I had been told that Joe Biden, the president of the United States, would be delivering the 2024 State of the Union Address on Thursday, March 7. As it happened, he didn’t. Instead, he indulged in a surreal, medically enhanced species of primal scream therapy. This was laced with liberal dollops of what Freudians call “projection,” accusing his political opponents of stifling democracy when everyone outside the orbit of the state propaganda machine knows that the surveillance apparatus over which Biden presides — ex officio, at least — is a self-perpetuating machine for extinguishing democracy and its prime nutrient, frank commitment to the truth.
It was a truly bizarre performance in which the angry, semi-coherent maunderings of an angry old man again and again collided with the irrefragable wall of mundane, historical fact. The collision was dissonant. The compliant, poodle media obviously got the memo that the speech was to be described as “fiery.” I hope that the PR genius who came up with that adjective as a synonym for “partisan incontinent hectoring” gets a bonus. He deserves one. But the rest of the world was appalled by the spectacle. (It saddens me to acknowledge that Senator Katie Britt’s ASMR response to this mess was less angry, though no less surreal than the original.)
Biden’s speech focused on two things: 1) perpetuating and extending the war in Ukraine and 2) fantasizing about the non-existent policy achievements of his administration while simultaneously castigating Donald Trump and all his works. About the State of the Union, Biden had almost nothing to say.
I did not see this performance live because, such are the workings of providence, I attended the inaugural Samizdat awards gala sponsored by the RealClear Media Fund. The conjunction of the two events was revelatory.
At the gala, the journalists Miranda Divine and Matt Taibbi, together with the epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya, were honored for their courageous truth-telling about Hunter Biden’s laptop, government censorship of social media and Covid. No one reading this column needs a primer about their important work.
What was arresting was the inauguration of a “Samizdat Prize” at a moment when the chief megaphone of the state affirmed that something like “samizdat” — the covert, “self-published” literature that helped unseal the Soviet Union — would henceforth be required if the truth would be allowed to circulate in the United States. “Samizdat” was necessary for the truth in a Stalinist regime. It may just be necessary in the increasingly totalitarian regime of the ruling class the United States.
Reflecting on this reality, Matt Taibbi noted two things. First, when the New York Post published their first exposé of Hunter Biden’s laptop on the run-up to the 2020 election, left-wing social media administrators, eager to assure Biden’s election, went all in on trying to suppress the story. For the first time, Taibbi observed, Twitter and Facebook experimented 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.
Taibbi’s second point underscores the larger political point and shows why “samizdat” is not a hyperbolic term for our burgeoning neo-totalitarian dispensation. “Then Trump came along and destroyed the whole system with one stroke,” Taibbi notes,
getting elected in spite of the blunt disapproval of media. His single Twitter account allowed him to bypass the press and speak to people directly. When that worked, and similar episodes like Brexit caused panic abroad, governments decided to take the anarchic potential of the Internet and turn it on its head. What was something like the “Self-publish” culture of the Soviet Union suddenly became, as we saw in the Twitter Files, an instrument of surveillance and social control.
“An instrument of surveillance and social control.” That’s where we are, isn’t it? It has been widely reported that Steve Nikoui, father of Lance Corporal Kareem Nikoui, killed in Afghanistan during the catastrophe of Biden’s disastrous withdrawal, was arrested for heckling Biden during the State of the Union address.
Arrested for heckling. That’s what they do if someone heckles a dictator, right? Why, yes, it is.
