Russia Declares the Gay Rights Movement as "Extremist"

As his military remains bogged down in Ukraine Vladimir Putin continues to demonize and attack individuals and groups within Russia to distract the populace from his Ukrainian quagmire. Much like in some of Donald Trump's recent deranged rants, Putin seeks to paint internal groups as a threat to society and in the process criminalizes individuals and groups.   Sadly, one of Putin's favored targets is the LGBT community within Russia.  This past week, Russia's puppet supreme court in a secret hearing - no doubt to the delight of the reactionaries within the Russian Orthodox Church - labeled LGBT groups as "extremist" and further opened the door for LGBT persecution in Russia. American LGBT individuals, especially the ever delusional Log Cabin Republicans and other gay Republicans who think their whiteness and relative affluence will protect them, should take note of what a second Trump regime filled with Christofascist homophobes could usher in. Other segments of society need to realize that once a fascist ruler is in power, the list of enemies and those painted as "other" always widens and those who through complacency or otherwise stood back and did nothing later find themselves on the enemies list.  A piece in the New York Times looks at this disturbing development.  Here are excerpts: 

Russia’s Supreme Court on Thursday declared the international gay rights movement an “extremist organization,” another chilling crackdown on gay and transgender people whose rights have been scaled back drastically since the start of the war in Ukraine.

The court was acting on a lawsuit filed by the Ministry of Justice requesting the designation. When it filed the case on Nov. 17, the ministry said the activities of the international L.G.B.T.Q. movement had exhibited “various signs and manifestations of an extremist orientation, including incitement of social and religious hatred.”

The ruling escalates the threat for gay communities inside Russia. Gay rights activists and other experts say the ruling will put gay people and their organizations at risk of being criminally prosecuted for something as simple as displaying symbols like the rainbow flag or for endorsing the statement “Gay rights are human rights.”

Experts said the decision would make the work of all L.G.B.T.Q. organizations, as well as any political activity, untenable.

It could be used to mete out jail sentences of six to 10 years to gay rights activists, their lawyers or others involved in any kind of public effort.

That prospect has heightened angst and alarm in the country’s already beleaguered gay communities.

“It is not the first time we are being targeted, but at the same time, it is another blow,” said Alexander Kondakov, a Russian sociologist at University College Dublin, who studies the intersection of law and security for the L.G.B.T.Q. communities. “You are already marked as foreign, as bad, as a source of propaganda, and now you are labeled an extremist — and the next step is terrorist.”

President Vladimir V. Putin has sought to portray the troubled, protracted war that he started as a fight to maintain “Russian traditional values.” To that end, the gay communities are often portrayed as a potential Trojan horse for the West.

The court decision comes months before Mr. Putin is expected to use what he calls his defense of Russian values as a pillar of his campaign in the March 2024 presidential elections.

The four-hour court session on Thursday was held behind closed doors because the case was declared secret, according to Russian press reports. Although at least one gay rights organization outside Russia sought to oppose the case in court, no countering arguments were allowed, the reports said.

The judge ruled that the decision would take effect immediately.

Under the ruling, any news organization, blogger or even an individual posting some form of public message that mentions the international L.G.B.T.Q. movement without noting the extremist designation could face a stiff fine.

Soon after the decision, the official RIA Novosti news agency began referring to the movement as an extremist organization in its reports on the ruling.

Ivan Zhdanov, the director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation . . . said the decision was the opening shot in Mr. Putin’s presidential campaign and called it an example of an increasingly isolated Russia emulating the laws of its ally Iran.

“There will be a complete distraction from real problems, the creation of mythical enemies, discrimination of the population on various grounds, this is just the beginning,” Mr. Zhdanov wrote on the social messaging app X, formerly Twitter.

The way the Ministry of Justice wrote the proposed designation was ambiguous, so it could be exploited by virtually anyone to denounce a gay person as an extremist, such as a provincial law enforcement officer hostile toward gay people or neighbors who covet a gay couple’s apartment, experts said.

[T]he Kremlin has increasingly slapped the “extremist” label on organizations that it does not like. Aside from Mr. Navalny’s opposition movement, they include the Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose presence in Russia is opposed by the Russian Orthodox Church; and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which the Russian government has accused of spreading Russophobia.

In Russia, measures targeting L.G.B.T.Q. groups started in earnest after 2012, when Mr. Putin returned to the presidency. In 2013, Russia passed a law banning “gay propaganda” directed toward minors and expanded that in 2022 to prohibit anything that, it said, smacked of endorsing “nontraditional relationships and pedophilia” among all Russians.

There is a long tradition of nations at war singling out minority groups, especially gay people, for prosecution, such as Nazi Germany. The effort to build support for the war inevitably involves identifying external and internal enemies, and in Russia the generally negative attitude toward gay people dovetails with this effort, said Alexandra Arkhipova, a social anthropologist who studies the ripple effects of the war on Russian society.

Negative attitudes toward gays are especially prevalent among Russians older than 65, who are also Mr. Putin’s core supporters. They identify with his promise to return to the Russia of 1970, when the idea of gay rights and fluid sexuality did not exist publicly, she said.

Days before announcing the lawsuit, a deputy minister of justice, Andrei Loginov, testified before the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva that, in Russia, “the rights of L.G.B.T. people are protected,” saying that “restraining public demonstrations of nontraditional sexual relations or preferences is not a form a censure for them.”

Be very afraid of what could happen in America should Trump with his Christofascist/white supremacists base of support regain control of the White House. 

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Nikki Haley's "Reverse Robin Hood" Agenda

As the New York Times is reporting, the political network founded by the anti-tax billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch has endorsed Nikki Haley in the Republican presidential nominating contest.  The endorsement could help Haley climb ahead of Ron DeSantis in the nominating process, and the group says that Ms. Haley - who is talking out of both sides of her mouth and trying to appear "Moderate" -  would win “the key independent and moderate voters that Trump has no chance to win.”  Yet, when one looks at Haley's position on tax cuts and cuts to Social Security and Medicare, one discovers that she is fully onboard with the "Reverse Robin Hood" agenda so loved by the Kochs and their political allies.  Haley basically wants to take from the working and middle classes and give more tax breaks to the very wealthy.  In this, she is anything but the moderate she is trying to pretend to be.  A column in the New York Times looks at Haley's positions and rightly says she is no moderate.  Here are column highlights:

It feels like years ago, but actually only a few months have passed since many big Republican donors seemed to believe that Ron DeSantis could effectively challenge Donald Trump for the Republican nomination. It has been an edifying spectacle — an object lesson in the reality that great wealth need not be associated with good judgment, about politics or anything else.

At this point, both conventional wisdom and prediction markets say that Trump has a virtual lock on the nomination. But Wall Street isn’t completely resigned to Trump’s inevitability; there has been a late surge in big-money support for Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina. And there is, to be fair, still a chance that Trump — who is facing many criminal charges and whose public rants have become utterly unhinged — will manage to crash and burn before securing the nomination.

So it seems worth looking at what Haley stands for.

From a political point of view, one answer might be: nothing. A recent Times profile described her as having “an ability to calibrate her message to the moment.” A less euphemistic way to put this is that she seems willing to say whatever might work to her political advantage. “Flip-flopping” doesn’t really convey the sheer cynicism with which she has shifted her rhetoric and changed her positions on everything from abortion rights to immigration to whether it’s OK to try to overturn a national election.

And anyone hoping that she would govern as a moderate if she should somehow make it to the White House is surely delusional. Haley has never really shown a willingness to stand up to Republican extremists — and at this point the whole G.O.P. has been taken over by extremists.

That said, Haley has shown some consistency on issues of economic and fiscal policy. And what you should know is that her positions on these issues are pretty far to the right. In particular, she seems exceptionally explicit, even among would-be Republican nominees, in calling for an increase in the age at which Americans become eligible for Social Security — a bad idea that seems to be experiencing a revival.

So let’s talk about Social Security.

The first thing you should know about Social Security is that the actual numbers don’t justify the apocalyptic rhetoric one often hears, not just from the right but also from self-proclaimed centrists who want to sound serious. No, the exhaustion of the system’s trust fund, currently projected to occur in roughly a decade, wouldn’t mean that benefits disappear.

It would mean that the system would need additional revenue to continue paying scheduled benefits in full. But the extra revenue required would be smaller than you probably think.

It’s true that the budget office projects a much bigger rise in spending on Medicare and other major health programs. But much of this projected rise reflects the assumption that medical costs will rise much faster than economic growth, which has been true in the past but need not be true in the future. Indeed, since 2010, Medicare spending has been far less than expected. And there is every reason to believe that smart policies could further curb health care costs, given how much more America spends than other wealthy nations.

Still, Social Security does face a funding gap. How should it be closed?

Anyone who says, as Haley does, that the retirement age should rise in line with increasing life expectancy is being oblivious, perhaps willfully, to the grim inequality of modern America. Until Covid struck, average life expectancy at 65, the relevant number, was indeed rising. But these gains were concentrated among Americans with relatively high incomes. Less affluent Americans — those who depend most on Social Security — have seen little increase in life expectancy and, in some cases, declines.

So anyone invoking rising life expectancy as a reason to delay Social Security benefits is, in effect, saying that aging janitors must keep working (or be cast into extreme poverty) because bankers are living longer.

How, then, should the Social Security gap be closed? The obvious answer — which happens to be favored by a majority of voters — is to raise more revenue. Remember, America collects less revenue as a percentage of G.D.P. than almost any other advanced economy.

But Haley, of course, wants to cut income taxes.

My guess is that none of this will be relevant, that Trump will be the nominee. But if he stumbles, I would beg political reporters not to focus on Haley’s personal affect, which can seem moderate, but rather on her policies. On social issues and the fate of democracy, she appears to be a pure weather vane, turning with the political winds. On fiscal and economic policy, she’s a hard-right advocate of tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the working class. If calling someone a populist has any meaning these days, she’s the exact opposite.

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The Frightening Things Trump Is Saying

 

If one looks at what history reveals about fascists and dictators of the past - or Vladimir Putin currently - is that time and time again they raise the specter of internal threats, usually by already disfavored groups, as a rationale to destroy democratic government and to dehumanize those they label as foes.  This manufactured is also used as a justification to dismantle an independent judiciary which might otherwise bar the autocrat's rise to power or hold them accountable under the law.  Increasingly, we are seeing Donald Trump in real time use the tactics of past and present would be dictators in his quest for power.  Anyone who opposes him is being labeled as a "traitor" and/or "vermin" even though he himself is the true traitor.   Frighteningly, far too many in today's Republican Party for whom power are happily going along with Trump's fascism and ignoring history's lesson that those who go along with dictators often find themselves eliminated down the road.  Once dehumanizing opponents becomes the accepted norm, descent into violence is all too easy.  Look no further than all the Russian oligarchs and military officers who have mysteriously fallen from windows or down staircases. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the frightening things Trump is saying that ought to have alarm bells ringing.  Here are highlights:

In 2019, Kennedy Ndahiro, the editor of the Rwandan daily newspaper The New Times, explained to readers of The Atlantic how years of cultivated hatred had led to death on a horrifying scale.

“In Rwanda,” he wrote, “we know what can happen when political leaders and media outlets single out certain groups of people as less than human.”

Ndahiro pointed out that in 1959, Joseph Habyarimana Gitera, an influential political figure within the largest ethnic group in Rwanda, the Hutus, had openly called for the elimination of the Tutsi, the second-largest of Rwanda’s ethnic groups. Gitera referred to the Tutsi as “vermin.”

“The stigmatization and dehumanization of the Tutsi had begun,” Ndahiro wrote. It culminated in a 100-day stretch in 1994 when an estimated 1 million people were killed, the majority of whom were Tutsi. “The worst kind of hatred had been unleashed,” Ndahiro wrote. “What began with dehumanizing words ended in bloodshed.”

I THOUGHT ABOUT the events that led up to the Rwandan genocide after I heard Donald Trump, in a Veterans Day speech, refer to those he counts as his enemies as “vermin.” . . . “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

When Trump finished his speech, the audience erupted in applause.

Trump’s comments came only a few weeks after he had been asked about immigration and the southern border in an interview with the host of a right-wing website. “Did you ever think you would see this level of American carnage?” Trump was asked.

The front-runner for the Republican nomination warned that immigrants pose an immediate threat. “We know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. . . . It’s poisoning the blood of our country.”

Trump’s rhetoric is a permission slip for his supporters to dehumanize others just as he does. He portrays others as existential threats, determined to destroy everything MAGA world loves about America. Trump is doing two things at once: pushing the narrative that his enemies must be defeated while dissolving the natural inhibitions most human beings have against hating and harming others. It signals to his supporters that any means to vanquish the other side is legitimate; the normal constraints that govern human interactions no longer apply.

[I]t is our inability to regard other people as nothing but animals that leads to unimaginable cruelty and destructiveness.” Dehumanized people can be turned into something worse than animals; they can be turned into monsters. They aren’t just dangerous; they are metaphysically threatening. They are not just subhuman; they are irredeemably destructive.

THAT IS THE WICKEDLY SHREWD rhetorical and psychological game that Trump is playing, and he plays it very well. Alone among American politicians, he has an intuitive sense of how to inflame detestations and resentments within his supporters while also deepening their loyalty to him, even their reverence for him.

Trump’s opponents, including the press, are “truly the enemy of the people.” He demanded that the parent company of MSNBC and NBC be investigated for “treason” over what he described as “one-side[d] and vicious coverage.” He insinuated on his social network, Truth Social, that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, deserved to be executed for committing treason. . . . There’s only one cure for treason: being put to death.”

At the Waco rally, Trump declared, “I am your warrior. I am your justice.” He added, “For those who have been wronged and betrayed, of which there are many people out there that have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” Trump has described 2024 as “our final battle.” He means it; so do tens of millions of his supporters.

TRUMP’S RHETORIC IS CLEARLY fascistic. These days, Trump is being “much more overt about becoming an authoritarian and transforming America into some version of autocracy,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at NYU, told PBS NewsHour. That doesn’t mean that if Trump were elected president in 2024, America would become a fascistic state. Our institutions may be strong enough to resist him, though it’s an open question. But Trump can do many things short of imposing fascism that can do grave harm to America.

Trump, after all, has been impeached twice, indicted four times on 91 counts, and found liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Courts in New York have found that he or his companies have committed bank fraud, insurance fraud, tax fraud, and charity fraud. Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election. He was the catalyzing figure that led to a violent attack on the Capitol. And he has argued for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

That Trump would say what he’s said and done what he’s done is no surprise; he is a profoundly damaged human being, emotionally and psychologically. And he’s been entirely transparent about who he is. The most troubling aspect of this whole troubling drama has been the people in the Republican Party who, though they know better, have accommodated themselves to Trump’s corruptions time after time after time. Some cheer him on; others silently go along for the ride. A few gently criticize him and then quickly change topics. But they never leave him.

As one Trump supporter put it in an email to me earlier this month, “Trump is decidedly not good and decent”—but, he added, “good and decent isn’t getting us very far politically.” And: “We’ve tried good and decent. But at the ballot box, that doesn’t work. We need to try another way.” . . . This sentiment is one I’ve heard many times before.

If I had told this individual in 2016 what Trump would say and do over the next eight years, I’m confident he would have laughed it off, dismissing it as “Trump Derangement Syndrome”—and that he would have assured me that if Trump did do all these things, then of course he would break with him. Yet here we are. Despite Trump’s well-documented depravity, he still has a vise grip on the GOP . . . .

White evangelical Protestants are among the Republican Party’s most loyal constituencies, and in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center, more than eight in 10 white evangelical Protestant voters who frequently attend religious services voted for Trump, as had 81 percent of those who attend less frequently.. . . 81 percent hold a favorable view of him, according to a poll taken in June—after Trump was indicted for a second time.

It is a rather remarkable indictment of those who claim to be followers of Jesus that they would continue to show fealty to a man whose cruel ethic has always been antithetical to Jesus’s and becomes more so every day. . . . Many of the same people who celebrate Christianity’s contributions to civilization . . . continue to stand foursquare behind a man who uses words that echo Mein Kampf.

When are more Americans going to wake up to the threat we all face to our freedoms and in some case our very lives?

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