Along with all his other hobbies, Vladimir Putin is making a PR push to re-brand Russia as a safe space for “Traditional Conservatives,” and he seems to have gotten some takers besides Tucker!
Carlson may have dropped by last week to get beta-cucked by Vlad and squee over Moscow’s clean subway and grocery carts, but even he is not dumb enough to want a dacha next to Edward Snowden and Tara Reade. (Yet. That we know of.)
But a couple of Dutch-Canadian YouTubers, Arend and Anneesa Feenstra, dairy fermers and property-flippers, really are! They claim they’re trying to immigrate to Russia because they believe pride flags flapping on Saskatchewan streets means that endtimes of Christian persecution is at hand, and Russia is more of a “Christian nation” than Canada. In other words, cuckoo.
They didn’t have family there, or know the language, but according to Arend, God told him to sell their farm and belongings and get eight of their nine children to Tbilisi for a final destination of Moscow, so they did. We can’t wait to hear how this story turns out!
The Feenstras haven’t bothered to learn Russian first. “We were naive on that,” said Anneesa. “I needed to use the washroom, and on the doors said male and female, but I didn’t know which was which!”
“In America, that wouldn’t be a problem, it’s free-for-all in the bathrooms, but now in our world it matters!” Arend marveled.
Next came days of their Russian handler filling out reams of paperwork on their behalf, in Russian, and hours of submitting themselves and their families to mandatory physical exams, including blood and urine tests, which seems not very Trucker Convoy of them.
Before they left Canada, God or whoever enticed them there also didn’t tell them about the whole banking thing, like they wouldn’t have easy access to money. Visa or MasterCard don’t work, surprise, surprise, and attempts to access their banking accounts got them immediately frozen.
“We have some cash, but, not enough!” complained Arend, and in a now-deleted clip, Anneesa was at almost her last straw.
“I’m very disappointed in this country at this point,” she huffed. “I’m ready to jump on a plane and get out of here. We’ve hit the first snag where you have to engage logic in this country and it’s very, very frustrating.”
But God will provide! And in Russia his name is Putin! What happened next was deleted and is now a bit of a mystery, with the clip of griping immediately deleted, and a new one with Arend desperately backtracking:
“After reading an article that said we were ‘disappointed with Russia’ we decided to remove our video. We are not disappointed with Russia — in fact the opposite is true. What Anneesa actually said was ‘I am very frustrated IN this country right now.’ This was a reflection of her inner frustration with not being able to speak and understand, she was not frustrated WITH Russia.”
With that cleared up, the Feenstras seemed to have gotten an upgrade in their handlers. When they reappeared they were driving around in a van ISO plots of farmland around in their chosen city of Nizhny Novogorod (once known as Gorky, after another famous content creator). Anneesa and the children toured a Russian art class, and the family appeared on state television. The attention they ordered had arrived! Their YouTube subscriptions went from a handful to more than 100k almost overnight, which if they had access to banking would add up to a kopek or two!
They haven’t found a farm yet, but now all 10 of them are in a two-bedroom apartment, with no vehicle, and homeschooling. But they say it’s worth it because woke Canada is so bad. On the show “A Russian Opinion,” Arend said, “You’ve got the whole woke movement, where a traditional male is seen as toxic in the west. In many jobs it’s a hindrance to a good career, because they’re trying to pick people from colored backgrounds…minorities.”
“You’re in the worst category possible,” empathized the host. “Because from what I can see you’re an alpha-type white male, who’s a farmer as well, so you’ve got the woke people after you, the vegans after you, you have the LGBTQ after you, you have literally everyone after you!”
Music to desperate-to-be-persecuted ears! How about all of you move there right now, racist conservatives?
There’s also the issue that Russia is what geopolitical experts refer to as “a shithole.” It’s grey, cold, authoritarian and has a GDP smaller than Texas. The land is mostly an unforgiving taiga that’s frozen solid when it’s not populated by swarms of mosquitoes that kill livestock by draining all their blood. There’s also the government gulag-ing and/or straight murdering anyone they don’t like, and yada yada yada.
But Putin and the Motherland are still plugging away at that rebranding potential! He has lately been calling it “the Fatherland” instead, very butch, and last May Russian state TV announced the possibility of an expatriate village outside of Moscow for the hundreds of “conservative-minded” Americans and Canadians who Russia now claims want to emigrate for ideological reasons, declaring, “the reason is propaganda of radical values: Today they have 70 genders, and who knows what will come next!”
What next indeed! With the YouTubes and the Xitter and the TikToks, the Fatherland doesn’t need Fox or the Republicans holding their dong to direct a non-stop stream of curated content to the gullibles. It has infinity hours to pitch the country of Solzhenitsyn as a haven for “traditional values” and “wokeism refugees” directly.
So hear that, traditional conservatives? Your dacha is waiting! Feenstras, we can’t wait to see how it goes!
