Was Pavel Durov Arrested at the Behest of the US Government?
A few reflections and articles to make your Hump Day.
My Wednesday morning got off to a good start. My three kids are back in school, which means my house is quiet by 8:30 on weekday mornings again. And then I saw my article on the arrest of Pavel Durov went live.
The arrest of Durov, a Russian billionaire and founder of Telegram, a social media platform that boasts nearly one billion monthly users, is the biggest story in the world right now.
It turns out that Durov has been on the FBI’s radar for years and had allegedly even tried to penetrate Telegram. The extent to which Pavel Durov’s arrest stems from the involvement of any US agency or official is unclear. But I explore the case and explain it could be the latest example of what George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley describes as censorship by surrogate. (READ THE ARTICLE here)
In other news, a former aide to New York Governor Kathy Hochul is accused of being a spy for China.
Linda Sun, 41, and her husband Chris Hu, 40, pleaded not guilty on Tuesday before a magistrate in Brooklyn after being charged “with secretly acting as an agent of the Chinese government in exchange for millions of dollars in compensation and gifts, including meals of gourmet duck.”
Prior to being accused of working for the Chinese Communist Party, Sun, who worked for Hochul, was fond of delivering speeches on the need for "diversity and equity" in government. Go figure. (You can read more about Sun in the New York Times.)
My favorite Thread of the Day goes to Jeremy Wayne Tate, who shares some wonderful reflections from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard commencement address.
At Mindset Shifts, my friend Barry Brownstein has a fantastic article that examines why people without meaning in their lives seek power over others.
During the reign of Louis XIV, French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal diagnosed why some lust for power. In his Pensées, Pascal wrote, “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” Pascal explained that, out of the inability to sit alone, arises the human tendency to seek power as a diversion.
Pascal asks us to imagine a king with “all the blessings with which you could be endowed.” A king, Pascal told us, if he has no “diversions” from his thinking, will “ponder and reflect on what he is.” Pascal’s hypothetical king will be miserable because he “is bound to start thinking of all the threats facing him, of possible revolts, finally of inescapable death and disease.”
Read the entire article to see where Barry is going (and I’d encourage readers to sign up for Barry’s content, which is reliably wise and illuminating).
Finally, in other news, in an interview with Jake Tapper, Kamala Harris says Elon Musk has “lost his privileges” and suggests X must be taken down.
"They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop,” said Harris.
Harris went to law school, so one would think she’d understand that the whole point of the First Amendment is to protect the right of people to speak freely.
Now, do people get things wrong on social media? Of course. But let me remind readers that, as Johns Hopkins University surgeon Martin Makary testified before Congress, the single greatest purveyor of misinformation during the pandemic was the US government. Did any government agency have its social media privileges revoked? I think not.
Anyway, that’s all I have today. My Parthian Shot to you is this: please remember that those who seek to control speech are much more interested in power and their agendas than protecting people from “misinformation.”
Not just the pandemic, but the US Government has been the leader in misinformation for well over 100 years.
Simply put, everything we’ve been “taught” to be true has been nothing but lies.
Every. Goddamn. Thing.
"Was Pavel Durov Arrested at the Behest of the US Government?"
Yes!