And From Our Correspondent At The Wuhan Institute Of Virology

Or was that the Moscow Institute of Homophobia? I can never remember....

(Vladimir Putin HATES you…and he DOUBLE HATES your if you’re…icky/yucky…LGBTQ)

Yes, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s pathetic excuse for an army may be the military equivalent of a Potemkin village. However, there’s still one thing Russians lead the world in by a country mile. Russia is the world’s multiple-time defending homophobia champion.

It should be evident by now, but the Russians hate the gays, the lesbians, transgender people, bisexuals, and the whole “abnormal” lot more than even spoiled borscht.

Then against, doesn’t even “good” borscht smell like it’s spoiled (asking for a friend)?

Vladimir Putin started a war against Ukraine that's going extremely poorly for him, and anti-LGBTQ hate is always popular in Russia, so yesterday Putin signed a viciously anti-LGBTQ "propaganda" law that basically bans any discussion of LGBTQ people, anywhere, anytime. Look over there, Russians! белка! (Means "squirrel.")

If you ever need a reminder why Putin is so popular among American Christian fascist types, this is why. They're more like him than they are like normal, functioning, patriotic Americans.

Longtime listeners might remember that Putin signed a similar "Don't Say Gay" law back in 2013, which purported to protect minors from being exposed to LGBTQ "propaganda." The new one dispenses with pretending it's about "protecting the children." Reckon Ron DeSantis's next "Don't Say Gay" law probably will too.

“Protecting the children?” Russian law doesn’t protect anyone except the oligarch class these days, and even those goons are wholly dependent on remaining in Putin’s good graces. In fact, “Russian law” has come to be understood as Russian not-so-secret code for “whatever our Dear Leader wishes for it to mean.”

By now, anyone LGBTQ and Russian with the means to escape from Putin’s personal hellscape hopefully already has. Any remaining members of Russia’s LGBTQ community are in for a rough ride- not that it’s ever been easy for them. Russia has always been a hotbed of virulent and exceedingly violent homophobia.

The new law expands that ban to spreading such information to people aged 18 and older.

The new law outlaws advertising, media and online resources, books, films and theater productions deemed to contain such “propaganda.”

It also broadens the existing restrictions by banning information about gender transitions to be spread to minors and bans information deemed to be propaganda promoting pedophilia.

Of course, as is true here in the US, there’s active denial of the truth that pedophiles, on average, tend to be White, Conservative, Christian, and male. Russians spread the propaganda that homosexuals are pedophiles to deflect attention from the truth.

“LGBTQ rights” in Russia is a running joke, as it is in some of the more Conservative Eastern European countries like Poland and Hungary, where being LGBTQ is actively and sometimes violently persecuted.

Still, no country has taken the hate as far as Russia- yet- but there’s a significant Panem et circenses aspect for Putin. He can, and is, using hatred of the LGBTQ community to distract from the absolute clusterfuck/disaster that is the war in Ukraine. The war’s an abject failure, and almost every Russian now recognizes that. They knows it can only end in Russia being seriously embarrassed by the West and their Ukrainian proxies.

So….bread and circuses it is!! Dance, comrades, dance!!

This law, at least on paper, is not going to be used to throw people in prison, but it is going to slap huge fines on them. Per the AP, 100,000 to 4 million rubles, or $1,660 to $66,000 for individuals. For public officeholders and corporations, they're much higher.

As CNN explains, what this law largely does is make it illegal to suggest that it's normal to be anything but heterosexual, or to be in a non-heterosexual relationship, or to be transgender. And that's on the internet, in movies, in books, literally just anywhere.

CNN also puts this into some context:

“The ban was rubber-stamped by Putin just days after a harsh new “foreign agents” law came into effect, as the Kremlin cracks down on free speech and human rights as its military operation in Ukraine falters. [...]

In early March, just days after Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian government adopted a law criminalizing the dissemination of what it called “deliberately false” information about the Russian armed forces. The maximum penalty is 15 years in prison.”

Vladimir Putin, never a functional democrat or a man of the people under the best of circumstances, is concerned first and foremost with maintaining power and keeping the money flowing in his direction. By tightening the screws on the Russian legal system, the power of the kleptocracy continues to grow. But the power to tighten those screws isn’t infinite; eventually the center will no longer be able to hold and the people will revolt.

With free speech and human rights continuing to be squeezed in an ever-tightening vise, getting accurate information out of the country to the Western media becomes an ever-riskier undertaking. Russia’s economy is crumbling, shelves in shops are empty as fewer foreign consumer goods are available, and foreign-owned businesses that haven’t already left are in the process of doing so.

This is not a good time to be bullish on Russia.

Bulwark writer Cathy Young, who was born in Moscow and is a good source for viewing Russian politics through the appropriate lens, writes that this is clearly intended as a distraction from Ukraine, aimed at a population that's a hell of lot more virulently homophobic than the West is. She quotes Aleksandr Khinshtein, the member of the Russian Duma principally responsible for the law:

The special military operation is taking place not only on the battlefield, but also in people’s minds and souls. Today, in fact, we are fighting to ensure that Russia, as the president puts it, does not have “parent number one, parent number two, and parent number three” instead of Mom and Dad. It is obvious that our confrontation with the West is largely civilizational in nature. That’s because Russia is an outpost for the protection and preservation of traditional values in opposition to the new pseudo-values imposed by the West, first and foremost being the normalization of sexual deviancy.

From the outside, Russia looks like a political system and an economy circling the drain, save that the nomenklatura has always managed to effectively insulate itself from the realities impacting the Russian people. The question, of course, is how long that will continue. Vladimir Putin cannot resist a popular revolt if the army and security forces turn on him and the rest of the nomenklatura.

Is a putsch of Putin and his cronies what will be required to stop the senseless killing in Ukraine and restore a sense of normalcy in Russia (if that’s even possible)? Or can Putin step back from the brink, extricate Russia from Ukraine, and somehow hang onto power?

Anyone who claims to understand the inner workings of the Russian government and, most notably, the nomenklatura, will almost certainly be exposed as having no idea what they’re talking about. Few in the West can claim inside knowledge. And what is “normalcy” in Russia. Once can go back to the rule of the Tsars and find nothing we in the West might define as “normalcy.” Life and governance in Russia have never been good or easy- unless you’re corrupt and ruthless.

And so we wait. And hope. And pray that somehow, some way, sense and sensibility will find a way to restore some equilibrium and stop the shooting and the killing.

When will that happen? When CAN that happen? Who knows? It could be tomorrow or drag on for years, with each scenario equally plausible. And that’s what frightens me so.

Because in the worst-case scenario, thousands of innocent people will die needlessly. And thousands of LGBTQ Russians will be targeted because Vladimir Putin needs scapegoats to deflect attention from his ineptitude and incompetence.

Remember when Russia used to be a superpower? Yeah, I don’t either…because it never really was. It was a Potemkin village armed with nuclear weapons. And it’s still that. It’s only stability lies in its instability, and capricious and volatility combined with nukes is a frightening amalgamation.

Don’tcha sometimes miss the grim predictability of the Cold War? We may have lived on the brink of Mutually Assured Destruction, but at least we (sort of) knew what to expect.