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Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
The writer is a technology entrepreneur and investor.
In 2016, President Barack Obama told his staff that Donald Trump’s election victory was “not the apocalypse.” By any definition, he was right. But understood in the original sense of the Greek word apokálypsismeaning “unveiling,” Obama could not make the same assurance in 2025. Trump’s return to the White House foreshadows apokálypsis secrets of the old regime. The new administration’s revelations need not justify revenge—renewal can go hand in hand with reconciliation. But for reconciliation to occur, there must first be truth.
The apokálypsis is the most peaceful way to resolve the old guard war on the internet, the war the internet has won. My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein calls the pre-internet secret keepers the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — the media organizations, bureaucracies, universities, and government-funded NGOs that traditionally limit public conversation. In retrospect, the internet already started our DISC jailbreak following the death of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in prison in 2019. Nearly half of Americans surveyed that year did not believe the official story that he had died by suicide, suggesting that DISC had lost complete control of with a story.
It may be too early to answer the Internet’s questions about the late Mr. Epstein. But the same cannot be said for the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Sixty-five percent of Americans still do doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Like the odd postmodern detective story, we’ve been waiting 61 years for the denouement as the suspects – Fidel Castro, 1960s mobsters, the CIA’s Allen Dulles – gradually die. The thousands of classified government files on Oswald may or may not be red flags, but opening them up for public inspection will bring some conclusions to America.
However, we cannot wait six decades to break the blockade of free discussion about Covid-19. In subpoenaed emails from Anthony Fauci’s senior adviser, David Morens, we learned that National Institutes of Health apparatchiks he hid their correspondence from Freedom of information Operation of the control. “Nothing,” wrote Boccaccio in his medieval epic about the plague Decameron“it is so rude that it cannot be said to another person if the proper words are used to convey it.”
In that spirit, Morens and former US chief medical adviser Fauci will have a chance to share some rude facts about our recent plague. Did they suspect that Covid came from US taxpayer funded research or a neighboring Chinese military program? Why did we fund the work of the EcoHealth Alliance, which sent researchers into remote Chinese caves to extract novel coronaviruses? Is “gain-of-function” research a byword for a biological weapons program? And how did our government stop the spread of such questions on social networks?
Our First Amendment frames the rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech, but the global reach of the Internet is leading its opponents to global war. Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned X without American support, in a tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine? Did we participate in the recent Australian law requiring age verification for social media users, marking the beginning of the end of online anonymity? Have we collected even two minutes of criticism of the UK, which arrests hundreds of people a year for online speech that causes, among other things, “nuisance, embarrassment or unnecessary anxiety”? We can expect nothing better than Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support a free Internet in Oceania.
Darker questions still loom in these dark final weeks of our interregnum. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently suggested on Joe Rogan’s podcast that the Biden administration has debanked crypto entrepreneurs. How similar is our financial system to the social lending system? We were a contractor for the tax administration illegal leakage Trump’s tax records dodgy, or should Americans assume their right to financial privacy depends on their politics? And can we even talk about the right to privacy when Congress preserves Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under which the FBI conducts tens of thousands of warrantless searches of US communications?
South Africa has confronted its apartheid history with a formal commission, but answering the above questions with gradual declassification would suit Trump’s chaotic style and our internet world that processes and disseminates short packets of information. The first Trump administration avoided declassifications because it still believed in the right-wing deep state from the Oliver Stone movie. This belief has faded.
Our old regime, like the aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France, thought the party would never end. 2016 shook their historicist faith in the arc of the moral universe, but by 2020 they hoped to write off Trump as an aberration. In retrospect, 2020 was an aberration, a rearguard action by the embattled regime and its ruler struldbrugg. There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past.
The future requires fresh and strange ideas. New ideas could have saved the old regime, which barely recognized, let alone answered, our deepest questions – the causes of the 50-year slowdown in scientific and technological progress in the US, the racket of rising real estate prices and the explosion of public debt.
Perhaps an exceptional country could continue to ignore such questions, but as Trump realized in 2016, America is not an exceptional country. It’s not even great anymore.
Identity politics endlessly relitifies ancient history. The study of recent history, now invoked by the Trump administration, is more insidious—and more important. The apokálypsis it can’t solve our quarrels about 1619, but it can solve our quarrels about Covid-19; he will not judge for the sins of our first rulers, but for the sins of those who govern us today. The Internet won’t let us forget those sins — but with the truth, it won’t stop us from forgiving.
