Republican party chairman Vladimir Putin was totally on brand in Geneva, slinging propaganda that eerily mirrored the lies recited daily by his American apparatchiks. At this point, who can tell who’s echoing whom?
By coincidence (nah) or design (yup), they’re all in sync about Jan. 6, which, in their revisionist re-telling, was not a failed violent coup that sought to overthrow a free democratic election. Nope, what you and I saw and heard on television didn’t happen at all. During his press conference at the close of the Geneva summit, Putin did his best to set us straight.
When an ABC News reporter pointed out that his domestic opponents are dead, imprisoned, or poisoned, and then asked what he’s so afraid of, Putin responded with this ButWhatAbout counterfactual word salad:
“On the question of who is murdering who, people went into the Congress in the U.S. with political demands. And many people were declared as criminals and they are threatened with imprisonment from 20 to 25 years. And these people were immediately arrested after those events, on what grounds we don’t know always. (Some) were just shot on the spot, and unarmed as well.”
He’d similarly riffed a few days earlier; during an interview on NBC News, he’d decreed that the people arrested at the Capitol were the victims of “persecution for political opinions…They came with political demands.” And in reference to dead rioter Ashli Babbitt, he’d asked, “Did you order the assassination of the woman who walked into the Congress and who was shot and killed by a policeman?”
That was all straight from the MAGA Republican playbook. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the MAGA Republicans are taking their cues from his Russian propaganda. Either way, it’s the most successful merger since Disney met Pixar.
The Russian murderer’s fake take on the Jan. 6 insurrection is echoed in spirit by the likes of Tucker Carlson (who says the insurrectionists were merely “older people from unfashionable zip codes” who “wandered freely through the Capitol” while they “talked about the Constitution”); and Senator Ron Johnson (who says it’s a “false narrative” that the rioters were violent); and Congressman Andrew Clyde (who says the rioters enjoyed “a normal tourist visit”); and Congressman Jody Hice (who says the real victim that day was Ashli Babbitt); and Congressman Paul Gosar (who says the rioters were “peaceful patriots,” and parrots the Putin lie that Babbitt was the victim of assassination: “The Capitol Police officer that did this shooting appeared to be in hiding, lying in wait, and then gave no warning before killing her”); and many more.
Is any of this a surprise? Of course not, and, most notably, it’s not a surprise to the person who warned us repeatedly five years ago that the Putin-MAGA axis was a clear and present danger to the United States of America. This prescient individual was back on TV yesterday, doubling down on the danger:
“When you take an oath to serve the United States, you take an oath to protect the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic. We never thought we had to worry about domestic enemies. We never thought we had to worry about people who didn’t believe in our democracy, in our Constitution, in our separation of powers, in our institutions. And sadly, what we’ve seen over the last four years, particularly since the election in 2020, is that we have people in our own country who are doing Putin’s work. Now whether they are witting or unwitting, they are doing his work to sow distrust, to sow divisiveness, to give aid and comfort to those within our country who, for whatever reason, are being disruptive as well as dangerous.”
Thank you, Hillary Clinton. Who, in a more just universe, would be currently serving her second term.