embarrassed for Tucker Carlson.
By the way, I added the name of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich to this cartoon at the last minute while inking it, and I should have fact-checked first. I have since learned that toward the end of the interview, Carlson did in fact ask Putin to release Gershkovich "as a sign of your decency." Putin, after complaining of a lack of "decency" from the West, suggested the possibility of trading Gershkovitz for some unspecified "reciprocal steps."
My bad. I won't argue if editors choose to omit Gershkovich from the cartoon (or to replace him with ballerina Ksenia Karelina, arrested for treason after Tucker left Russia).
On the other hand, I think it's important to keep all these names in the public mind. Editors who leave mention of Gershkovich in the cartoon can just pretend that later, Tucker noticed that he had a couple minutes left for his interview and decided to risk bringing the Gershkovich case up as long as his getaway car was warming up outside anyway.
Getting back to the part that makes this cartoon relevant to the worldwide LGBTQ+ community, Russian courts have begun convicting citizens arrested under new laws criminalizing so-called "extremist" LGBTQ activity.
Russian courts have issued the first known extremism convictions arising from the 2023 Supreme Court ruling designating the “international LGBT movement” as extremist, Human Rights Watch said today. The Supreme Court ruling, which was handed down on November 30 but became public only in mid-January 2024, indicates that many more convictions may follow.
The Supreme Court ruling also declared the rainbow flag a forbidden symbol of the “LGBT movement.” Displaying the flag is the basis for administrative penalties in at least three cases that courts have tried in recent weeks. In late January, a court in Nizhny Novgorod sentenced a woman to five days detention for wearing rainbow-colored earrings after an individual accosted her and her friend in a cafe. Also in late January, a judge in Volgograd region handed down a fine over a rainbow flag published on a social media page. In early February, a court in Saratov fined a woman for posting a rainbow flag on social media.
A police investigation of supposedly extremist LGBTQ propaganda at a "My Little Pony" fan convention in Moscow forced organizers to shut down their event this week. Police apparently were unable to find any My Little Ponies with rainbow manes, or whatever was allegedly perverting the morals of impressionable little Russians.
Russia's LGBTQ+ community is, of course, not the only target of the Putin regime's eradication campaign against whomever it slaps an "extremist" label on.
Since a court banned three organizations affiliated with political opposition leader Aleksey Navalny as “extremist” in 2021, Navalny and five of his supporters have been sentenced to prison on a range of extremism charges for legitimate activism, while dozens more have received fines and short-term jail sentences. Six members of Vesna, a democratic youth movement, have been in pretrial custody since June 2023 on various spurious charges, including extremism. Hundreds of Jehovah’s Witnesses have been jailed since the organization was banned as “extremist” in 2017.
And now, of course, the ballerina who raised funds for a charity aiding bombed-out citizens of Ukraine.
But at least Putin makes the trains run on time. And so clean besides!
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