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A guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world.
The author is a technology entrepreneur and investor.
In 2016, President Barack Obama told his staff that Donald Trump’s election victory was “not the end of the world.” By any definition, he was right. But President Obama could not provide the same reassurance in 2025, understood in the original meaning of the Greek word apokalypsis, meaning “revelation.” President Trump’s return to the White House portends the apocalyptic reveal of the Ancien regime’s secrets. The new administration’s revelations do not necessarily justify revenge. Reconstruction can take place in parallel with reconciliation. But for reconciliation to occur, there must first be truth.
Apocalypsis is the most peaceful means of resolving the old wars on the Internet, wars won by the Internet. My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein refers to the pre-Internet secret keeper as the Distributed Thought Suppression Complex (DISC). These are media organizations, bureaucracies, universities, and government-funded NGOs that have traditionally restricted public conversation. In retrospect, when financier and child molester Jeffrey Epstein died in prison in 2019, the internet had already begun to free us from DISC prison. Almost half of Americans polled that year did not believe the official report that he died by suicide, and DISC lost complete control of the narrative.
It may be too early to answer internet questions about the late Mr. Epstein. But the same cannot be said about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. 65 percent of Americans still doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Like some bizarre post-modern detective novel, we waited 61 years for the grand finale, as suspects like Fidel Castro, the 1960s Mafia, and the CIA’s Allen Dulles gradually died. The thousands of classified government files on Oswald may or may not be red herrings, but releasing them for public viewing could provide the United States with some closure.
But we cannot wait 60 years for an open discussion on COVID-19 to lift the lockdown. A subpoena email from Anthony Fauci’s senior adviser, David Morens, reveals that National Institutes of Health officials concealed communications from Freedom of Information Act scrutiny. In his medieval plague epic, The Decameron, Boccaccio wrote, “There is nothing so vulgar that you can say to someone else, if you use the right words to convey it.”
In that spirit, Mr. Morens and former US chief medical adviser Fauci will have the opportunity to share some sordid facts about our nation’s own recent epidemic. Did they suspect that the coronavirus arose from U.S. taxpayer-funded research or military projects in neighboring China? Why did we fund the work of the EcoHealth Alliance, which sent researchers into remote caves in China to extract the coronavirus? Is it a pronoun? And how did our government stop such questions from spreading on social media?
The First Amendment provides rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech, but the global reach of the Internet tempts adversaries into global wars. In a tragic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine, can we believe that Brazilian judges banned X without US support? Have we joined Australia’s recent law requiring age verification for social media users to be the beginning of the end of internet anonymity? Did we spend even two minutes criticizing the UK, which arrests hundreds of people a year for online speech that causes “annoyance, inconvenience or unnecessary anxiety”, among other things? We might not expect much more from Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but free internet in Oceania must be supported.
In the bleak final weeks of our interregnum, dark questions still emerge. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently suggested on Joe Rogan’s podcast that the Biden administration has eliminated bank accounts for crypto entrepreneurs. How similar is our financial system to the Social Credit system? Was the illegal leak of Trump’s tax records by an IRS contractor an anomaly, or are Americans’ rights to financial privacy swayed by politics? Should we assume that it will? And how can you talk about the right to privacy when Congress has preserved Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act under which the FBI conducts tens of thousands of warrantless searches of Americans’ communications? Or?
South Africa has confronted its history of apartheid with formal commissions, but answering the above questions with piecemeal declassification is a challenge to President Trump’s chaotic style and the internet’s ability to process and propagate short packets of information. Would be suitable for both worlds. The first Trump administration avoided declassification because it still believed in the right-wing deep state of the Oliver Stone movies. This belief has faded.
Our Ancien regime, like the pre-revolutionary French aristocracy, believed that the party would never end. 2016 had shaken their historicist belief in the arc of the moral world, but by 2020 they were hoping to dismiss Trump as an anomaly. In retrospect, 2020 was an anomaly, a rearguard action of a beleaguered regime and its ruler, Struldburg. There will be no reactionary recovery of the pre-Internet past.
The future needs fresh and strange ideas. New ideas may have saved the old regime. The old regime hardly acknowledged, let alone answered, our deepest questions, such as what caused America’s 50-year slowdown in scientific and technological progress, the soaring real estate prices, and the real estate explosion. Public debt.
Perhaps an exceptional country could have continued to ignore such questions, but as President Trump understood in 2016, America is not an exceptional country. It’s not even great anymore.
Identity politics endlessly re-discusses ancient history. The study of recent history that the Trump administration is now required to do is both more dangerous and more important. Revelation cannot resolve our fight over 1619, but it can resolve our fight over COVID-19. It will not judge the sins of our first rulers, but the sins of those who rule us today. The internet does not allow us to forget those sins, but the truth does not prevent us from forgiving.
