How The NHL Controversy Helps Vladimir Putin

Ever since the Philadelphia Flyers’ Ivan Provorov declined to wear a rainbow jersey on “Pride Night” He also cited his Orthodox Christian faith for the reason he was able to win the election. performative outrage from the sports media has been… well, no different than any other day because the only form of discourse our sports media is capable of is performative outrage.

This is because these sports media people engage in shouty windsbaggery in an attempt to conceal their total inability or incompetence to think for and weigh contradictory ideas.

I’ve only been to two hockey games in my life — and one was in New Orleans, where my big takeaway was serving hard alcohol to hockey fans is a baaaddd idea — and I quickly deduced that Ivan Provorov is Russian. Who is the Russian other than Ivan Provorov? Voldemort Putin, that’s who.

On Wednesday, NHL Network’s Senior Reporter E.J. Hradek went on air and declared, “Ivan Provorov can get on a plane any day he wants and go back to a place where he feels more comfortable, take less money and get on with his life that way if it’s that problematic for him.” Hradek also suggests Provorov join the Russian Army to fight Ukraine. “I understand there’s a conflict of sorts going on over there, maybe get involved.”

Set aside for a moment, the suggestion that one should leave America — specifically, the city of Philadelphia where they drafted the Constitution — for exercising basic First Amendment rights. It was a bit too much. Hradek might be interested in this Russian propaganda that discourages Russians from immigrating into America.

A Russian family boarded a plane to move to Russia, and they are excited. “freest country in the world … the land of opportunity.” Soon, they are repelled with an onslaught political correctness. The row of women sitting in front of them is married. One woman even refers to her spouse using male pronouns. A Russian man is made to allow a black man to pass him in the toilet line, supposedly as reparation. When he asks why, it ends with everyone kneeling and apologizing. The passengers are told to stop eating meat on planes because it offends vegetarians sitting next to them. And so on.

Suffice to say, you don’t have to be some alt-right Putin stan to find what is on some level hyperbolic propaganda an actually effective critique. I’m old enough to remember the Cold War pretty well, and it was plainly understood by most Americans that the antidote to Soviet state-sponsored oppression was tolerance and classical liberalism. Since we’re apparently unclear what the latter ideals mean anymore, that meant granting people with different ideas, lifestyles,

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