In the end, the most wonderful thing about America is not the greenback’s status as the world’s reserve currency or that our real per capita prosperity is unprecedented not just for the planet today, but in the scope of human history. Our singular defining achievement is not our state-of-the-art medical, technological, or architectural accomplishments, and it is not even that Grand Central Station and Union Station remain underrated in the global pantheon of train stations.

Rather, it’s that our God-given right to insult, harangue, and smear the people in power is legally enshrined in our founding charter. Hollywood celebrities can don pussy hats and scream expletives as they protest former President Donald Trump, and top conservative pundits can travel to other countries to lie that the Second World bodegas in impoverished kleptocracies prove that the first and greatest bastion of the free world is somehow inferior to the ruins of the Russian Empire.

So it’s a bit of an ironic tragedy that in the midst of Tucker Carlson‘s Potemkin tour of Russia, legendary anti-corruption dissident and political prisoner Alexei Navalny has died at just 47 years old. Although his attorneys and his wife are trying to get to the bottom of why this middle-aged man died so suddenly, Russian President Vladimir Putin would have us believe Navalny perished from a blood clot.

There’s an old John Mulaney joke in which the comedian lampoons a network executive who tried to tell him that the word “midget” is just as bad as the N-word.

“Do you know how I know it’s not?” Mulaney posits. “It’s because we’re saying the word ‘midget,’ and we’re not even saying what the ‘N-word’ is. If you’re comparing the badness of two words, and you won’t even say one of them — that’s the worse word.”

The objective quality of a country works the same way. Tucker Carlson can go to Russia to trash America, and he’ll simply come back even richer than before. Hell, despite the fact that Brittney Griner repeatedly trashed the United States before she was maliciously imprisoned by the Russians on trumped-up drug charges, America’s government fought tooth and nail to bring her home.

Compare that to the likes of Navalny, who, after attempting to use speech and democratic persuasion to push back against the authoritarian government ruling Russia, die from a sudden blood clot after being seen perfectly healthy the day before.

Or from a plane being blown up.

Or falling out of a sixth-story window.

Or being poisoned, shot, or hit by a car in the streets of Moscow.

Naturally, the greatest minds on Twitter took the plausible murder of Navalny to find the real protagonist of the story: Donald Trump.

For argumentation’s sake, let us take the premise (that Trump’s political opponents wish to persecute him the way Putin’s regime has taken out Navalny) as true for a moment. Given the eleventy-billion ways the prosecutors targeting Trump have perverted state and federal law, it’s not so far-fetched to deduce that Alvin Bragg and company really do wish they could resort to an easier and less democratic way to delete Trump from the 2024 ballot. None of this is to say that Trump’s opponents have any actual homicidal intent, but as a thought experiment, let’s assume that these secretaries of state and prosecutors would not stop at antidemocratic means to remove Trump from contention.

Well, the whole point is that try as they might, the deep state, the national Soros prosecution apparatus, and the entire Democratic Party have succeeded at taking down Trump only once — and only through the banal labor of democracy. We now know that Russiagate was an absolutely abominable attempt by the CIA to weaponize the security state and unconstitutional domestic surveillance against the Trump campaign to distract from Hillary Clinton’s illegal email servers — and it failed; Trump won 2016 and appointed a whole special counsel investigation to air out the dirty laundry of the deep state. Then Democrats in Congress tried to impeach Trump over his allies’ (since vindicated) efforts to investigate Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings — and it failed; Trump was not convicted and instead headed into 2020 with a lead that only a once-in-a-century pandemic could curtail. Now four separate criminal trials, E. Jean Carroll, and Letitia James have thrown the legal sink at Trump, trying him for everything from campaign finance violations to breaking the Espionage Act — and it is failing in spectacular fashion; his polling lead over Biden has never been greater, and it is precisely due to the systemic guardrails put in place by our messy republic that not one of the four criminal cases against Trump seems headed for a conviction before Election Day.

And again, the way these prosecutions have blown up proves exactly how the U.S. is structurally superior to Russia in every way. It was the legal team of Michael Roman, a co-defendant in the case against Trump in Fulton County, Georgia, that dropped the bombshell revelation into prosecutor Fani Willis’s alleged misconduct that has thrown a potentially fatal blow in the Left’s last and really only hope of putting Trump in prison.

None of this is to say that we are currently realizing, yet alone that we have always realized, the promises made by the American experiment on paper. The corruption of Willis is likely just the tip of the iceberg, and Lord knows that if Trump does get a second term in the Oval Office, domestic surveillance from corrupt Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act courts to low-level CIA politicization must be systemically gutted.

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But the fact is that I can say all this and not worry about standing too close to my balcony tonight. That difference is what makes Navalny a hero and the U.S. the greatest country the world has ever known.

The economic canards promulgated by certain pro-Russian propagandists on Twitter right now are worth a separate, forthcoming magazine column. But it’s pretty safe to say that even if you take the notion that Russian subways are beautiful and grocery stores are abundant at face value, Navalny and his silent countrymen would have taken free speech over beaux arts any day.