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Your guide to what the 2024 US elections mean for Washington and the world
The writer is an entrepreneur and technology 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 it is understood in the original sense of the Greek word End of the worldIt means “reveal,” Obama was unable to give the same reassurances in 2025. Trump’s return to the White House heralds Trump’s return to the White House. End of the world One of the secrets of the old regime. What the new administration reveals does not need to justify revenge, as reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation. But for reconciliation to take place, there must be truth first.
the End of the world It is the most peaceful way to resolve the old guard's war on the Internet, a war that the Internet has won. My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein calls the pre-Internet secretaries the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — the media organizations, bureaucracies, universities, and government-funded NGOs that traditionally define the public conversation. In hindsight, the Internet had already begun to free us from DISC prison after financier and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein died in prison in 2019. Nearly half of Americans surveyed that year did not trust the official story that he died by suicide , suggesting that DISC had lost complete control of the narrative.
It may be too early to answer the Internet's questions about the late Epstein. But one cannot say the same about the assassination of John Kennedy. Still sixty-five percent of Americans doubt That Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Like a bizarre post-modern detective story, we wait 61 years for an epilogue as the suspects – Fidel Castro, a 1960s mafia member, and Allen Dulles, head of the CIA – gradually die. The thousands of secret government files related to Oswald may or may not have been just a pretext, but opening them to public inspection would give America some closure.
However, we cannot wait six decades to end the ban on free discussion of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). In emails requested from David Morenz, Anthony Fauci's senior adviser, we learned that officials at the National Institutes of Health He hid Their correspondence from Freedom of information Auditing law. “Nothing,” Boccaccio wrote in his medieval plague epic The Decameron“, “It is so indecent that it could not be said to another person if proper words were used to convey it.”
In that spirit, Morenz and former US Chief Medical Advisor Fauci will have the opportunity to share some indecent facts about our recent plague. Did they suspect that Covid was caused by American taxpayer-funded research, or by a nearby Chinese military program? Why did we fund the work of EcoHealth Alliance, which sent researchers to remote Chinese caves to extract new coronaviruses? Is “gain-of-function” research synonymous with a biological weapons program? How did our government stop the spread of such questions on social media?
Our First Amendment sets the rules of engagement in domestic battles over free speech, but the global reach of the Internet tempts its adversaries into a global war. Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned X without American support, a tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine? Were we complicit in recent Australian legislation requiring age verification for social media users, the beginning of the end of online anonymity? Have we been able to muster even two minutes of criticism of the United Kingdom, which arrests hundreds of people a year for online speech that raises, among other things, “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”? We may not expect the best from Orwell's dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support Internet freedom in Oceania.
Darker questions still arise in these dark final weeks of the interregnum. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently suggested on Joe Rogan's podcast that the Biden administration is cannibalizing crypto entrepreneurs. How much does our financial system resemble the social credit system? We were IRS contractors Illegal leaks Are Trump's tax records anomalous, or should Americans assume that their right to financial privacy depends on their policies? One can speak of a right to privacy at all in Congress Save Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under which the FBI conducts tens of thousands of warrantless searches of Americans' communications?
South Africa has confronted its history of apartheid with a formal commission, but answering the above questions with gradual declassification would suit Trump's chaotic style and an online world that processes and disseminates short packets of information. The first Trump administration shied away from declassification because it still believed in the deep right-wing case of the Oliver Stone film. This belief has faded.
Our ancien régime, like the aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France, believed that the party would never end. 2016 had shaken their historic faith in the arc of the moral universe, but by 2020 they hoped to write off Trump as an aberration. Looking back, 2020 was an aberration, a rearguard action for the struggling regime and its courageous ruler. There will be no retrospection of the pre-Internet past.
The future requires new and strange ideas. New ideas could have saved the old order, which barely acknowledged, let alone answered, our deepest questions – the reasons behind the fifty-year slowdown of scientific and technological progress in the United States, the noise of soaring real estate prices, and the explosion of technology. Public debt.
Perhaps an exceptional country could continue to ignore such questions, but as Trump understood in 2016, America is not an exceptional country. It's not even a great idea anymore.
Identity politics endlessly revisits ancient history. The study of modern history, which the Trump administration is now called upon, is more insidious – and more important. the End of the world It cannot solve our struggles over 1619, but it can solve our fights over Covid-19; He will not judge the sins of our early rulers, but rather the sins of those who rule us today. The Internet will not allow us to forget those sins – but with the truth, it will not prevent us from forgiving.
