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Alexei Navalny Lived and Died in Truth Bari Weiss

Published

11 months ago

February 17, 2024

Alexei Navalny on the January 2021 flight that took him from Berlin to Moscow, where he was immediately arrested. (Photo by Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images)

Alexei Navalny had a choice.

After he was poisoned by Moscow in August of 2020, after he emerged from a monthlong coma in a Berlin hospital, after he overcame the terrible effects of the nerve agent Novichok, which was developed by the Soviet Union, he could have stayed in exile in Germany.

He had already become the most important dissident in Russia. The choice—certainly the rational choice—would have been to remain outside of Putin’s reach.

But Navalny made the opposite one.

“There was never a question for me whether to return or not,” he said upon his recovery in Berlin. “They are doing everything to scare me. But what they are doing there is not of much interest to me. Russia is my country. Moscow is my city. I miss them.”

So he flew back to Moscow. He was arrested at the airport on January 17, 2021. Then he was sentenced on bogus charges of embezzlement, extremism, and fraud and sent to a penal colony 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle. They called it “Polar Wolf.” The punishment was 19 years.

It was in that gulag that Navalny—a man who will be remembered forever as one of the heroes of our darkening century—was killed earlier today.

In this, Navalny joins a long line of ordinary and noble people who were and are the victims of Stalinist tyranny and now Russian authoritarianism.

People like:

Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist and author of Putin’s Russia, who was shot dead on October 7, 2006—Putin’s birthday—in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow. She was 48 years old.

Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent turned British defector, who was hospitalized for polonium-210 poisoning and died 22 days later, on November 23, 2006. His chief crime was saying out loud what everyone suspected: that Russian intelligence had killed the oligarch Boris Berezovsky.

Sergei Magnitsky, responsible for exposing corruption and misconduct by Russian government officials, who served 358 days in a Moscow prison before he died at 37 years old, on November 16, 2009.

Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated on February 27, 2015, beside his Ukrainian wife on a bridge near the Kremlin, in Moscow, where he was organizing a rally against Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.

“There has always been a surplus of servitude and a deficit of freedom in Russia,” he once said. “We value those who grovel, which is why Russia remains a ‘nation of slaves and princes’ to this day.”

When I woke up early Friday morning to the news that Russia’s most courageous hero had been murdered, I called up another one. Natan Sharansky spent nine years of his life in the gulag where Navalny was murdered. Sharansky’s crime was his desire to immigrate to Israel, where he now lives, in Jerusalem.

“I can’t collect myself,” Sharansky told me. “He was the most fearless person I knew—and the most stubborn in unmasking the true nature of this regime.

“Even after an assassination attempt by the regime left him on the brink of death, he turned his own horrific experience into a tool to expose Putin’s method, by getting one of his would-be assassins to reveal his mission and the men who sent him. And in going back he sent a clear message to the people of Russia and to the world that he was not afraid of Putin’s regime—and neither should they be too afraid to act,” Sharansky said.

“People prefer to run away from the truth because the truth is very tough,” he went on. “It demands that you change your behavior—not to just enjoy life and the privileges of being close to the regime. He did more than anyone in the history of Russia to show to millions of citizens the regime’s real nature. He was the great producer, the great actor. But the stage was the world. And the price was his own life.

“I dedicated my book The Case for Democracy to the memory of Andrei Sakharov, a man who proved that with moral clarity and courage we can change the world. That’s Navalny,” said Sharansky. “At some point people are scared. It is against nature not to be scared. But he said: you can be very strong. He said there is black and there is white. It’s so clear. It’s so simple. Moral clarity without any compromises.”

In our world of cynicism and cowardice, it often doesn’t seem so simple. But Navalny’s life—a life lived in truth—and his death—a death for the sake of truth—gives the lie to the moral confusion all around us.

The life and death of Navalny insists on the following: there is a free world and an unfree world. There is right and there is wrong. There is better and worse, good and evil. There is truth and there are lies. And heroes, however imperfect, walk among us still.

“My message if I am killed is very simple,” he told the filmmaker Daniel Roher in 2022. “Do not give up.”

People across Russia heard that message. In St. Petersburg, people waved their phone flashlights at the Memorial to Victims of Political Repression. In Moscow, people lined up in the snow to lay flowers in Navalny’s memory at a memorial to gulag victims. His wife, Yulia, got onstage in Munich hours after the news and said this: “I thought about it. Should I stand here before you or should I go back to my children? And then I thought, what would Alexei do in my place? And I am sure that he would have been standing here on this stage.”

Just beneath that clip of Navalny’s heroic wife I come across another. This is one of Tucker Carlson praising a Moscow grocery store, where he is mesmerized by the cart system that disincentivizes shoppers from “taking the carts back to their homeless encampments” and by the low prices. Then there is another of him inside the Moscow subway system, praising its order and cleanliness and set to soaring music.

I am reminded of a passage from one of Sharansky’s fellow dissidents and Navalny’s political ancestors: Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In his 1976 book Warning to the West, he wrote this: “Human nature is full of riddles. One of those riddles is: How is it that the people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find strength in themselves to rise up and free themselves first in spirit and then in body, while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for it, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery?”

Navalny was in the darkest pit. And yet he remained free. May his example live for all time. God knows we need it in ours.

LAST MONTH IN ISRAEL I GOT A CHANCE TO INTERVIEW SHARANSKY LIVE IN TEL AVIV. WATCH THAT VIDEO HERE:

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Does the West Need a Religious Revival? Join Us for Our Next Live Debate. The Free Press

Published

6 hours ago

January 14, 2025

admin

In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt outlined his vision for four fundamental freedoms that ought to be secured for people everywhere: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

These four ideals formed the bedrock of the liberal world order. But in 2025, they are under threat from a radically new set of technological, economic, and cultural challenges.

What does free speech look like on the internet, where a handful of tech giants control the flow of information? Would the crisis of meaning in our society be alleviated if people turned back to religion? Why, in an age of unprecedented prosperity, are so many of us so unhappy? And how can we guarantee both freedom and security in an era of mass surveillance?

This year, The Free Press is partnering with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) to present The Freedom Debates, four live debates in cities across the country that speak to FDR’s four freedoms and tackle the urgent, complex questions associated with them. We are thrilled to have the support of FIRE, the country’s premier civil liberties organization, for this series.

Our first debate—“Does the West Need a Religious Revival?”—will take place February 27 at The Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas, featuring Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ross Douthat, Adam Carolla, and Michael Shermer.

Paid subscribers can head HERE to purchase presale tickets before they open to the general public in 24 hours, using the code at the end of this article.

We can’t think of a topic more urgent than this one.

Anyone with eyes to see has noticed that our culture is fraying. It’s not just the degradation of trust in institutions, the extreme political polarization, and the culture wars tearing our communities apart. Marriage rates have reached historic lows, as have childbirths. Conversely, depression, anxiety, loneliness, addiction, and deaths of despair have spiked.

It’s a crisis of meaning that has befallen not just the United States but most countries in the West.

In recent years, a growing chorus of intellectuals has pointed to the decline of traditional religion as a culprit. Our existential dread, they argue, is the result of a “God-shaped hole,” filled only with consumerism, hedonism, nihilism, and destructive ideological movements. That was the subject of one of the most important essays we published last year: Peter Savodnik’s “How Intellectuals Found God.”

At the time of FDR’s Four Freedoms speech, American churches were flourishing. One half of Americans were attending services regularly. Now, fewer than half of us even belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque.

Despite their emphasis on freedom of worship, the founders of the United States understood religion to be fundamental to a well-functioning society. John Adams wrote in 1798 that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Is rising secularism the culprit for our modern malaise? Or is the problem elsewhere—the result of rapid technological changes, growing economic inequality, and other social disruptions? And would a return to religion be a return to dogma, repression, and intolerance?

On February 27, we’re convening an all-star lineup to answer the question: “Does the West Need a Religious Revival?” For the first event of our Freedom Debates series, Ross Douthat and Ayaan Hirsi Ali will face off against Adam Carolla and Michael Shermer.

Paid subscribers now have exclusive access to purchase presale tickets before they open to the general public in 24 hours. The access code is below.

Does the West Need a Religious Revival? Join Us for Our Next Live Debate. — Eitan Gutenmacher for *The Free Press*

At The Free Press, passionate, smart, good-faith debate is at the very core of our mission. Our commitment to open conversation is why we partnered with FIRE to host our America Debates series last year. We are so proud to partner with them again on this year’s series, The Freedom Debates.

We are grateful to our paid subscribers for making this debate, and everything we do at The Free Press, possible. We encourage you to take advantage of the 24-hour presale period by using the access code at the end of this email.

VIP tickets include an invitation to our debate after-party, where you’ll chat with Bari Weiss and members of The Free Press and FIRE teams, mingle with the debaters, and get a chance to meet each other IRL. Plus: strong drinks and great food. You won’t want to miss it.

If you’re a student, verify your academic status here to receive a special student discount code!

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WATCH: LA Fires, MAGA’s Schism, and Meta’s Big Pivot Bari Weiss

Published

6 hours ago

January 14, 2025

admin

Trump’s inauguration is right around the corner, and there is so much to cover about the new White House. In the coming weeks, we’ll have key figures in the Trump administration on Honestly to talk about what they are planning.

But, we all know that if Trump 2.0 is anything like Trump 1.0, there are going to be a lot of twists and turns here. And we want…

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Landlords gouge victims of LA fires Judd Legum

Published

10 hours ago

January 14, 2025

admin

The devastating fires in Los Angeles have killed 24 people. The fires have burned tens of thousands of acres, and hundreds of thousands of Angelenos have been forced to evacuate. The blaze has destroyed at least 12,000 structures and thousands of people have nowhere to live.

For most people, this is a horrific tragedy. But numerous landlords in the area are treating it as a money-making opportunity.

A review of rental listings revealed dozens of properties where the landlords have sharply increased their prices since the fires began on January 7. Popular Information used Zillow to identify rental homes in communities near the areas impacted by the fires — including Pacific Palisades, Santa Monica, Manhattan Beach, Huntington Beach, and the San Fernando Valley — that have increased their asking price over the last week.

While not every rent increase is evidence of exploitation, the timing and scale of many increases strongly suggest price gouging is occurring.

In Manhattan Beach, for example, Popular Information identified a five-bedroom home listed on December 31, 2024, for $8,750 per month. By Monday, the rent was bumped up 125 percent to $19,750 monthly.

But it is not only luxury properties with ocean views whose prices have skyrocketed in the last week.

A three-bedroom home in Tujunga, listed for $4,100 on December 28, was increased to $8,500 on January 7, the day the Pacific Palisades fire broke out, 93 percent higher than its initial listing price.

Popular Information found dozens of homes whose rents property managers have hiked during Los Angeles’s state of emergency. Some are 5,000-square-foot mansions that regularly go for tens of thousands of dollars per month. Others are modest single-family homes that can already be too expensive for many renters.

California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) declared a State of Emergency for Los Angeles and Ventura counties on January 7. Landlords who have increased rent by more than 10% since January 7 could find themselves on the wrong side of the law. California’s price gouging law prohibits increasing rental prices by more than 10% for 30 days after a State of Emergency is declared. For housing not rented at the time of the declaration, the rental price is defined as the most recent price paid or offered within one year. (For housing that hasn’t been offered for rent within the last year, the price is capped at “160 percent of the fair market rent established by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development.”)

Violations of the state’s price gouging law are punishable by up to a year in jail, a $10,000 fine, or both. On Sunday, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said that state and federal prosecutors were “very eager to prosecute anyone who thinks they’re going to take advantage of the people who have been through this tragedy.”

Some landlords appear to be belatedly familiarizing themselves with the law. Popular Information identified several properties where the rental prices were increased well in excess of 10% after January 7 but then subsequently decreased to be at or just below the legal limit. These landlords are also exploiting the fires to increase their profits, but they are now doing so within the technical limits of the law.

One four-bedroom home in Glendale has undergone three price changes in less than a week. After being purchased in November 2024 for just over $3 million, the house was listed on January 7 at $11,800 per month. Two days later, the price shot up to $17,900 per month, a 51% increase. Then on January 12, the price was reduced to $12,980 — exactly 10 percent higher than the price it was listed for on January 7, making it the legal maximum the property manager can charge under the emergency order.

A three-bedroom home in Sherman Oaks, CA was initially listed for $6,975 on December 3 and then increased to $8,000 on January 9 — a 14.7% increase. On January 12, the price was adjusted to $7,670, representing a 9.96% increase over the initially listed rent.

Popular Information also found two properties whose rents were raised by 40% and 60% that were then reduced but remain above the legal limit. Several other properties have been reduced to below the 10% threshold.

Popular Information’s analysis focused on rental homes, and not apartments, because prices for multi-family units are more opaque. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, however, emphasized that large corporate landlords will also be scrutinized. In a press conference on Saturday, Bonta noted that “some of our landlords use algorithms based on demand and supply to set their prices,” referring to AI software like RealPage. Bonta warned that blaming software, or claiming ignorance of the law, “is not an excuse.”