Pussy Riot Reappraised

Pussy Riot, the punk-rock/guerilla-protest collective, was in the business page yesterday, interviewed by the soft-spoken Jim Rutenberg for a piece titled "A Warning for Americans From a Member of Pussy Riot." The member, Nadya Tolokonnikova, was in Miami for Art Basel, the annual jet set international art fair.

Based on her new video, “Make America Great Again,” Tolokonnikova has left her ski mask and her faux-punk behind and is now angling in a Madonna/Lady Gaga direction. She is trying to hit the jackpot in the United States.

It is easy to make fun of Pussy Riot, at least the solemn expressions of concern for the group's artistic freedom belched out by the USG/NGO nexus, but Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina did support Occupy Wall Street, visiting imprisoned Cecily McMillan on Rikers Island. Plus, Tolokonnikova publicly backed Bernie Sanders. So it is doubtful that Pussy Riot is a creation of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Rutenberg, a champion of internet censorship in the form of policing Fake News, steered the conversation towards the dangers of authoritarianism and the crisis of belief in objective truth.

But truth cannot break through if people never find it or believe it when they do. And the problem in Russia is the same one we’re seeing here, Ms. Tolokonnikova told me. “A lot of people are living really unwealthy lives so they have to work not one but two jobs, so they don’t have time to analyze and check facts, and you cannot blame them,” she said.

And, after so many years in which the “lift-all-boats” promises of globalization didn’t come to pass, she said, “they don’t trust bureaucrats, they don’t trust politicians, and they don’t really trust media.”

That’s why the top Russian propagandist Dmitry K. Kiselyov can assert that “objectivity is a myth” and, here in the United States, the paid CNN Trump-supporting contributor Scottie Nell Hughes can declare: “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, of facts.”

When there is no truth, invasions are “liberations” and internment camps are “relocation centers.”

But, as Ms. Tolokonnikova said, “There is always a way if you really want to tell the truth.”

Doing so, for her, has come at a cost, even after prison. Informal Cossack security forces beat her and other Pussy Riot members as they prepared to perform in Sochi during the 2014 Olympics. That same year, a youth gang attacked her with trash and a green antiseptic chemical in Nizhny Novgorod, where she was protesting prison conditions. The men were clearly identifiable but, she said, police made no arrests.

Ms. Tolokonnikova has also co-founded a news site called Media Zona. She said it avoided opinion so that readers would accept it as a just-the-facts counter to disinformation.

“You are always in danger of being shut down,” she said. “But it’s not the end of the story because we are prepared to fight.”

Her counsel for United States journalists: You better be, too.

I am not so sure about Media Zone. There appears to be a lot of stuff on Navalny's ongoing legal battles, but there is also a feature on the recent prison strike in the U.S.

What struck me was Tolokonnikova's critique of globalization to a newspaper, The New York Times, whose entire mission is to spread the gospel of globalization.