As the saying goes, the difference between the New York Times and the old Soviet Pravda is that Pravda readers knew they were being lied to.

To circumvent the Soviet mainstream media, dissidents created what they called the "samizdat," their word for the clandestine copying and distribution of literature banned by the state.

To circumvent our mainstream media, conservatives have created their own samizdat, an unorganized network of blogs, public forums, news-aggregators, online publications, talk radio shows, citizen-journalists, and legal monitors such as Judicial Watch, a truth force that one Second Amendment blogger aptly called "a coalition of willing Lilliputians."

Despite repeated attempts by Big Tech to thwart the samizdat, the internet has given the Lilliputians unprecedented reportorial power, and social media —  Facebook and Twitter most prominently — have given them an ability to distribute their message in ways Soviet dissidents could only imagine.  It was the samizdat that carried Donald Trump to victory in 2016 and, barring massive vote fraud, will carry him again in 2020.

The samizdat has done most of the real reporting on the major news stories of the last dozen or so years, most recently on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) mania.  To understand the samizdat's effect, consider a recent Gallup poll on the U.S. sports industry.  A year ago, by a 45-25 margin, most Americans had a favorable view of professional sports.  Today, by a 40-30 margin, most have an unfavorable view.

These numbers had to shock the more woke among NFL and NBA execs.  All summer, these execs have been reading about the largely peaceful protests against the systemic racism responsible for the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks among others and the crippling of Jacob Blake.  How, they wondered, could sports fans not embrace those athletes who stood (or knelt) in support of social justice?

The players all endorsed the BLM movement or appeared to.  So did the sportscasters, the advertisers, the TV networks, Hollywood, Big Tech, the New York Times, the major magazines, and just about everyone with a prominent soapbox except for Fox News — and even Fox waffled.

Had the execs been paying attention, however, they would have understood that the same forces that supported the BLM protest also supported Hillary Clinton.  In 2020, as in 2016, the major media's collective control of the BLM messaging was subverted by the samizdat's ability to record and distribute the facts on the ground.  For the first time in history, ordinary people know more real news than do the people in control of America's major newsrooms.

V.P. candidate Kamala Harris has yet to catch on.  Allying herself with Kenosha's Jacob Blake, Harris paid a visit to Blake's family last week and spoke to Blake on the phone.  "I mean, they're an incredible family," said Harris.  "And what they've endured, and they just do it with such dignity and grace."

Times readers applauded.  They, like Harris, did not know what the samizdat knew.  For starters, the dad of this incredible family, Jacob Blake, Sr., is likely no fan of the Times, having tweeted not too long ago, "The Jewish controlled media tells you what they want you to hear."  This was one of many anti-Semitic tweets from the old man.

The samizdat also know that the son from this incredible family, Jacob Jr., broke into the home of an ex-girlfriend, digitally raped her in front of a sleeping child, and stole her car keys and debit card.  Police issued an open warrant for Blake's arrest on sexual assault charges and a restraining order, the violation of which prompted a call to the police.

The Kenosha police tried multiple times to subdue Blake without injuring him, just as they tried with George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks.  On the average day, American police arrest roughly 28,000 people.  In only 2 percent of those arrests do the police have to resort to weapons.  In only 0.2 percent do they pull their guns.  Blake prompted each stage of the escalation, including the final one, when he reached into the back seat, presumably for a knife, and the police shot him.

Bad things happen when people resist arrest, either to the perp or the cop or both.  The samizdat understands this.  Protesting athletes and their enablers do not.  Of the roughly 560 arrests each day in which the police use weapons, the major media will share only those videos in which white cops subdue black suspects, and then, only the snippets that incriminate.  Videos of black cops forcibly arresting black suspects or white cops subduing white ones hold no arrest interest for the shapers of the day's news.

In a just world, the Minneapolis police who arrested George Floyd will likely be cleared as well.  New York Times readers do not know this. Those who follow the samizdat do.  The same holds true for the Louisville cops involved in the Breonna Taylor shooting and quite likely for the Atlanta cops involved in the shooting of Rayshard Brooks.

The samizdat understands the consequences of these celebrated police-perp encounters: cops begin to pull back from actively policing black neighborhoods.  Sensing opportunity, criminals moved into the void.  Attorney and Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald has dubbed this phenomenon the "Ferguson Effect."

According to FBI data, the murder rate in the United States rose nearly 11 percent the year after the Ferguson riots in late 2014, its greatest one-year jump in a half-century.  In 2016, the trend continued with an 8.5-percent increase over the year before, more than half of those murdered being black.

This summer, "the Minneapolis effect" is making cops long for the Ferguson years.  My best source, political scientist Dr. Ernest Evans, tells me homicides year-to-date are up an astonishing 37 percent nationwide.  Kansas City, where I live, has already recorded 60 percent more murders than it did in the entire year of 2014.

None of this has been necessary.  It all started in July 2013, when a trio of Marxists threw a fit following a Florida jury's acquittal of the innocent George Zimmerman.  Those who followed the samizdat expected this outcome.  Those who depended on the major media were as shocked as they were when Trump cleaned Hillary's clock in 2016.

President Barack "If I Had a Son" Obama had the opportunity to endorse the verdict in 2013 and kill BLM in its earliest stages.  He chose not to.  Now the Democrats have lost control of a movement they lacked the courage to stop back when they had the power to stop it.

Their media allies have been spinning all summer to offset the damage the BLM has done to America and the Democratic Party, but that task grows harder by the day.  The media can call a riot a protest, but there is no euphemism for the wanton shooting of cops.  

Jack Cashill's new book, Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency, is now widely available.  Check www.cashill.com for more information.