stoweboyd: Nadya Tolokonnikova, a member of the Russian punk band and art collective Pussy Riot, was
stoweboyd: Nadya Tolokonnikova, a member of the Russian punk band and art collective Pussy Riot, was in Miami Beach last week for Art Basel. Credit Casey Kelbaugh for The New York TimesJim Rutenberg, A Warning for Americans From a Member of Pussy RiotLeading up to Ms. Tolokonnikova’s trial, Russian news reports carried suggestions that she and her bandmates were pawns of Hillary Clinton’s State Department or witches working with a global satanic conspiracy — perhaps linked to the one that was behind the Sept. 11 attacks, as lawyers for one of their offended accusers put it. This is what we now call “fake news.” Pussy Riot became an international symbol of Mr. Putin’s crackdown on free speech; of how his regime uses falsehood and deflection to sow confusion and undermine critics. Now that the political-media environment that we smugly thought to be “over there” seems to be arriving over here, Ms. Tolokonnikova has a message: “It’s important not to say to yourself, ‘Oh, it’s O.K.,’” she told me. “It’s important to remember that, for example, in Russia, for the first year of when Vladimir Putin came to power, everybody was thinking that it will be O.K.” -- source link