OLIVER GHORBANIFAR: Seriously? The media is weeping for Alexei Navalny?

Recently, the mainstream media decided to rapidly increase its production rate—impressive even in the most uneventful of times—of sanctimony and cheap emotional blackmail.

But this time it wasn’t to launch a variety of smears and half-truths in service of a banana republic-esque legal witch hunt against a former president to prevent him from running for president a second time. It wasn’t even to try and soft-pedal a wave of violent pogroms against middle America—which were'mostly peaceful’ of course—or to bankrupt them or drive them into mental illness via a series of arbitrary and brutal lockdowns.

No, this time it was in order to work themselves up into a self-righteous frenzy over the death of a man—largely irrelevant in his own country—who American liberals are now trying to mythologize as a kind of Russian George Floyd.

But who was Alexei Navalny, really?

Here are just a few of the highlights of his strange life:

Navalny, who was born in Butyn, Russia, on June 4, 1976, initially rose to a minor level of prominence for his legal career and dissident blog, which was derided by many at the time as being both racist and antisemitic.

Navalny was a member of the liberal Yabloko party from 2000 until 2007, before co-founding the ethnic nationalist movement 'Narod.'

He starred in two notable YouTube videos for the group:

href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICoc2VmGdfw">one compared Islamic immigrants to tooth decay, and another pushed for