It is amusing, to say the least, to watch red-faced Republican demagogues denounce President Barack Obama as a Kenyan Communist demagogue while they cheer for a true Communist demagogue, Russian President Vladimir Putin. They have no problem with Putin ruling his country with an iron hand, brooking no opposition, but let President Obama issue a perfectly legal executive order, and they go batshit crazy.

Of course, Old Vladimir hates gays, and that seems to go a long way toward warming the cockles of a conservative’s heart. Suddenly, free speech and all the rights that go along with it, are unimportant to conservatives. They claim to champion a monolithic morality and regularly denounce moral relativism but in fact, they embrace the reality of a relativistic morality. If they were true champions of free speech, they would be denouncing Putin like they denounce Obama.

Putin, for what it’s worth, seems to agree with conservative characterizations of his heroic stature, speaking of “fruitless, so-called tolerance” and claiming his anti-gay laws are a bastion of global conservatism. In many ways, the Sochi Olympics seem as much about glorifying Putin as the 1936 Berlin Olympics were about glorifying Adolf Hitler, who also claimed to be defending his country from insidious foreign ideology. Hitler, like Putin, liked to throw gays in jail, and American conservatives in the 1930s loved themselves some Adolf Hitler.

So Putin, like Hitler for a previous generation of conservatives, is a hero, and the Western media, which is critical of the Russian strongman, is guilty of stirring up anti-Russian “hysteria.” For anti-gay activists, Russia has somehow (and impossibly, of course) become the true champion of human rights in the world. As one commenter on BuzzFeed quipped, “Thank God these guys are around to defend people’s right to deny people their rights.”