https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-21-2023
"The list of 500 banned Americans that Russian president Vladimir Putin
released on Friday makes it clear that Putin is openly aligning himself with
Trump and today’s MAGA Republicans. The people on the list are not necessarily
involved with U.S. policy toward Russia; they are Americans who are standing in
the way of the Trump movement’s takeover of our country.
Notably, one of the names on the list is Georgia’s Republican secretary of
state, Brad Raffensperger, who refused to “find” the 11,780 votes Trump needed
to win Georgia in 2020 and thus take the state’s electoral votes from
Democratic winner Joe Biden. Also on the list was Michael Byrd, the Capitol
Police officer who killed Ashli Babbitt as she attempted to break into the
chamber of the House of Representatives, where more than 60 representatives and
staffers were holed up, on January 6, 2021. Others made the “500 list,”
according to the statement, for being part of “power or law-enforcement
structures directly involved in the persecution of dissidents in the wake of
the so-called ‘storm of the Capitol.’”
Since Trump’s attempt to overthrow the will of the voters on January 6, 2021,
his supporters have imitated the language and the laws that enabled Putin to
destroy representative democracy in Russia and Viktor Orbán to undermine
liberal democracy in Hungary.
Attempting to set a new kind of imperial Russia up as a challenger to the
liberal democracies that have held the majority of global power since World War
II, Putin in 2019 declared liberal democracy “obsolete.” At a time when his own
economic and social troubles at home threatened his continuing hold on power,
he lashed out at democracy’s emphasis on equality before the law, saying that
immigrant rights, gay rights, and women’s rights undermine “the culture,
traditions and traditional family values of millions of people making up the
core population.”
Like Putin, Orbán cemented power with attacks on immigrants, LGBTQ people, and
abortion rights while claiming to be shoring up traditional religion. Not
surprisingly, both Putin and Orbán have praised Trump, with the overlap between
the former U.S. president and the autocratic leaders becoming more pronounced
as Trump’s followers work to undermine U.S. support for Ukraine in its fight to
push back Russia’s invasion and in the Conservative Political Action
Conference’s decision to hold a second meeting in Budapest, Hungary, this
month.
That overlap is also visible in the anti-immigrant, anti-LBGTQ, and
antiabortion legislation spreading through U.S. states dominated by Trump
loyalists."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
