The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics are in full swing and, as is customary with such events, the western media has swarmed the event to broadcast back home the latest in news, videos, and pictures as the games progress. Along with the news coverage, there has been a steady stream of mocking and complaints regarding the conditions in Sochi, much of it posted on Twitter under #SochiProblems. Many of the tweets under that hashtag are merely general comments on the progress of the Olympics or their favorite teams or events, but the underlying theme and driving force behind the movement, especially from the major media outlets, seems to be a deep animosity towards Russia. This animosity is not surprising considering Russia’s turn towards traditionalism and Christianity. Russia has been especially vilified recently for its anti-homosexuality laws and the arrest and imprisonment of the band Pussy Riot for a blasphemous performance in a church. So when the reports of all the issues with the Sochi Olympics started being posted and promoted, I simply wrote them off as great exaggerations at best and outright lies at worst, and I’m sure many of you did as well. Beijing certainly didn’t get this much criticism from the media when it hosted the Olympics, even though conditions there were undoubtedly closer to third-world than in Russia. But the Chinese aren’t white Christians who recently banned adoptions from people with the same sexual appetites as the reporters posting on Twitter.

Everyone knows that the media has an agenda and has no problem lying to advance that agenda. Beyond that basic consideration, when evaluating any news report, I have personal reasons for disbelieving the western propaganda coming out of Sochi. I’ve taken several trips to Eastern Europe, including a two-week stay in Russia, and while it may not be up to western standards, it was much closer to first-world than third-world. I’ve also spent significant amounts of time in Washington D.C., Atlanta, and Houston, and both St. Petersburg and Moscow were at least as clean, safe, and pleasant as the American cities, if not more so. I certainly felt safer on the Moscow subway at 2 A.M. than I did on the D.C. subway at 10 A.M. Every city has its problems, especially when it’s flooded by tens of thousands of foreigners over a short period of time; however, I found the scale and nature of the problems being reported to be simply unbelievable based on my personal experience in the country.

Someone took the time to track down the source of some of the worse pictures on #SochiProblems, and the fact that they are lies grabbed off Google Images, entirely unrelated to the Sochi Olympics, is unsurprising. Consider this video posted yesterday by a U.S. Olympian of a wolf prowling her hotel hallway in Sochi. If you scroll down on the #SochiProblems hashtag, you’ll see that the media jumped all over it without asking for verification. Well, the wolf first became a husky and then became a hoax, pulled off with the help of comedian Jimmy Kimmel.

The media always has an agenda, and its agenda with the Sochi Olympics is to punish Russia for opposing modernism and decadency. Remember that when you hear the mainstream media reports coming out of Russia.

Also, can we please get some Cossacks to come over here and deal with Miley Cyrus? That would be great.