America
has reversed the Jeffersonian ideal. The threat to democracy is now soci- ety — a realm of injustice and oppres- sion, in which human wolves perpetu- ally devour the weak. Donald Trump and Elon Musk stand
as archetypes of the predator. They rep- resent the authoritarian impulse, and they can manipulate the dull-mind- ed masses, even unto insurgency, by spreading falsehoods and fake news. Only a powerful, watchful gov-
ernment, in the hands of the Party of Truth, can impose democracy on a troubled society by controlling the words said, as well as the means of communication that convey them, to the public. For today’s guardian class, Trump
was the quintessential problem of democracy that could be solved only by undemocratic means. Three months after his election, he
was under investigation for conspiring with Russian agents. Failure to find guilt merely con-
firmed Trump’s supervillain powers. A barrage of accusations, impeachments, and indictments has targeted Trump since 2016; the thinking seems to be that, sooner or later, someone will find him guilty of something. That is prob- ably correct. But the establishment left faced a
second and more complex problem: how to control social media, which they believed had lifted Trump to power and might do the same for other dan- gerous carnivores of the Party of Lies. Very quickly, telling fibs online got
ratcheted into a national security cri- sis under the purview of Homeland Security. Nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) provided the “experts” to jus- tify this effort. Many, like the Aspen Institute and
the Atlantic Council, received federal funds — but all sowed panic about disinformation, and all demanded gov- ernment regulation of social media. The NGOs developed the umbrella
conclaves where personnel from feder- al agencies like Homeland Security, the
24 NEWSMAX | SEPTEMBER 2023
The chronology is significant. Most pieces of the system came to life early in the Trump
administration. The pandemic proved an incubator and accelerator of government control of digital speech.
FBI, and State Department inducted their social-media “partners” into the mysteries of digital orthodoxy. Now there were good truths and bad
truths. In cases like that of the Hunter Biden laptop, noble lies had to be told to solve the problems of democracy. The new censorship sidestepped the
old legal niceties: warrants, judges, for- mal investigations. It was a bureaucrat- ic process. As such, it was self-justified, secretive, and open-ended. The chronology is significant. Most
pieces of the system came to life early in the Trump administration. The pan- demic proved an incubator and accel- erator of government control of digital speech. With the ascent of Joe Biden to the presidency, the system achieved some- thing like maturity. Biden was a believ- er — and a practitioner. He accused the digital platforms of
“killing people” with disinformation, and he demanded, successfully, that Twitter exile critics and political oppo- nents.
Biden’s Disinformation Gover-
nance Board self-detonated because the administration imagined such an agency to have self-evident value and was totally unprepared for the torrent of criticism that flooded in. Few Americans want federal gov-
ernance of information. The estab- lishment left, conversely, can’t sur- vive politically without control of the web — and it dwells in a dim institu- tional bubble where self-interest is forever confused with the salvation of democracy. Desperate to break the Democrats’
hold on our culture, Republicans like Jordan aim to ride the First Amend- ment to escape their media ghetto and reach the large majorities required to win national office again. That is a reasonable strategy — but
ours is an unreasonable age. The Republicans are caught in a
circular dilemma: They need the presidency to be heard above the cen- sorship, yet the censorship radically diminishes their chances of getting to the White House. The Democratic Party is the natural
home of the establishment left. To this arrangement, the left brings apparent advantages, like the reflexive applause of The New York Times, but also, less evidently, a heavy load of ideological baggage. Its doctrines tend to be unpopular
even among Democrats. Most Blacks oppose defunding the police, for exam- ple. Most Hispanics disapprove of open borders. Most Democrats don’t believe that grievance should trump merit. If put to a vote, these propositions
would lose. The left must therefore transform
them into moral commandments, beyond the reach of politics. In the digital age, this can be accomplished only by policing and controlling the web — and censorship of that magni- tude is possible only if Biden or some other Democrat holds the presidency after 2024.
Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst and author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. Excerpted from City Journal.
KOSHIRO K/SHUTTERSTOCK
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