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!
The percentage of American parents who are jabbing their children with the untested Covid boosters is single digits. If you consider that as a proxy, I propose the resistance is bigger than you think. People are getting tired of the gaslighting.
Marty Makary was unable to find a single HEALTHY child in the US who died of Covid (CDC claims total Covid deaths in US children from 2020-2023= 1696 of >70,000,000 in four years) . Germany announced that no HEALTHY children there died of Covid. Israel claimed that no HEALTHY person under age 50 died there of Covid. Over 90% of US children had been infected with Covid (by antibody assays) by end of 2022 and HEALTHY US children have no need for Covid vaccines.
Most Covid deaths occurred after the vaccines became available (in the US of 1.15 million Covid deaths only 386,000 were in 2020); one would have expected with the resistance to early treatments that most deaths would have occurred before introduction of the vaccines (as with measles and other effective vaccines).
You do have to take the time factor into account when comparing cases. The first vaccination was only a year after the first confirmed covid case. Of course there were more deaths pre-vaccine. There were only 12 months pre-vaccine.
All other diseases had a few thousand years pre-vaccine, or at least a few hundred.
Compare cases over 1 year to cases over nearly 4 years, and the latter will almost always be higher. There are exceptions, but not many. And then we have the shenanigans of "died of" vs "died with"....
You are missing a very important scientific aspect. In addition to time being important, type of virus is important. Single stranded DNA viruses (Covid, flu) with little or no outer protection mutate like crazy. That is why the flu vaccine is new every year, that is why the Covid virus mutates once per 2 people that get it.
That means that early 95% vaccine effectiveness drops very rapidly as the virus mutates, and so the post-vaccine period for Covid is also one of a lot less vaccine effectiveness than the post-vaccine world for smallpox.
Oh yeah, totally agree. Another factor s (unlike smallpox) there are animal reservoirs. This isn't a purely human virus. As you said, much closer to influenza than measles or smallpox.
Almost no one under 50 died from Covid. While it's true many more died after the vaccines, Covid had nothing to do with that. Covid was a flu. Almost everyone who died WITH Covid actually died from a preexisting condition and not FROM Covid. The vaccines killed anyone of any age at random with it depending completely on the quality of dosage and the injection location. If the syrum was injected directly into a blood vessel instead of a muscle then you likely quickly formed blood clots or suffered from a heart condition with some dying right there on the spot. The 'vaccine' is the killer, not Covid
I know that feeling but don't forget. As Angela Merkel once said, "I'm worried about the 5%. Because if 5% of the population stands up against the government, we'll fall." I may have the percentage wrong, but it's single digits. It was single digits in the American revolution as well. I think 3%. Unity sufficient to make positive change is much closer than the elite want us to believe.
In San Francisco in the 1960s, there were posters saying "1% free."
When I asked what they meant, my friends told me that as long as 1% of the population kept their minds free, we could overcome the establishment narrative.
Maybe we don't need to be as many as 5%. Maybe 1% will do.
At any one time, only 5% of the Soviet population were registered communists.
There used to be this joke, if you got 5 people to join the party, you won a Moskvich, which you were free to drive for a year. If you got 10 people to join the party, you got a dacha on the Black Sea in which to vacation with your family. If you could get 25 people to join the party, you didn't have to.
If you want to be very revolutionary, just take cash at the bank. We probably only have about 3% cash circulating vs total deposits. Love the Merkel quote, hadn't heard it. Wasn't it Bush Sr. who said if the public ever knew what they did, they'd be hung from lamp posts?
As amazing as the internet is and as universal and separate as it should be... it makes the control that much easier. We'll be squashed like nothing before. The message removed and washed like never. The internet is amazing for it's reach and terrifying for it's limited ability to adapt and overcome.
I'm not so sure - you have to understand that - like in the USSR, the people doing the 'quashing' were bureaucratic drones, and the people being 'quashed' were generally MUCH brighter. I think it's going to be VERY hard for elite leftist 'wokers' to contain all the ways we can communicate.
My issue is that the armies of the moronic outnumber us in this country, and abroad. The paid shills that spew that which the "college" educated wish to hear. The WEF is 10 to 15 years ahead of us. What we see and want to stop now is already unstoppable, and we have almost no clue as to what they wish to do next.
The system is set up to make you believe you're outnumbered and resistance if futile. My estimation is 2/3 of America is on the MAGA spectrum and not open borders transgenders
As the great spiritual teacher of the U.S. ruling party, Joseph Stalin, used to say: 'It's Not Who Votes That Counts, It's Who Counts The Votes.' Observe what they do and weep. We will, hopefully, still have a right to communicate their fraud to each other.
We're fighting against a cult. The Soviets had to work hard to suppress the entire population; in the United States today, half the people are willing, happy cultists. Politics is religion, and Democrat elites are their chosen prophets and clergy. It is almost impossible to break someone from their devotions and so far every attempt to do so only makes them more entrenched in their illiberal beliefs.
It took longer than I thought it would, but I think they are now coming after Substack contrarians. At least that's what my newsletter subscriber metrics strongly suggest. Something has changed in recent months.
There's mild irony that one of the inaugural recipients of the Samizdat Prize got his start in the USSR in the waning days of the original "samizdat era"!
Of course, media control has been present in the US since the beginning of the broadcast era if not earlier when only a few newspapers had anything beyond a local reach.
Not too long ago, those of us so inclined to seek alternative views would turn to small newsletters and local broadcast.
The halcyon days of college radio and "alternative media".
What frightens the powers-that-be the most is the loss of control over the primary delivery mechanisms.
Hence the "Censorship Industrial Complex".
Trump's election in 2016 was their wake-up call but the Hunter Biden laptop story seems to have been the watershed event. Kudos and thanks to Miranda Devine for breaking that story! That was arguably even more visible than the quashing of challenges to the official COVID-19 narrative -- and kudos and thanks to Dr. Jay for his work on that (and Dr. Marty M. et alia)!
Given the singular nature of that event -- a blockbuster story by the NY Post -- and the near-instanteous, blanketing reaction, it seemed impossible that the reaction was anything but coordinated.
Kudos and thanks as well to Elon Musk for his courage (both politically and financially) in buying Twitter (now "X") and then providing access to Matt and company which set the stage for the revelations now known as the "Twitter Files". It is rare that clear evidence of malfeasance has been made available to the public. It was no longer a matter of "suspicion" or "doubt" but of "certainty".
In 2018, I was working at a major "media analysis and ratings" company -- huge flat-screen TVs in every meeting room and hallway -- and I was stunned by how I could walk from room to room and not only hear the same story but the exact same choice of words being uttered by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC and PBS. It was revelatory.
At this point, given the collapse of several major "cover stories" -- COVID origins, the laptop as disinformation -- it would be great to next have consistent, vigorous follow-up on the promulgators of these stories and to hold their feet to the fire:
1.) Fauci et alia and COVID-19 origins: Wuhan funding and collaboration, the lab scrubbing once the story broke, and the degree to which the CCP may have promoted travel while simultaneously quashing the story. There's plenty more to learn. If it's not a lab-leak, where's that "missing natural link"? The vector for SARS CoV was determined in a matter of months, ironically by a team lead by Peter Daszak.
2.) The infamous "public statement signed by 51 former intelligence officials" that declared the Huter Biden laptop story "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation". It seems near-impossible that the FBI, which had possesion of the laptop for over a year by that time, had not made a determination of its validity and that all these "former intelligence officials" weren't able to get that determination. Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrell, a signatory of the letter, testified that then Biden campaign senior adviser Anthony Blinken orchestrated the letter.
3.) The equally infamous Susan Rice email from 2017 documenting a White House meeting in which exiting-president Barack Obama, a man who would literally have zero authority in a matter of weeks, discussing with then-FBI head James Comey about whether or not information could be shared with the incoming Trump administration.
The full text is now available, but from the Grassley page:
"
'President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities “by the book”. The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.
From a national security perspective, however, President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.'
The next part of your email remains classified. After that, you wrote:
'The President asked Comey to inform him if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team. Comey said he would.'
"
The repeated, childish use of "by the book" is of course inadvertently hilarious. In all the wrong ways. A government run by rude, impudent, scheming children.
Obama, the putative "constitutional law professor", was about to leave office and would relinquish any and all authority. Even though there is the qualification of "in the next few weeks", what authority did Obama have to challenge the incoming administration's right...literally, their right...to all information?
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.
Agree completely. Matt, you know the memory hole is real and alive. AI will only make it worse! Printed paper is the only record that will truly matter.
Absolutely! I would be more than happy to buy myself a copy. Even if we win against the censors, they will later pretend that things never got to the point they did. Hardcopies have the advantage of being able to keep them on your shelf even when narratives have moved on.
An idea for a title, taken from today’s post: “I thought it was crazy, and said so in print”. Nice theme for Matt’s writing on topics as diverse as Robin DiAngelo and Russiagate, and it sounds gonzo enough.
Yes! Matt, you may want to check out what Caitlin Johnstone has been doing, anthologizing her best Substack posts in a monthly magazine that is, amazingly, available on Amazon (where I have faithfully been ordering each issue as it comes out, as I would certainly do for such a collection of your work).
It took 4 minutes for the link to the Prize to be deleted with notation that a "third party source" was needed. And of course, no third party source that will be allowed has covered the event.
Samizdat Prize Real Clear Media Fund.[third-party source needed]
I have opened a discussion at the "Talk" page for MT's Wikipedia page.
It is ironic that an award named the "Samizdat Prize" is immediately erased from the record.
This is what I said:
"On March 7, 2024 Taibbi won the inaugural Samizdat Prize along with Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford) and Miranda Devine (New York Post reporter). The RealClear Media Fund awarded the Prize. I added this sentence to Taibbi's page along with a link to the Award and the link was deleted. So far there has been no third-party source covering the event that is acceptable, but the event did happen, the Prize was awarded."
HELP!
If anyone here edits Wikipedia, please consider adding to the "Talk" page about the deletion of the link to the Samizdat Prize.
Kind of funny how Wikipedia is treated by Youtube as the go-to "source" for more information when it is edited anonymously in such a way. A year or two ago, the democratic party started to spread new messaging about inflation using a novel (read: false) definition of it, and rather than correct their lies, they had someone edit their new definition of inflation into wikipedia and defend it from corrections. Pick up a dictionary from the early 1900's and look up the definition of inflation and you'll learn that the definition has literally been changed for political purposes twice. However, if you go by the original definition, it's far easier to understand why things are the way they are today.
And if you ask a Personal Assistant like ALEXA it will quote from Wikipedia. Editing Wikipedia is not difficult, but it has a lot of rules and policies. If you see something incorrect (like a date) you get no push back. But if you try to add something like the Samizdat Prize you run into the list of "Reliable Sources." Over the years the "Reliable Sources" are mainly MSM. So, if the MSM don't cover something (like the Samizdat Prize or the Dao Prize) it drops from the Wikipedia coverage.
It's long game of Samizdat.
MT won the Dao Prize for the "Twitter Files" (with Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger)--which recognizes excellence in investigative journalism for accuracy and courage. The MSM did not cover that. I did a rather lengthy back and forth on MT's Talk page but didn't make much headway except to get it listed.:
I looked at the Bhattacharya and Devine Wikipedia pages and did not even try to add the Samizdat Prize. because those pages are monitored as well. Anything positive and true for --but not covered in what Wikipedia calls "reliable sources" unreliable" gets removed.
Government types are representative of whatever the most current tech is. Unfortunately for us, the internet and AI make a tech-totalitarianism very likely, if not inevitable
I don't know. He was a film maker, some people would say he was a "cool cat," others that he was "the cat's meow" or "the cat's pajamas". But that he was some sort of feline is inescapably obvious given his name, wouldn't you say?
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'.
Exactly. We are a handful of sand to them. Paraphrasing Michael Shellenberger; "Centralization is inherently unstable. Think of a stack of quarters 1 foot high. The more they centralize, the weaker they are." The tighter they squeeze, the more of us are liberated.
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.
not so sure about that. JFK, rfk, MLK, Gulf of tonkin... I hear ya but I also witnessed a murder on 11/24/63 with millions of others that put my naivety aside...
The Net may have threatened elite power structures, but the moral perfidy of institutions existed much earlier.
Gurri names “ a partial roster of who Our Democracy controls”: the White House, half of Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the scientific establishment and expert class in general, the old prestige media, the new digital media (minus Twitter/X), the universities, the arts and entertainment world, and famous corporations from Coca-Cola to Nike.” The Security State controls all of them: through blackmail, threats, or bottomless black budget pay offs.
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.
I do too, but I'm on a limited income thanks to the austerity that Congress is using against its own citizens (I consider neoliberal austerity to be a form of sanctions against the American people) and I can only afford a few subscriptions to some independent journalists.
I subscribe to Matt and Glenn. I wish I could afford at least 2 others. Also, I have to watch the auto-renew 'cause I don't know if I'll be around next year.
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!
That. That. That. That. That.
In all seriousness, I agree with everything you said.
As The Great Rush Limbaugh would say “mega dittos!”
I fear the resistance is too atomized and disconnected to turn this around.
The percentage of American parents who are jabbing their children with the untested Covid boosters is single digits. If you consider that as a proxy, I propose the resistance is bigger than you think. People are getting tired of the gaslighting.
Marty Makary was unable to find a single HEALTHY child in the US who died of Covid (CDC claims total Covid deaths in US children from 2020-2023= 1696 of >70,000,000 in four years) . Germany announced that no HEALTHY children there died of Covid. Israel claimed that no HEALTHY person under age 50 died there of Covid. Over 90% of US children had been infected with Covid (by antibody assays) by end of 2022 and HEALTHY US children have no need for Covid vaccines.
Most Covid deaths occurred after the vaccines became available (in the US of 1.15 million Covid deaths only 386,000 were in 2020); one would have expected with the resistance to early treatments that most deaths would have occurred before introduction of the vaccines (as with measles and other effective vaccines).
You do have to take the time factor into account when comparing cases. The first vaccination was only a year after the first confirmed covid case. Of course there were more deaths pre-vaccine. There were only 12 months pre-vaccine.
All other diseases had a few thousand years pre-vaccine, or at least a few hundred.
Compare cases over 1 year to cases over nearly 4 years, and the latter will almost always be higher. There are exceptions, but not many. And then we have the shenanigans of "died of" vs "died with"....
There is a Substacker, Andreas Ohler, who documents statistics (and their obfuscations). Also A Midwest Doctor and Pierre Kory.
You are missing a very important scientific aspect. In addition to time being important, type of virus is important. Single stranded DNA viruses (Covid, flu) with little or no outer protection mutate like crazy. That is why the flu vaccine is new every year, that is why the Covid virus mutates once per 2 people that get it.
That means that early 95% vaccine effectiveness drops very rapidly as the virus mutates, and so the post-vaccine period for Covid is also one of a lot less vaccine effectiveness than the post-vaccine world for smallpox.
Oh yeah, totally agree. Another factor s (unlike smallpox) there are animal reservoirs. This isn't a purely human virus. As you said, much closer to influenza than measles or smallpox.
Almost no one under 50 died from Covid. While it's true many more died after the vaccines, Covid had nothing to do with that. Covid was a flu. Almost everyone who died WITH Covid actually died from a preexisting condition and not FROM Covid. The vaccines killed anyone of any age at random with it depending completely on the quality of dosage and the injection location. If the syrum was injected directly into a blood vessel instead of a muscle then you likely quickly formed blood clots or suffered from a heart condition with some dying right there on the spot. The 'vaccine' is the killer, not Covid
Take it easy, Group Captain. There's nothing anybody can do about this thing now.
I know that feeling but don't forget. As Angela Merkel once said, "I'm worried about the 5%. Because if 5% of the population stands up against the government, we'll fall." I may have the percentage wrong, but it's single digits. It was single digits in the American revolution as well. I think 3%. Unity sufficient to make positive change is much closer than the elite want us to believe.
In San Francisco in the 1960s, there were posters saying "1% free."
When I asked what they meant, my friends told me that as long as 1% of the population kept their minds free, we could overcome the establishment narrative.
Maybe we don't need to be as many as 5%. Maybe 1% will do.
At any one time, only 5% of the Soviet population were registered communists.
There used to be this joke, if you got 5 people to join the party, you won a Moskvich, which you were free to drive for a year. If you got 10 people to join the party, you got a dacha on the Black Sea in which to vacation with your family. If you could get 25 people to join the party, you didn't have to.
The punch line fell flat. I don't get it
If you want to be very revolutionary, just take cash at the bank. We probably only have about 3% cash circulating vs total deposits. Love the Merkel quote, hadn't heard it. Wasn't it Bush Sr. who said if the public ever knew what they did, they'd be hung from lamp posts?
That was Hillary Clinton yelling that at her top advisor and to 'fix this' after Trump won
Resistance is futile.... Until we hand the few!
As amazing as the internet is and as universal and separate as it should be... it makes the control that much easier. We'll be squashed like nothing before. The message removed and washed like never. The internet is amazing for it's reach and terrifying for it's limited ability to adapt and overcome.
I'm not so sure - you have to understand that - like in the USSR, the people doing the 'quashing' were bureaucratic drones, and the people being 'quashed' were generally MUCH brighter. I think it's going to be VERY hard for elite leftist 'wokers' to contain all the ways we can communicate.
That's why they're so excited about AI. They won't need numbers. AI will be their army on the internet and the battle field
My issue is that the armies of the moronic outnumber us in this country, and abroad. The paid shills that spew that which the "college" educated wish to hear. The WEF is 10 to 15 years ahead of us. What we see and want to stop now is already unstoppable, and we have almost no clue as to what they wish to do next.
The system is set up to make you believe you're outnumbered and resistance if futile. My estimation is 2/3 of America is on the MAGA spectrum and not open borders transgenders
We communicate? So what?
As the great spiritual teacher of the U.S. ruling party, Joseph Stalin, used to say: 'It's Not Who Votes That Counts, It's Who Counts The Votes.' Observe what they do and weep. We will, hopefully, still have a right to communicate their fraud to each other.
HSE. Hope springs eternal.
They get you "hooked," then apply the hook...
“Give Me Convenience Or Give Me Death!”
-Jello Biafra
Whoa, did you just drop a DKs reference? Well played.
another Dead Kennedys fan!!!
America--the "Inconvenient Truth Shall Set You Free!"--or, most likely not.
Defeatism is catching. Please don’t spread it.
We're fighting against a cult. The Soviets had to work hard to suppress the entire population; in the United States today, half the people are willing, happy cultists. Politics is religion, and Democrat elites are their chosen prophets and clergy. It is almost impossible to break someone from their devotions and so far every attempt to do so only makes them more entrenched in their illiberal beliefs.
I fear only a disaster will move some and the rest will double down.
That's exactly where they want us to be. The whole point of samizdat is to get around that. Don't quit too soon.
Not quitting but griping on substack is not going to fix the problem
It took longer than I thought it would, but I think they are now coming after Substack contrarians. At least that's what my newsletter subscriber metrics strongly suggest. Something has changed in recent months.
https://billricejr.substack.com/p/something-has-changed-with-substack?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
It's going to get worse. Much, much worse.
I don't to l so, but if it were, it is our duty to turn it around
Right! HOW?
Keep reading substacks and X posts from truth tellers, and tell others about them, for starters.
Congrats and thanks to Matt here as well!
There's mild irony that one of the inaugural recipients of the Samizdat Prize got his start in the USSR in the waning days of the original "samizdat era"!
Of course, media control has been present in the US since the beginning of the broadcast era if not earlier when only a few newspapers had anything beyond a local reach.
Not too long ago, those of us so inclined to seek alternative views would turn to small newsletters and local broadcast.
The halcyon days of college radio and "alternative media".
What frightens the powers-that-be the most is the loss of control over the primary delivery mechanisms.
Hence the "Censorship Industrial Complex".
Trump's election in 2016 was their wake-up call but the Hunter Biden laptop story seems to have been the watershed event. Kudos and thanks to Miranda Devine for breaking that story! That was arguably even more visible than the quashing of challenges to the official COVID-19 narrative -- and kudos and thanks to Dr. Jay for his work on that (and Dr. Marty M. et alia)!
Given the singular nature of that event -- a blockbuster story by the NY Post -- and the near-instanteous, blanketing reaction, it seemed impossible that the reaction was anything but coordinated.
Kudos and thanks as well to Elon Musk for his courage (both politically and financially) in buying Twitter (now "X") and then providing access to Matt and company which set the stage for the revelations now known as the "Twitter Files". It is rare that clear evidence of malfeasance has been made available to the public. It was no longer a matter of "suspicion" or "doubt" but of "certainty".
In 2018, I was working at a major "media analysis and ratings" company -- huge flat-screen TVs in every meeting room and hallway -- and I was stunned by how I could walk from room to room and not only hear the same story but the exact same choice of words being uttered by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC and PBS. It was revelatory.
At this point, given the collapse of several major "cover stories" -- COVID origins, the laptop as disinformation -- it would be great to next have consistent, vigorous follow-up on the promulgators of these stories and to hold their feet to the fire:
1.) Fauci et alia and COVID-19 origins: Wuhan funding and collaboration, the lab scrubbing once the story broke, and the degree to which the CCP may have promoted travel while simultaneously quashing the story. There's plenty more to learn. If it's not a lab-leak, where's that "missing natural link"? The vector for SARS CoV was determined in a matter of months, ironically by a team lead by Peter Daszak.
2.) The infamous "public statement signed by 51 former intelligence officials" that declared the Huter Biden laptop story "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation". It seems near-impossible that the FBI, which had possesion of the laptop for over a year by that time, had not made a determination of its validity and that all these "former intelligence officials" weren't able to get that determination. Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrell, a signatory of the letter, testified that then Biden campaign senior adviser Anthony Blinken orchestrated the letter.
https://judiciary.house.gov/media/in-the-news/biden-campaign-blinken-orchestrated-intel-letter-discredit-hunter-biden-laptop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Statement_on_the_Hunter_Biden_Emails
Why isn't this a huge story?
3.) The equally infamous Susan Rice email from 2017 documenting a White House meeting in which exiting-president Barack Obama, a man who would literally have zero authority in a matter of weeks, discussing with then-FBI head James Comey about whether or not information could be shared with the incoming Trump administration.
https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/grassley-graham-uncover-unusual-email-sent-susan-rice-herself-president-trump-s
The full text is now available, but from the Grassley page:
"
'President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities “by the book”. The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.
From a national security perspective, however, President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.'
The next part of your email remains classified. After that, you wrote:
'The President asked Comey to inform him if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team. Comey said he would.'
"
The repeated, childish use of "by the book" is of course inadvertently hilarious. In all the wrong ways. A government run by rude, impudent, scheming children.
Obama, the putative "constitutional law professor", was about to leave office and would relinquish any and all authority. Even though there is the qualification of "in the next few weeks", what authority did Obama have to challenge the incoming administration's right...literally, their right...to all information?
Again, how did this story vanish?
Obama. The first ex-president to not leave town after his term was over? Opined he could have had a third term except for that pesky Consitution?
The story didn't vanish. It never existed, because Chris Matthews wasn't the only media person who got a 44 thrill up his leg.
What organization bestowed the award?
I haven’t heard of it before.
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.
Agree completely. Matt, you know the memory hole is real and alive. AI will only make it worse! Printed paper is the only record that will truly matter.
Absolutely! I would be more than happy to buy myself a copy. Even if we win against the censors, they will later pretend that things never got to the point they did. Hardcopies have the advantage of being able to keep them on your shelf even when narratives have moved on.
An idea for a title, taken from today’s post: “I thought it was crazy, and said so in print”. Nice theme for Matt’s writing on topics as diverse as Robin DiAngelo and Russiagate, and it sounds gonzo enough.
Great idea. I would absolutely buy a nicely bound compilation of Matt’s stuff. I’ll put it next to my copies of Walter’s “County Highway.”
TAKE MY MONEY!!
I would buy numerous copies to hand out to those who might be persuaded.
I would buy a book collecting them instantly it became available.
One complicating factor: what about the comments? They add so much depth to any article.
Yes! Matt, you may want to check out what Caitlin Johnstone has been doing, anthologizing her best Substack posts in a monthly magazine that is, amazingly, available on Amazon (where I have faithfully been ordering each issue as it comes out, as I would certainly do for such a collection of your work).
Caitlin would do well to alleviate her economic ignorance, but she’s a staunch voice against The Empire, so I appreciate her for that.
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
It took 4 minutes for the link to the Prize to be deleted with notation that a "third party source" was needed. And of course, no third party source that will be allowed has covered the event.
Samizdat Prize Real Clear Media Fund.[third-party source needed]
I have opened a discussion at the "Talk" page for MT's Wikipedia page.
It is ironic that an award named the "Samizdat Prize" is immediately erased from the record.
This is what I said:
"On March 7, 2024 Taibbi won the inaugural Samizdat Prize along with Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford) and Miranda Devine (New York Post reporter). The RealClear Media Fund awarded the Prize. I added this sentence to Taibbi's page along with a link to the Award and the link was deleted. So far there has been no third-party source covering the event that is acceptable, but the event did happen, the Prize was awarded."
HELP!
If anyone here edits Wikipedia, please consider adding to the "Talk" page about the deletion of the link to the Samizdat Prize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Matt_Taibbi&action=history
Kind of funny how Wikipedia is treated by Youtube as the go-to "source" for more information when it is edited anonymously in such a way. A year or two ago, the democratic party started to spread new messaging about inflation using a novel (read: false) definition of it, and rather than correct their lies, they had someone edit their new definition of inflation into wikipedia and defend it from corrections. Pick up a dictionary from the early 1900's and look up the definition of inflation and you'll learn that the definition has literally been changed for political purposes twice. However, if you go by the original definition, it's far easier to understand why things are the way they are today.
And if you ask a Personal Assistant like ALEXA it will quote from Wikipedia. Editing Wikipedia is not difficult, but it has a lot of rules and policies. If you see something incorrect (like a date) you get no push back. But if you try to add something like the Samizdat Prize you run into the list of "Reliable Sources." Over the years the "Reliable Sources" are mainly MSM. So, if the MSM don't cover something (like the Samizdat Prize or the Dao Prize) it drops from the Wikipedia coverage.
It's long game of Samizdat.
MT won the Dao Prize for the "Twitter Files" (with Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger)--which recognizes excellence in investigative journalism for accuracy and courage. The MSM did not cover that. I did a rather lengthy back and forth on MT's Talk page but didn't make much headway except to get it listed.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Matt_Taibbi#*2023._The_Dao_Prize_for_the_%22Twitter_Files%22
You just proved in real-time why the Samizdat Prize is what the world needs right now. Nicely done.
I looked at the Bhattacharya and Devine Wikipedia pages and did not even try to add the Samizdat Prize. because those pages are monitored as well. Anything positive and true for --but not covered in what Wikipedia calls "reliable sources" unreliable" gets removed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources
I see no way to counter this.
so creepy!
We are the Evil Empire, now.
It’s been a good, er evil 30 years at least…
And you'd be amazed how many humans still buy the Eagle Flag Freedom bullshit.
Would I be? 😸
I’d buy it on a T-shirt clutching a hot dog!
Government types are representative of whatever the most current tech is. Unfortunately for us, the internet and AI make a tech-totalitarianism very likely, if not inevitable
Would you feel better about it if you were made emperor? You could assume the name "Catallus."
Every cat sees himself as Feline Royalty.
That must explain the following:
"Dogs look up to us,
Cats look down on us,
But pigs . . . pigs treat us as equals."
Every cat is right.
By the way, are you any relation of Federico Fellini?
Is he a cat?
I don't know. He was a film maker, some people would say he was a "cool cat," others that he was "the cat's meow" or "the cat's pajamas". But that he was some sort of feline is inescapably obvious given his name, wouldn't you say?
Sounds legit, but I don't think I am especially related.
We’ve always been, somehow
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'.
Exactly. We are a handful of sand to them. Paraphrasing Michael Shellenberger; "Centralization is inherently unstable. Think of a stack of quarters 1 foot high. The more they centralize, the weaker they are." The tighter they squeeze, the more of us are liberated.
You stole that line from Princess Leia... caught ya! LOL
This comment will self destruct.
What comment?
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/
Just read Gurri's piece. Savage.
Having lived through the 1960's the press then was much freer.
not so sure about that. JFK, rfk, MLK, Gulf of tonkin... I hear ya but I also witnessed a murder on 11/24/63 with millions of others that put my naivety aside...
The Net may have threatened elite power structures, but the moral perfidy of institutions existed much earlier.
AI will close Pandora's box. Digital is too ephemeral.
Gurri names “ a partial roster of who Our Democracy controls”: the White House, half of Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the scientific establishment and expert class in general, the old prestige media, the new digital media (minus Twitter/X), the universities, the arts and entertainment world, and famous corporations from Coca-Cola to Nike.” The Security State controls all of them: through blackmail, threats, or bottomless black budget pay offs.
Because of course he does.
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.
I do too, but I'm on a limited income thanks to the austerity that Congress is using against its own citizens (I consider neoliberal austerity to be a form of sanctions against the American people) and I can only afford a few subscriptions to some independent journalists.
I subscribe to Matt and Glenn. I wish I could afford at least 2 others. Also, I have to watch the auto-renew 'cause I don't know if I'll be around next year.
Not Weiss, she's a rabid Zionist.
Jack Devine? The old CIA guy? No, he continues to lie on behalf of the State.
If you would bother to actually read the article you will discover that Miranda Devine was one of the recipients of this award.
Keep it up Matt. You are on fire. Humbly heroic, relentless, all your skin in the game. Thank you.
Damn dude, well said!
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.
What's truly scary is those students will be taught to trust legacy media and distrust independent media.
Shhhh. They won't be taught any critical thinking. Shhhh emoji.
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.