What’s A Shameless Alpha Male Worshipper To Do?
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the thug who leads Russia’s most effective military force — a private group of criminals nominally allied with the Kremlin — is now threatening the official Kremlin leadership with armed rebellion, and openly declaring the war in Ukraine to have been undertaken on false pretenses, with phony rationalizations based on fabricated nonsense about non-existent threats from Ukraine and NATO.
In other words, all the internal Russian upheaval aside — thug alliances tend to break up when some of the thugs see their own advantage in separating themselves from the others — what is most interesting about Prigozhin’s public attack on the Kremlin is that he is calling out the entire war as essentially fraudulent, alleging that its real purpose was and is nothing but the unjustified takeover of Ukrainian territory for the sake of dividing up new wealth and land among Russia’s Putin-allied oligarchs.
So my question is, what are Putin’s most steadfast and consistent English-language apologists, from Donald Trump to Tucker Carlson to Jordan Peterson, going to say now? Their entire edifice of Putin apologist obfuscation, which was never anything but borrowed Kremlin talking points, has now been completely exploded by a rival Russian thug. To be clear, the propaganda story these Western fools were telling on Putin’s behalf is now over, obsolete. They can no longer spout the lies, because those lies, as they were spouting them, depended heavily on the implication that only the Western media was denying the Kremlin’s “legitimate national security interests” in Ukraine, and only the Democratic Party was claiming that Ukraine was an innocent victim and Russia the bad guy. Now, however, that necessary implication is gone, and with it all the best bull crap these apologists have been selling their millions of weak-minded, tribally-motivated fan club followers for the past year and a half.
And what is even more troubling, from the apologists’ point of view, is that Prigozhin has all the traits in reality that their he-man hero Putin has only in a photo-op fantasy world — courage, alpha-male aggression, a willingness to put his own life at risk rather than merely order other men into death’s way from a comfy and fortified palace bunker — which makes him, when push comes to shove, far more deserving of the loving admiration of little boys like Trump, Carlson, and Peterson, who apparently still dream, pathetically, of being real he-man killers themselves someday.
Do these fools flip to Prigozhin now? Or stick with the empty shell Putin? Or do they wait, their fingers in the wind, to see how it all falls out in Moscow over the coming weeks before declaring themselves too strongly again? Nobody knows, not even they, for they are only now being confronted with the rise of the new reality and the shattering of their Putin propaganda, and probably have not fully recognized the significance of this change yet.
