Don’t be fooled: Putin chose to punish Brittney Griner to exploit US culture wars

Make no mistake: Vladimir Putin selected Brittney Griner for particular persecution exactly to take advantage of our tradition wars. No American needs to be fooled into pondering she doesn’t deserve our full assist.

Certainly one of his kangaroo courts simply sentenced the WNBA star and Olympics champion to over 9 years in jail for hashish possession and drug smuggling, plus a superb of about $16,000. But the case was an outrage from the beginning.

Griner flew again to Moscow to play for a Russian professional ladies’s hoops staff. Plainly singled out for further scrutiny, she bought arrested for “smuggling” all of 0.7 grams of hashish oil in vape cartridges. How does that benefit the authorized most sentence?

No: The Russians singled out this American as a result of she’s well-known, black, lesbian and workouts her free speech rights to talk out towards police brutality, and so on. — and as Putin likes to play the normal conservative to attraction to Russians and lots of within the West, that made her a fantastic hostage as he jousts with the West in assist of his savage warfare of conquest in Ukraine.

(For the document, Griner’s dissent is a lot patriotic: In 2020 she advised the Washington Submit: “I don’t imply that in any disrespect to our nation. My dad was in Vietnam and a regulation officer for 30 years.” And: “I wished to be a cop earlier than basketball. I do have delight for my nation.”)

Sure, we’re doubtful about President Joe Biden’s bid to get Griner and one other US hostage freed in trade for releasing arms trafficker Viktor “Service provider of Dying” Bout, however that’s a aspect subject.

If you happen to low cost our nation’s obligation to face by this US citizen unjustly imprisoned by a international thug merely since you disagree together with her, you’re enjoying into Putin’s palms.

Putin’s propaganda, at residence and overseas, facilities on portray America as decadent and someway simply as oppressive as his regime. Standing agency towards his persecution of Brittney Griner, irrespective of how a lot you disagree together with her, is essential to exhibiting the world that our nation stands at the start for freedom.