We are no longer the Land of the Free. Now we must be the Home of the Brave.

An image of "Tank Man" from the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy revolt of 1989 in China. Facebook / Meta blocked this image on the anniversary in June.

A lone man stands down a column of Chinese tanks. Later they would violently put down the pro-democracy movement in China, killing. The government’s count of those killed in the Square between June 3 and 5 was 241 (including soldiers), with some 7,000 wounded; most other estimates have put the death toll much higher. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

I am, this morning, too sick (and work-swamped) to really write anything substantial for you, so I am going to refer a GREAT article in Rolling Stone about what it’s like to live under authoritarianism—as it is very definitely a possible close future for us all—which talks about the loss of press freedom in Russia as Putin plotted his war on Ukraine.

Tim Grierson of Rolling Stone writes:

Filmmaker Julia Loktev’s voice is the first we hear in her epic new documentary. Over a nighttime shot of Moscow, she warns, “The world you’re about to see no longer exists. None of us knew what was about to happen.” For the next five-and-a-half hours, My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow more than lives up to that ominous opening. Loktev’s film chronicles the Russian government’s systematic crackdown on journalists in late 2021 and early 2022 as Vladimir Putin plots his invasion of Ukraine. Shooting by herself with just an iPhone, Loktev spent weeks at a time shadowing the young women and men of TV Rain, the country’s last independent news channel. The result is a gripping vérité portrait of citizens under siege by a tyrannical leader stripping away their freedoms.

Start watching for it to air in a theater near you starting August 15th.

Trump’s use of federal troops in DC, some say, is a prelude to his using them in many other U.S. cities. Expect an assault in Newsom’s territory.

And remember Tank Man. When Zuckerberg engineers the blocking of every single copy of this image on Meta and Facebook for weeks around the June anniversary of this man’s extraordinary courage, this administration, with ample help from the uber-rich media tycoons, is doing to us what Putin did to TV Rain.

The full article from Rolling Stone, please go here: https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/my-undesirable-friends-director-interview-1235406202/