The post-Soviet thaw in authoritarianism is being rolled out in the US - in reverse . Also in the most developed west, that’s what the ‘developed’ increasingly seems to mean.
Matt Taibbi (and Dr Jay Bhuttacharya and Miranda Devine) have been awarded the inaugural Samizdat prize (play on words, self-publishing). Bhuttacharya, demonized over the Great Barrington Declaration, later learned that within days of their pronouncement he and his two colleagues (all accomplished professors) had been made a government pet project’ smear target. He was one of the successful litigators in Missouri vs Biden.
As Taibbi (who helped break the revelations of social media’s collusion with government and intelligence services over censorship) tells it:
" Jay, Miranda, and I all share a connection to the same story. When Miranda published her blockbuster New York Post exposé of October 14, 2020, “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad,” Internet platforms Twitter and Facebook experimented for the first time with disappearing a major political story in the middle of an election year. Not only did both platforms suppress the story, but as I later found in internal correspondence, Twitter used tools previously reserved for child pornography to prevent individuals from sharing the story in direct messages — the digital version of a Cheka agent intercepting that copy of a Solzhenitsyn or Voinovich story before one person could hand it to another."
For years, in the dominant narrative the Hunter Bider laptop story became a supposed indicator of people’s naivety and the untrustwothiness or ‘unreliable’ stories. Worse, this outcome was by design, in order to bury the story among the pre-digested notion of ‘Russian Disinformation’.
The trouble is, I don’t think the lesson has really been learned where it matters - in the public eye. But this award won’t do any harm.
ED
America Enters the Samizdat Era
Thanking fellow honorees Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Miranda Devine, and explaining why an American Samizdat Prize is both great and scary
SubStack are standing firm-ish against the onslaught but seem to be preventing embedded tweets so that authors have to insert them as screenshots. Seems a better alternative having said that: when the tweet author deletes their o.p. your page is made to look ridiculous. Best to keep receipts.
A few hours after posting the above I heard a BBC prog discussing Biden’s speech with one of those Dem supporitng commentators. The latter had an excuse of course, but it was striking how the famed BBC balance, however fake it might be, was entirely absent. The legal requirement for a semblance of balance may not appply to US politics, and the BBC as always acted like the Trump opposition channel. Not like Dem TV but in its inimitable refined, disapproving, nudging way.
So, the the two attributes of the Biden administration on which they agreed it shone by contrast to boo-hiss Trump were its commitment to democracy, and saving the American people from the Coronavirus! As the above Taibbi post suggests Biden et al did its damnedest to thwart democracy over…Hunter Biden and the Twitter Cernsorship files (and Facebook files as well). With the Online Harms Bill passed, unauthorised online criticism of UK government could soon disappear. The BBC’s Trusted News Initiative (and its anti-Corbyn attacks) shows exactly how committed it is to democratic values.
On Covid, if they are referring to the vaccine it was developed under Trump but two other small matters also need pointing out: firstly the number of Americans who died without receiving any early treatment, a policy that was in servitude to the vaccines, but also of course the lack of data showing that the vaccines reduced covid deaths at all. Certainly covid deaths officially went up in the US and UK in the 6/12/18-months following the vaccines.
I assume these were all “PCR approved” COVID deaths where no-one has investigated the links with the jab!
The failure to treat illnesses that “they say” were covid could easily be pneumonia and lung issues which were not properly treated as they would have been prior to 2020 or just care home and hospital euthanasia treatments like medazalam and morphine!
Yeah there’s all that - I saw an article saying the CDC were busy miscategorizing vaccine related deaths as covid. Probably bypassing the PCR test if they were cooking the books.
But the BBC and US establishment extoll the merits of their democracies, they should believe official data. Trouble is, even that shows they are wrong.
. Also in the most developed west, that’s what the ‘developed’ increasingly seems to mean.