As the saying goes, the difference between the New York Times and the old Soviet Pravda is that Pravda readers knew they were being lied to.
To circumvent the Soviet mainstream media, dissidents created what they called the “samizdat,” their word for the clandestine copying and distribution of literature banned by the state.
To circumvent our mainstream media, conservatives have created their own samizdat, an unorganized network of blogs, public forums, news-aggregators, online publications, talk radio shows, citizen-journalists, and legal monitors such as Judicial Watch, a truth force that one Second Amendment blogger aptly called “a coalition of willing Lilliputians.”
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Despite repeated attempts by Big Tech to thwart the samizdat, the internet has given the Lilliputians unprecedented reportorial power, and social media — Facebook and Twitter most prominently — have given them an ability to distribute their message in ways Soviet dissidents could only imagine. It was the samizdat that carried Donald Trump to victory in 2016 and, barring massive vote fraud, will carry him again in 2020.
The samizdat has done most of the real reporting on the major news stories of the last dozen or so years, most recently on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) mania. To understand the samizdat’s effect, consider a recent Gallup poll on the U.S. sports industry. A year ago, by a 45-25 margin, most Americans had a favorable view of professional sports. Today, by a 40-30 margin, most have an unfavorable view.
These numbers had to shock the more woke among NFL and NBA execs. All summer, these execs have been reading about the largely peaceful protests against the systemic racism responsible for the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks among others and the crippling of Jacob Blake. How, they wondered, could sports fans not embrace those athletes who stood (or knelt) in support of social justice?
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The players all endorsed the BLM movement or appeared to. So did the sportscasters, the advertisers, the TV networks, Hollywood, Big Tech, the New York Times, the major magazines, and just about everyone with a prominent soapbox except for Fox News — and even Fox waffled.
Had the execs been paying attention, however, they would have understood that the same forces that supported the BLM protest also supported Hillary Clinton. In 2020, as in 2016, the major media’s collective control of the BLM messaging was subverted by the samizdat’s ability to record and distribute the facts on the ground. For the first time in history, ordinary people know more real news than do the people in control of America’s major newsrooms.
