The Russian government have added opposition leader Alexei Navalny and his pals to a list of terrorists, the Associated Press reports on a pointless gesture directed at people mostly already in prison anyway, meant to distract from everything going to shit in the country under Vladimir Putin’s failed leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic and parallel economic crisis.
The situation bears some similarities to the later months of Donald Trump’s disastrous presidency when the Donald vowed to designate leftist Antifa protestors as terrorists and promptly failed to do so as there is no federal registry for domestic terrorist groups in the United States. Well, it’s similar in that Trump said he would do it. He didn’t, because he had no interest in putting in the work necessary to create a federal domestic terrorist group designation. Or he didn’t want to do it because he knew it’d end up being mostly the violent right wing militias like the Oath Keepers, 3%ers, and others that swore loyalty to him would end up on the list too. Or both. Probably both.