Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister says Iran's neighbors would act to shore up their security if Tehran were to obtain nuclear weapons.
Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, said on Sunday that Iran's Gulf Arab neighbors would act to shore up their security if Tehran were to obtain nuclear weapons, Reuters reported.
"If Iran gets an operational nuclear weapon, all bets are off," Prince Faisal said in an on-stage interview at the World Policy Conference in Abu Dhabi when asked about such a scenario.
"We are in a very dangerous space in the region...you can expect that regional states will certainly look towards how they can ensure their own security," he added.
Indirect US-Iranian talks to salvage the 2015 nuclear agreement between global powers and Iran have stalled in recent months.
Iran in September announced it had submitted its comments to the US response to the European Union’s draft for reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, but the US said the Iranian response "is not at all encouraging.”
A US official later said that the efforts to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal have “hit a wall” because of Iran's insistence on the closure of the UN nuclear watchdog's investigations.
Though Riyadh remained "skeptical" about the Iran nuclear deal, Prince Faisal said on Sunday it supported efforts to revive the pact "on condition that it be a starting point, not an end point" for a stronger deal with Tehran.
"The signs right now are not very positive unfortunately," Prince Faisal said, adding, "We hear from the Iranians that they have no interest in a nuclear weapons program, it would be very comforting to be able to believe that. We need more assurance on that level."
Saudi Arabia, which is Iran’s regional foe, has long spoken out against the Islamic Republic’s attempts to acquire nuclear weapons.
During the negotiations between Iran and world powers on the 2015 nuclear deal, Saudi Arabia and other major Sunni states expressed concern over a deal which would allow Iran to produce nuclear weapons – a position which placed them very close to Israel’s position on the matter.
Ultimately, however, Saudi Arabia's government announced that it welcomed the deal.
Prince Faisal previously said that his country would accept a nuclear deal with Iran if it ensured Tehran never obtained a nuclear weapon.
Our Parasitic Generation Yes, there is a lot of ruin in great nations. But even America is by now running low on it.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Posted by Ruth King
“Be assured young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”
Are we sure that there is all that much ruin left in the United States?
We are $31 trillion in collective debt. The new normal is $1.5 trillion budget deficits. The military is politicized and short of recruits. We trade lethal terrorists for woke celebrity athletes as if to confirm our enemies’ cynical stereotypes.
Our FBI is corrupt and discredited, collaborating with Silicon Valley contractors to suppress free speech and warp elections. We practice segregation and racial discrimination and claim we do not because the right and good people support it and, anyway, the victims deserve it. The country has seen defeat before but never abject, deliberate humiliation as in Kabul, when we fled and abandoned to the terrorist Taliban a $1 billion embassy, a huge, remodeled air base, thousands of friends, and tens of billions of dollars in military hardware—and hard-earned deterrence.
We are witnessing the breakdown of basic norms essential for civilized life, from affordable food and fuel to available key antibiotics and baby formula. Old Cairo seems safer than an after-hours subway ride or stroll at dusk in many major American cities. Medieval London’s roadways were likely cleaner than Market Street in San Francisco. Speech was freer in 1920s America than it is now.
The Breakdown of Basic Society
Our California always is a preamble to America’s future. Our present is likely your tomorrow.
Each summer here we impotently expect forest conflagrations. Millions of acres of flames pour more millions of tons of smoke and carbon and soot in the skies. Tens of millions of hated combustion engines cannot begin to match the natural blankets of aerial dirt.
The state seems to shrug it off, saying wildfires are both inevitable and natural. Old-fashioned forest management and fire-fighting strategies, honed over centuries, are deemed obsolete by our green experts. So, we let fiery nature take its better course. What is the implicit message to those in the way of fires that devour homes and trees? Nature’s way? Natural wood mulch? Or that such fools should not build their cabins or homes where they are not wanted?
What was bequeathed to us from a state of 15 million—magnificent aqueducts, once brilliantly designed freeways and airports, superb universities and schools, perfectly engineered reservoirs, and downtowns of majestic skyscrapers—in a California of 41 million are frozen in amber or in decay. They have few updates and even fewer replacements. The decrepitude recalls the weedy forums and choked fountains of Vandal-era Roman cities, which is what happens when a later parasitic generation mocks but still consumes what it inherits but cannot create.
Our own generation’s pale contributions are multibillion-dollar, quarter-built, graffiti-defaced high-speed rail Stonehenge monoliths. We prefer to shut down rather than build nuclear plants. Our solar battery plants are as prone to combust as they are to store electricity. And our urban streets reek of feces. All seem testaments to our incompetence, arrogance, and ignorance. We fear the idea of homelessness, and so cede to the homeless our downtowns and avoid what follows.
Our great universities, once the most esteemed in the world from Berkeley and Stanford to UCLA and USC, grow burdened with commissars, too many of their outnumbered faculties are weaponized, and their students have never been more confident in their abilities, and with so little reason for that confidence.
A return to syllabi and grading standards of just 30 years ago would result in mass flunkings. Failure on tests apparently means the test, not the test taker, is found wanting.
What follows is the erosion of meritocracy and competence. And that reality is starting to explain the great unraveling: why our bridges take decades to build rather than a few years, why train tracks are not laid after a decade of “planning,”and why to drive down a once brilliantly engineered, but now crammed and dangerous road is to revisit the “Road Warrior” of film. Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes are the apt characters of our age.
Institutions That Went Rogue
The FBI has imploded. It has all but become a Third World retrieval and investigatory service for the Democratic Party. Its last four directors either have lied, misled, or pleaded amnesia while under oath.
In 2016, the bureau with the Democratic National Committee sought to destroy the integrity of an election by fabricating a Russian collusion hoax. Its continuance and coverup ultimately required FBI agents and lawyers to alter legal documents, to lie under oath, to destroy subpoenaed phone data, and to outsource illegal suppression of First Amendment rights to Silicon Valley contractors. The nation now fears there isn’t anything the FBI might not do.
As we became hyper-legal with Trump, we are more sublegal with the entire Biden family. For a decade, with impunity, it gorged multimillion profits from selling the “Big Guy”/Mr. “10 Percent” Joe Biden’s name and access—sums for the most part hidden and likely not completely taxed. We all know it is true, and we all know the FBI and Department of Justice know it is true, and we know further that the truth means nothing.
This self-satisfied generation constantly brags of transforming elections. But it will be known more as the destroyer of a once hallowed Election Day. Not so long ago 70-80 percent of the electorate took the trouble of voting under transparent protocols. We replaced it in most states with 60-70 percent of the votes without audit and the product of vote harvesting and curing. Our generation, in just a couple of years, destroyed Election Day voting and Election Night counting.
The New Medievalism
Despite different calibrations, various data reveal what is self-evident to the naked eye. The American middle class is shrinking, if not insidiously sliding into indebted peasantry. Westerners are regressing and by design, now deciding daily whether to top up the tank, turn up the heat, or buy beef.
Society is also bifurcating. A tiny powerful minority has more leverage than any other elite in the history of civilization. And a large underclass of subsidized poor shares with the wealthy a disdain for the struggling middle class, the old bulwark of democracy.
In place of knightly penances and chivalric oaths, our elite takes Bankman-Fried-like vows to “fight climate change,” support “transitioning,” and ensure “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” But like their Medieval brethren, they do so only by first enhancing, not endangering, their own careers.
For the ruling class, prep schools, alphabetic certifications from tony universities, and revolving-door résumés are modern versions of having an abbey on site, a stately coat-of-arms, or taking vows from the correct religious orders. Otherwise, it is the same medievalism masked by pretension.
Our Rhine and Danube
America is rapidly resembling something like wide-open fifth-century A.D. Rome, when its traditional inviolable northern borders on the Rhine and Danube rivers vanished. Thousands of unassimilated tribes crisscrossed as they pleased on the premise that no one among their overripe, soft hosts could or would dare stop them.
Joe Biden just remarked that he is too busy to visit the southern border. And why not? There may have been roughly 5 million illegal aliens who have crossed it since his inauguration. He earns contempt both from those who try to enforce the border and those who cross illegally over it.
Biden surrealistically trashes Trump’s supposed archaic idea of a wall—always without noting self-evident truths about it: anywhere Biden stopped the wall or has not replaced prior rickety fencing, there are the most porous and trafficked entry points.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ various mendacities that the border is “secure” translate to allowing as many million aliens as possible to break the law to enter the United States in the four years of the Biden experiment. The administration sees itself in a race to create a one-off window of historic laxity through which millions can pour in—before a comatose nation wakes up and shuts it down.
We are approaching an historic 50 million residents who were not born in the United States, and of various legal and illegal statuses. In a sane world, we might survive the challenge—if newcomers had all come legally, learned the customs and language of their desired new home, were audited and queued by some logical meritocratic process, and were quickly assimilated and integrated by a confident host population that assumed any who wished to live in America surely desired help in becoming an American and felt gratitude to their hosts.
Instead, there is only chaos—and it is by design.
The legal immigrant waiting in line to enter the United States is considered a fool, while illegal aliens and residents instead quickly absorb three messages from their hosts. First, illegal residents will often be treated better than American citizens, at least in terms of lax law enforcement, various legal exemptions and amnesties, and unaudited entitlements.
Second, many will soon learn they can assume immediate moral claims against the majority population of their new home, who can be seen as racist oppressors and obligated to offer reparatory concessions in terms of hiring, admissions, and entitlements.
Third, too many will quickly learn, Ilhan Omar-style, to harbor a quiet derision for their benefactors. Their contempt is not due to Americans’ dearth of magnanimity and generosity, much less to “systemic racism.” Instead, their American hosts are silently assumed to be naïve, timid, overly solicitous, malleable, easily manipulated, rolled, and conned—especially when it is understood that if the roles were reversed and the entrants were the hosts, they would have a different notion of borders.
The idea of 330 million American citizens of different incidental races and ethnicities united by a common American identity of shared values, customs, and traditions is all but mocked. In its place is arising something like the former Yugoslavia—an undefined mishmash of competing and increasingly hostile tribal interests, with residents sorting themselves out into red and blue states that eventually will lead to two antithetical Americas.
So once assumed services, customs, institutions, and expectations are eroding—from a safe walk to a government office in a large city’s downtown, to a visit to the local public emergency room in extremis for humane, rapid, and competent care, to a clean, safe subway ride in a major city, or watching election returns conclude on Election Night.
A Nation of Thieves?
In a nearby Home Depot the other day, there were two long lines to check out. The other six were closed, as was the largest exit with several self-check-out counters.
Why? When asked the clerk whispered that the theft rate is high in the store and that from time to time it shuts down various exits to limit stealing or perhaps to confuse calculating thieves. I added that I had learned that almost any large item in a box purchased at Home Depot had to be first opened to ensure that key parts like knobs, wires, and screws had not been ripped off.
A local Walmart stopped its 24-hour service; again, the clerk said it was due to unsustainable looting during the early morning hours.
I also went to Walgreens and Rite-Aid recently. Much of what anyone wanted, from razors to antihistamines, was under lock-and-key. None of this was true just a decade ago. I live in a rural area among small towns—a world away from Los Angeles and San Francisco where smash-and-grab robberies and unapologetic looting have caused the mass closures of pharmacies and all-service stores.
Exemptions given thefts under $950 in some states may be the culprit. Others cite the post-George Floyd riots and the climate of unpunished street criminality. Maybe years of mask-wearing made us forget who normally had used masks and for what reasons.
Weaponized activist district attorneys and virtue-signaling mayors also signal to criminals that property crimes don’t warrant arrest, much less conviction, much less incarceration.
But whatever the cause, a once famously lawful America has become a veritable land of thieves. The criminal is all but exempt. And the middle class and poor suffer as a result from poor services, higher prices, reduced hours, and fewer stores.
We know the solution is to deter crime by assured punishment for the guilty. But the majority of Americans either cannot or will not demand a return to sanity for fear of some sort of undefined pushback from their elites. Pick your charge: “racism,” “privilege,” “bias,” “discrimination.” Any will do.
We have seen lots of cultural revolutions in this country, but never one that was so singularly focused on razing the foundations of America—until now. Yes, there is a lot of ruin in great nations. But even America is by now running low on it.
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A Partisan Thumbs Down for Sinema’s Verity
By John Fund
Yet ideologically she hasn’t changed much. FiveThirtyEight.com notes that she has voted with President Biden 93% of the time. Where she departs from today’s Democratic Party is over its intolerant domination by progressives. In her 2009 book, “Unite and Conquer: How to Build Coalitions That Win and Last,” she describes how as a state legislator she came to believe that reform will stick only if it’s incremental and bipartisan. She said progressives had caught “the dread disease” of “identity politics” and wrapped themselves in the “mantle of victimhood.”
To the far left, that makes her the enemy. Last year protesters harassed her in a public rest room, and her fellow Democrats shrugged. Mr. Biden said, “I don’t think they’re appropriate tactics, but it happens to everybody. . . . It’s part of the process.”
She’s being vilified again. A headline on the leftist Daily Kos website calls her an “isolated weirdo.” The Atlantic describes her as “ideologically unpredictable and erratic.” She replies by recalling her promise to voters that “I would not demonize people I disagreed with, engage in name-calling, or get distracted by political drama.”
Arizona politics will see a lot of political drama if Ms. Sinema seeks re-election in 2024. Progressives have been threatening a primary challenge, pointing to a September AARP poll that showed her approval rating at 37% among Democrats, 36% among Republicans and 41% among independents. But in a three-way race against a left-wing Democrat and a MAGA Republican, those numbers aren’t bad, especially in a state where a third of voters are independent.
The media is filled with stories of voters being fed up with extremists in the GOP. But Ms. Sinema’s experience shows that Democrats also have a problem with extremism. Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii—who left the Democratic Party in October and is a close friend of Ms. Sinema—says that “the level of intimidation by the left against dissenters is vicious and unrelenting.”
If conservatives can free themselves from Donald Trump, they can focus more on policy and then make the argument in 2024 that Democrats are the real extremists on everything from crime to education. That argument will be easy to make when Democrats say that even Ms. Sinema is too moderate for them.
Mr. Fund is a National Review columnist and a co-author of “Our Broken Elections: How The Left Changed The Way You Vote.”
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Will we still be a viable functioning republic?
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The Year is 1922
Very interesting for all ages.
The year is "1922,"
One hundred years ago."What a difference a century makes!
Here are some statistics for Year 1922
The average life expectancy for men was 47 years.
Fuel for cars was sold in drug stores only.
Only 14 percent of homes had a bathtub.
Only 8 percent of homes had a telephone.
The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.
The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower.
The average US wage in 1922 was 22 cents per hour.
The average US worker made between $200 and $400 per year.
A competent accountant could expect to earn $2,000 per year.
A dentist earned $2,500 per year.
A veterinarian between $1,500 and $4,000 per year.
And, a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.
More than 95 percent of all births took place at home.
Ninety percent of all Doctors had NO COLLEGE EDUCATION! Instead, they
attended so-called medical schools, many of which were condemned in the press AND in the government as "substandard."
Sugar cost four cents a pound.
Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen.
Coffee was fifteen cents a pound.
Most women washed their hair once a month . and, used Borax or egg yolks for shampoo.
Canada passed law prohibiting poor people from entering into their country for any reason.
The Five leading causes of death were:1. Pneumonia and influenza. 2. Tuberculosis 3. Diarrhea 4. Heart disease. 5 Stroke.
The American flag had 45 stars ...The population of Las Vegas , Nevada was only 30.
Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and iced tea hadn't been
invented yet.
There was neither a Mother's Day nor Father's Day.
Two out of every 10 adults couldn't read or write And, only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated from high school.
Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were available over the counter at local drugstores.
Back then pharmacists said: "Heroin clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind, regulates the stomach, bowels, and is a perfect guardian of health!" (Shocking?)
Eighteen percent of households had at least one full-time servant or domestic help...
There were about 230 reported murders in the ENTIRE U.S.A.
I am now going to forward this to someone else without typing it myself.
From there, it will be sent to others all over WORLD all in a matter of seconds! It is impossible to imagine what it may be like in another 100 years.
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So Michelle got in the act of trashing Trump?
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And:
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- The continuing decline in American education.
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Earlier this year, I was fired by Western Kentucky University after I canceled my classes to protest the bias and politicization happening on campus and in the classroom.
In the last year, students had repeatedly admitted to me that they simply ape their professors' politics to get through their coursework, and to avoid confrontation or grading bias. They also told me that they put little time into general education classes—particularly the humanities—because they felt that the faculty politicized their course material. In the Fall 2021 semester, a lengthy discussion with a perceptive undergraduate student highlighted the danger of universities promoting partisan ideas and politics. He pointed out that many students resent the biased teaching they were getting, and increasingly see the humanities and general education as not simply irrelevant but dishonest. Often, students aren't critiquing or grappling with ideas at all because rank partiality turns them away.
This claim troubles me profoundly, and I wish I could say I haven't witnessed its truth. But the reality is that many students feel that the university doesn't open their minds; instead, it shuts their mouths.
A 2020 study shows that, by a tremendous margin, students of all political persuasions report that college faculty express more liberal views in class. 64% of "very liberal" students reported being in a course that espoused liberal perspectives "frequently" or "all of the time." Only 6% of the "very liberal" reported hearing conservative messaging frequently. These numbers are consistent with the other end of the spectrum, as 63% of the "very conservative" responders reported frequently hearing liberal messaging and only 12% heard from the right regularly.
In the same study, 85% of "very conservative" students in arts, humanities, and religion majors felt that they are not simply hearing the messages but feeling "pressured"—with all of the term's ugly, unethical connotations. And while the liberal bent of the humanities isn't news, the data also shows that "very conservative" students in health-related majors feel that same ideological pressure 65% of the time. Nearly 30% of "conservative students" in the health majors also report feeling pressured. These numbers suggest that faculty aren't just failing to maintain neutrality—they are actively proselytizing.
Other anecdotes from my recent classroom experiences suggest these numbers aren't anomalies. In many instances, my meetings with students turned to the challenges of navigating a highly politicized campus. A liberal, Christian drama student suggested her faith was tested from time to time by her aggressively woke professors and classmates. A nursing major recounted being denied a position in nursing school and feeling as if the essay requirement on diversity was ultimately to blame. A middle-aged former soldier returned to college only to find that, despite his service, he was regarded as an oppressor and regularly reminded of such. A management major of African descent was frustrated with their professors’ assumptions that everyone black was on board with identity politics.
I myself had begun to grow increasingly concerned with the consistent push of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) emails and the clear indications of partisanship all around me: colleagues who scoffed at dissenting scholars like John McWhorter and Jonathan Haidt; syllabi declaring that the Middle Ages were, indeed, "queer"; signs in the halls with references to racial justice and messaging referring to "antiracist work"; a barrage of "training" and daily emails from newly minted DEI sinecures. In one instance, the university’s DEI Team urged faculty to: "kick off your new year with the goal of gaining/creating a greater understanding of the intersections of race, power, privilege, supremacy, oppression, and equity." Such emails are now commonplace. It doesn't take much to see the overreach, and the students see it clearly.
Much of this is why many Americans are losing faith in the value of higher education. A 2019 Pew poll found that only half of Americans believe college is a positive for our nation. Nearly 40% believe colleges and universities actually have a negative effect. A 2021 Ipsos poll showed that white Republicans feel the least comfortable on our campuses—about which so-called "inclusion" advocates seem to care little. As the Overton Window has shifted leftward on campus these last years, Americans of all political backgrounds are questioning the use and cost of universities. Indeed, this was a trend before identity politics ascended as the raison d'être of academia, but it would be naïve to suggest that the recent shifts on American campuses aren't in part to blame for crashing enrollments and negative attitudes.
I hate that I must state this to forestall the obvious labels many will attach to me, but I am a liberal. I've never voted for a conservative in my life. On the contrary, I've spent a good deal of time rallying against them. I've donated significant time, money, and energy to liberal candidates and causes. Throughout my career, I have also embraced diversity and inclusion (as defined before our current zeitgeist). I was part of an international education company that recruited students from around the globe and placed them in schools in the U.S. and Canada. My work is responsible for the education of thousands of black, brown, Asian, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and Atheist students from all over the globe. I have hired African American, Hispanic, and Asian Americans. I have fired many white people.
But I have always believed that one must be mindful of how tribalism can lead you to believe and do things that violate your principles. The recent shifts on our campuses have abandoned core liberal principles. I see racism being lauded as equality, and former defenders of free speech are now among the most censorious. “Liberal” means something wholly different to the latest batch of college administrators and education school graduates who have quickly declared new, hardly-examined rules by which we must all live.
The final incitement for my class cancellations was a meeting with the English department head, which I had requested to question the department’s messaging and address the student concerns. The department head confirmed that the department crafted public messages to support Ibram X. Kendi and other ideologically-aligned writers’ ideas, and that individuals in the department wanted to go beyond a simple affirmation that black lives matter and show support for the politics and political aspirations of the Black Lives Matter movement. The message ensures that the department will do "transformative anti-racist work," and the department head affirmed that this concept was intentionally selected as a call to action.
The confirmation that the university was endorsing these specific philosophies meant I couldn't continue to put my back into my lectures. I canceled my classes and agreed to a meeting with the dean. During that meeting, the university representatives assured me that the DEI messaging was general and neutral and that the Black Lives Matter statement in no way meant the people in the department supported these ideas. They told me that no meeting notes existed to document how the department crafted the messages, and none of the representatives could explain the process.
I asked how the university could, under the flag of "diversity," have possibly allowed one of the departments to link to a page collecting bail money for the same organization that recently bailed out Black Lives Matter member Quintez Brown after his attempted murder of a Jewish political candidate in Louisville, Kentucky? I implored them to closely look at the philosophies and actions the university was promoting in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. After all, the WKU DEI plan acknowledges that there is "animus towards individuals holding viewpoints deemed socially or politically conservative." The evidence suggests that liberal positions have moved further to the left, arguably leaving a greater number falling into what academia deems “conservative,” and thus a target of this animus. I suggested that, in the emotional and dynamic period we've recently lived through, perhaps there had been some overreach.
I asked to see some movement on these issues before returning to my classroom.
The university fired me instead.
What motivated me to challenge the university, risk a two-decade-long academic career, and pen this very essay was a defense of classical liberalism—a defense of free speech and the principles of the Civil Rights Movement. I am asking universities to wake up to the fact that many students are uncomfortable and are not getting what they came to college to receive. Rather than finding campuses a place of analysis and debate, enlightenment and erudition, many students find themselves subject to shaming and inquisition. They find themselves treated not as sparks of knowledge ready to burst into flame, but rather as vessels to be filled with whatever political ideology motivates their professoriate.
The current path will not restore Americans' faith in higher education. To save it, we must speak up.
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Biden wants to befriend the Palestinians and was pressed by the radical AOC and Muslim group that have taken over the party and they, in turn, pressed The, run amok, FBI.
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Russia mocks America and Biden's wokeness.
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Very Amused’: Russian State Media Mock Biden’s Woke Diplomacy
By Tim Rice
Russian state media are mocking the United States for prioritizing WNBA player Brittney Griner over former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan because of Griner's race and sexual orientation.
RT editor in chief Margarita Simonyan in a television appearance Thursday said she was "very amused but not surprised" that the Biden administration swapped Griner, rather than Whelan, for notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, as Whelan has "three problems."
"His first problem is that he is white. His second problem is he is a man. His third problem: He is a heterosexual. This is not something that can be forgiven today," Simonyan said.
Whelan, a former Marine convicted in 2020 on manufactured espionage charges, has spent two years in a Russian penal colony. "I was arrested for a crime that never occurred," he told CNN Thursday. "I don't understand why I'm still sitting here." During the television segment, Simonyan and the other panelists repeatedly refer to Whelan as a spy and repeat the trumped-up charges against him.
The segment suggests that Russia's propaganda machine plans to weaponize the Biden administration's controversial decision to swap Bout for Griner, who was arrested at a Moscow airport in February for possessing less than a gram of marijuana.
"American voters were given a choice: a hero who suffered while serving his fatherland … or a black lesbian, hooked on drugs, who suffered for a vape with hashish," Simonyan said.
"And well-known, for the sake of PR!" adds another unidentified panelist.
Bout, a former Soviet military translator known as the "Merchant of Death," was convicted in 2011 of selling weapons to a Colombian terrorist cell that planned to kill American soldiers. Simonyan, whom the State Department calls "Vladimir Putin's loyal propagandist," said Bout's release is "the first good news" for Russia.
"The second good news is that [the United States] spits on its heroes to the extent that it considers it significantly more important to free a rightfully charged, well-known athlete," the Russian propaganda chief said, adding that "this says a lot about the state of this society, of these intelligence agencies, and everything related to geopolitical confrontation."
Griner since her arrest has become a cause célèbre, which likely informed the Biden administration's decision to prioritize her release over other Americans imprisoned abroad. President Joe Biden has met with Griner's wife Cherelle several times, inviting her to the Oval Office on Thursday to personally share the news of Griner's release.
According to CNN, "senior U.S. government officials" visited Whelan's sister to "share and talk through the news" that her brother was not being released.
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