Congratulations to you, Jay, and Miranda. The further a society drifts from truth, the more they will hate those who speak it. We must continue to subvert Subversion on our Substack samizdats. Say that 5 times fast!
Matt - I’ve made this humble request before in these comments and will take this opportunity to do so again. Please publish a print anthology of your most-liked Substack posts from 2020-present! Maybe Walter could write the foreword. I would eagerly buy it, not least because one day all your digital samizdat could be zapped from the internet.
I am so pleased to see this gentle, courageous man, Dr. Bhattacharya, increasingly find the public admiration that was so shamefully denied him during the Crazy Years.
The good thing is that people will always find ways around top-down control measures -- even if we have to go back to burning our notepads after every 'conversation'.
As Martin Gurri shows in The Revolt of the Public, the most portentous consequence of the cataclysmic expansion of information and communication technology caused by the inception of the internet has been the rapid dissolution of institutional authority and elite power. An abundance of information, in this case a limitless, infinite influx, greatly diminished the authoritative aura of previously select sources. The elite class went from enjoying what might as well have been a monopoly on a relatively tiny info-sphere (which in turn allowed a false pretense of moral certainty) to finding itself smack dab in the middle of an epistemic free-for-all.
Edit: Gurri has a great new piece in the NY Post about the alliance of elites rigging the game for Biden in 2024.
Until we come up with the new ways to get the truth to each other, it's paramount we continue supporting through subscription writers like Matt, Greenwald, Weiss, Bhattacharya, Devine, et al. I'm coming up on my 3rd renewal for Matt and Glenn. I consider it a civic duty to ante up.
Just a mild personal anecdote, but one of my friends from growing up who I rarely see would occasionally 'like' a bunch of my facebook posts at once but it would be few and far between. I asked her about it in October 2020, and of course, facebook never showed her my posts unless she happened to proactively go to my profile.
What she was looking for at the time was information about the Hunter Biden laptop story, which like you, I did not think was itself so big of a deal as the massive effort to censor it, but of course I had posted about it a few times.
Its crazy how fast everything slipped into insane censorship once it started, its important to personally know dissident people, I suppose.
Tonight as I await the official pronouncement from our leader as to how America is doing --- which will be all lies --- and I read this post, I am so discouraged.
Probably because today in The State Journal Register, Springfield, Illinois, this was the front page headline: "Illinois schools teach media literacy." So the Illinois school system is doing a curriculum on how to inform kids on how to look at the world. Even though the Illinois school system can't teach 'em ---- literacy! Wow.
Thank you for fighting this good fight. You are making a/the difference. It is time for the rest of us to get out there and help.
Jay Bhattacharya was curious about how many people where he lived had been infected with Covid. The official numbers seemed low; unlike Asia where borders were secured against sick people and Covid cases were kept low with a cordon sanitaire for over a year, the US was oblivious to infected people entering the country. There were 948 reported cases by clinics and hospitals in Santa Clara County, California at the time (March 27. 2020); serological testing by the group including Bhattacharya found that ~53,000 people had actually been infected and had antibodies to SARS-CoV2 at that time: academic.oup.com/ije/article/50/2/410/6146069?login=true
Since 50-times as many people had been infected as the authorities admitted, this meant that the infection fatality rate was 50-fold lower than quoted and that Covid was not nearly as dangerous as declared (it was still deadly in the Elderly; just that most Covid deaths were in those over age 80).
Bhattacharya's results interfered with the messaging that "No one is safe until everyone is safe". The CDC eventually estimated that only 1 in 4 Covid infections were reported: stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/117147 , but did not acknowledge Bhattacharya's work. His colleague John Ioannidis used serological measurements to determine that the global Covid infection fatality rate for subjects under age 70 was 0.05% (=1 in 2000, almost all deaths in the 60 year olds and in the seriously ill): iris.who.int/handle/10665/340124.
Congratulations to you, Jay, and Miranda. The further a society drifts from truth, the more they will hate those who speak it. We must continue to subvert Subversion on our Substack samizdats. Say that 5 times fast!
Matt - I’ve made this humble request before in these comments and will take this opportunity to do so again. Please publish a print anthology of your most-liked Substack posts from 2020-present! Maybe Walter could write the foreword. I would eagerly buy it, not least because one day all your digital samizdat could be zapped from the internet.
We are the Evil Empire, now.
I am so pleased to see this gentle, courageous man, Dr. Bhattacharya, increasingly find the public admiration that was so shamefully denied him during the Crazy Years.
The good thing is that people will always find ways around top-down control measures -- even if we have to go back to burning our notepads after every 'conversation'.
As Martin Gurri shows in The Revolt of the Public, the most portentous consequence of the cataclysmic expansion of information and communication technology caused by the inception of the internet has been the rapid dissolution of institutional authority and elite power. An abundance of information, in this case a limitless, infinite influx, greatly diminished the authoritative aura of previously select sources. The elite class went from enjoying what might as well have been a monopoly on a relatively tiny info-sphere (which in turn allowed a false pretense of moral certainty) to finding itself smack dab in the middle of an epistemic free-for-all.
Edit: Gurri has a great new piece in the NY Post about the alliance of elites rigging the game for Biden in 2024.
https://nypost.com/2024/03/05/opinion/bidens-2024-advantage-an-alliance-of-elites-rigging-the-game/amp/
Until we come up with the new ways to get the truth to each other, it's paramount we continue supporting through subscription writers like Matt, Greenwald, Weiss, Bhattacharya, Devine, et al. I'm coming up on my 3rd renewal for Matt and Glenn. I consider it a civic duty to ante up.
Keep it up Matt. You are on fire. Humbly heroic, relentless, all your skin in the game. Thank you.
Congratulations Matt! Well deserved by you, Jay and Miranda! And another great commentary on life in Soviet Union and now in the United States…
Just a mild personal anecdote, but one of my friends from growing up who I rarely see would occasionally 'like' a bunch of my facebook posts at once but it would be few and far between. I asked her about it in October 2020, and of course, facebook never showed her my posts unless she happened to proactively go to my profile.
What she was looking for at the time was information about the Hunter Biden laptop story, which like you, I did not think was itself so big of a deal as the massive effort to censor it, but of course I had posted about it a few times.
Its crazy how fast everything slipped into insane censorship once it started, its important to personally know dissident people, I suppose.
Congratulations, Matt. Well deserved.
Tonight as I await the official pronouncement from our leader as to how America is doing --- which will be all lies --- and I read this post, I am so discouraged.
Probably because today in The State Journal Register, Springfield, Illinois, this was the front page headline: "Illinois schools teach media literacy." So the Illinois school system is doing a curriculum on how to inform kids on how to look at the world. Even though the Illinois school system can't teach 'em ---- literacy! Wow.
Thank you for fighting this good fight. You are making a/the difference. It is time for the rest of us to get out there and help.
Added to MT's Wikipedia page. Follow history to see if it is taken down:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Matt_Taibbi&action=history
Congrats! The speech is an excellent big picture look at where we are now.
I'd hate to think where we would be if Musk had not taken over twitter.
Long live the fighters! The truth-tellers too!
Jay Bhattacharya was curious about how many people where he lived had been infected with Covid. The official numbers seemed low; unlike Asia where borders were secured against sick people and Covid cases were kept low with a cordon sanitaire for over a year, the US was oblivious to infected people entering the country. There were 948 reported cases by clinics and hospitals in Santa Clara County, California at the time (March 27. 2020); serological testing by the group including Bhattacharya found that ~53,000 people had actually been infected and had antibodies to SARS-CoV2 at that time: academic.oup.com/ije/article/50/2/410/6146069?login=true
Since 50-times as many people had been infected as the authorities admitted, this meant that the infection fatality rate was 50-fold lower than quoted and that Covid was not nearly as dangerous as declared (it was still deadly in the Elderly; just that most Covid deaths were in those over age 80).
Bhattacharya's results interfered with the messaging that "No one is safe until everyone is safe". The CDC eventually estimated that only 1 in 4 Covid infections were reported: stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/117147 , but did not acknowledge Bhattacharya's work. His colleague John Ioannidis used serological measurements to determine that the global Covid infection fatality rate for subjects under age 70 was 0.05% (=1 in 2000, almost all deaths in the 60 year olds and in the seriously ill): iris.who.int/handle/10665/340124.