What does it say about the current state of America when a former KGB thug-turned-president of Russia can make legitimate points about our increasing embrace of the very same totalitarian impulses for which he is routinely derided?

Following the Geneva summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin, Fox News accused Putin of “trolling” Biden. That’s because for every accusation the president made regarding Putin’s authoritarian conduct, Putin cited a valid counterpoint illustrating the Biden administration’s equally thuggish behavior.

When Biden attempted to hammer Putin for tamping down on opposition to his government, and locking up Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, Putin pointed out that Biden has done essentially the same thing with regard to those who participated in the Capitol riot on January 6. “People rioted and went into the Congress with political demands,” Putin stated. “Many people were declared as criminals, threatened with imprisonment from 20 to 25 years. These people were immediately arrested after those events; on what grounds we don’t know always.”

It’s worse than that. As of this writing, a number of those arrested have not only been denied bail but confined in solitary confinement for months, prior to being tried. Whom the media and Democrats label dangerous “insurrectionists” includes an 18-year-old high school senior from Georgia and a 70-year-old Virginia farmer with no criminal record.

And it’s not just conservatives who’ve noticed that such treatment makes a complete mockery of the “right to a speedy and public trial” guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. “Detaining Americans captured within the United States indefinitely without trial or even charge is a clear violation of our Constitution and our values, and it must not be permitted,” says California Democrat Dianne Feinstein.

Biden’s response to Putin’s allegations? “I think that’s a ridiculous comparison,” Biden said during a news conference following the summit. After that, he told a flat-out lie: “It’s one thing for literally criminals to break through … go into the Capitol, kill a police officer, and be held accountable.”

That would be Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, whose death was officially attributed to natural causes, long after Democrats and their media lapdogs fully embraced and promulgated the false narrative that he had been killed by a fire extinguisher wielded by protesters. That Biden still clings to that wholly debunked narrative is astonishing. Either he is a propaganda-monger of the first order, or his mental capacities have diminished to the point where he is no longer capable of keeping up with the news.

In his own press conference, Putin compared the pro-democracy movement led by Navalny in Russia to both the Capitol riots and those led by BLM last summer. And when ABC’s Rachel Scott asked Putin what he was afraid of with regard to that movement, Putin insisted Nalvany’s moment had called for mass disorder and was extremist in nature. “America just recently had very severe events, well-known events, after the killing of an African American,” Putin stated, referring to protests following the police killing of George Floyd. “And the entire movement developed known as Black Lives Matter. I’m not going to comment on that but here’s what I do want to say: What we saw was disorder, destruction, violations of the law, etc. We feel sympathy for the United States of America but we don’t want that to happen on our territory. We’re doing our utmost in order to not allow it to happen.”

Would that the Biden administration felt the same way. Yet is has become transparent that the Biden administration’s DOJ believes some rioters — and some police — are “more equal” than others. One June 7, five Republican senators sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland regarding the inescapable discrepancies between the DOJ’s handling of 2020 protesters and his office’s prosecution of January 6 protesters. “DOJ’s apparent unwillingness to punish these individuals who allegedly committed crimes during the spring and summer 2020 protests stands in stark contrast to the harsher treatment of the individuals charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 breach of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.,” the letter stated.

The senators also noticed another glaring discrepancy: The DOJ has a publicly available website, listing all of the January 6 defendants and their crimes — yet no such database exists with regard to the rioters who caused between one and two billion dollars worth of damage. Damage that included the burning of police stations, molotov cocktails tossed at police in New York and a federal courthouse in Portland, the looting and burning of countless businesses, many of which were minority-owned, and numerous attacks on police.

And while the media and Democrats have labeled the Capitol riots as the equivalent of Pearl Harbor and/or 9/11, the multi-city carnage perpetrated by BLM and antifa were presented as “mostly peaceful” demonstrations that “intensified.”

What fueled those demonstrations? Massive levels of anti-police sentiment related to George Floyd’s death at the hands of police. Yet remarkably, those same demonstrators, who invariably insist cops are both systemically racist and murderous, are wholly uninterested about the still-unnamed police officer who shot and killed Capitol protester Ashli Babbitt. The same protesters who insist virtually every police shooting of a person of color is unjustifiable and demands a thorough investigation couldn’t care less about the clandestine one that cleared an officer who killed an unarmed woman.

Nonetheless, the focus remains on Biden’s ineptitude because he allowed Putin to disseminate “propaganda.” Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was especially incensed, declaring that Putin was allowed to “spout Russian propaganda to create the context for moral equivalence between the United States and Russia on every front, whether it was talking about BLM or protesters or our judicial system.”

That would be the “judicial” system that insists QAnon conspiracy theorists may engage in “real world violence,” while ignoring the realty that antifa and BLM have engaged in real-world violence, and Democrat-controlled cities do endure real-world violence by gangs — on a daily basis. The same system encouraging Americans to report on friends, coworkers, and family members who are “radicalized,” while conspicuously failing to define the term. The same system that refuses to release 14,000 hours of video taken during the Capitol riots because it is “highly sensitive” government material — even as selective clips are being used to prosecute rioters who, like the American public, apparently have no right to see exactly what happened — in totality.

But there’s no moral equivalence between Russian justice and a DOJ willing to preserve a despicable, liberty-crushing narrative at the expense of the truth?

Is Putin a thug? Absolutely. Does he have a legitimate point? Last week, former assistant director for FBI counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi insisted that taking on domestic terrorism required the DOJ “to attack and dismantle the command and control element” — one that may include “people sitting in Congress right now.”

Does that sound more like the FBI — or the KGB?

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” —George Orwell, Animal Farm