Matt Taibbi on Substack today
Meet Josiah Zayner, America’s Most Censored Person
Quote:
Culturally, weāve always been a people up to something in our garages that was none of your business. As the worldās great hothouse for growing crazy people, America produced masses of harmless quacks, surrounded on the edges by a few world-changing geniuses and a fair number also of Mansons, Meteskys, and Starkweathers. With the exception of the occasional Anti-Saloon League or Un-American Affairs Committee, the freedom of spirit at the heart of this equation has for most of our history been celebrated more or less uncontroversially as a core American value.
Usually, a majority figured the odd Scientologist or laetrile dealer was worth tolerating if we also got flying machines, the telephone, and Star Wars out of the bargain.
That dynamic is changing, and the remote unsupervised farm is fast being replaced by a vast, searchable electronic grid. Before, if you wanted to gobble mushrooms and invent Mormonism, who could stop you?
Now weāve got a class of experts who think even enlightened self-abuse canāt be tolerated on their watch.

āThatās the other crazy thing,ā Josiah says. āI have a PhD in this stuff from the University of Chicago. So itās really weird when people point and say, the experts donāt like this. Technically, am I not one of the experts? Donāt I get a say?ā
More from Zayner:
Matt Taibbi: Is the problem in your case one of companies intentionally targeting you because youāve been in the news and controversial, or are you just repeatedly falling afoul of algorithmic censors?
Josiah Zayner: I donāt think necessarily anybodyās out there trying to be deliberately take me down, or is out to get me. Sometimes it feels that way, especially when my payment processors all go away at once, boom, boom, boom. I thought, whoās reporting it? How do you even find out if thereās coordination?
I think itās just the system is designed so poorly that people are just getting caught up in a net, one thatās taking away completely legitimate stuff, and they donāt care because they would rather just take out as much of the bad as possible. Itās like the fraud detection for the banks. Itās terrible⦠They call and say, āYou charged this thing for getting gas!ā Iām like, āI get gas like once a week. How is that fraud?ā
MT: Youāre in a position where there are lots of videos about you on platforms like YouTube, and those are allowed, but the primary source is not. Whatās that like?
Josiah Zayner: The information is totally being controlled. Thatās what it is. Itās not even about politics. Itās just the information we are all experiencing is totally being manipulated and controlled. Itās hard for me. If I canāt even post something about my own life, everybody is only getting a weird, distorted filtered view from the media. They canāt even hear my own account. Thatās really weird.








