Time for truth and reconciliation

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The author is a technology entrepreneur and investor.

In 2016, President Barack Obama told his staff that Donald Trump’s election victory was not an “apocalypse”. By any definition, he was right. But it was understood in the original sense of the Greek word apokálypsiswhich means “revealed”, Obama could not give the same guarantee in 2025. Trump’s return to the White House apokálypsis of the secrets of the old regime. Revelations of a new administration should not justify revenge – reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation. But for reconciliation to happen, there must first be truth.

The apokálypsis it is the most peaceful way to resolve the war of the old guard on the internet, a war that the internet won. My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein calls the keepers of pre-internet secrets the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) – media organizations, bureaucrats, universities and NGOs funded by ‘ government that traditionally stifled public discourse. In retrospect, the internet had already begun to be released from prison by DISC with the prison death of promoter and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. About half of Americans polled that year were disbelieving the official story that he died by suicide, suggesting that DISC has. lost complete control of the story.

It may be too soon to answer Internet questions about the late Epstein. But one cannot say the same about the assassination of John F Kennedy. Sixty-five percent of Americans still are doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Like a modern detective story, we wait 61 years for the denouement when the suspects – Fidel Castro, 1960s mafiosi, Allen Dulles of the CIA – slowly die. The thousands of classified government files on Oswald may not be red herrings, but opening them up for public inspection will give America closure.

We cannot wait for sixty years, however, to stop the closure of free discussions about Covid-19. In classified emails from Anthony Fauci’s senior adviser David Morens, we learned that the National Institutes of Health’s tools are working. hidden their letters from Freedom of Information Do the test. “Nothing,” wrote Boccaccio in his account of the medieval plague The Decameron“it is so dishonorable that it cannot be said to another person if proper words are used to convey it.”

In that spirit, Morens and America’s former medical adviser, Fauci, will have an opportunity to share some salacious facts about our latest epidemic. Did they suspect that Covid arose from research funded by US taxpayers, or China’s close military program? Why did we fund the work of the EcoHealth Alliance, which sent researchers into remote caves in China to isolate new coronaviruses? Is “operational effectiveness” research a byword for the bioweapons program? And how did our government stop the proliferation of such questions on social media?

Our First Amendment establishes the rules of engagement for civil wars over free speech, but the global reach of the Internet tempts its opponents to global war. Can we believe that the Brazilian judge banned X without American support, in a sad way of twisting the Monroe Doctrine? Have we had a hand in Australia’s latest law requiring age verification for social media users, the beginning of the end for Internet anonymity? Did we spare two minutes to criticize the UK, which arrests hundreds of people a year for causing online speech to, among other things, “annoyance, disturbance or unnecessary anxiety”? We may expect no better from Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support free internet in Oceania.

Dark questions are emerging in these quiet final weeks of our fellowship. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently suggested on Joe Rogan’s podcast that the Biden administration has discouraged crypto entrepreneurs. How similar is our financial system to the public credit system? They were IRS contractors illegal leaks Are Trump’s tax returns unusual, or should Americans consider their right to financial privacy dependent on their politics? And can one talk about the right to privacy at all in Congress economical Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, where the FBI conducts tens of thousands of warrantless searches of Americans’ communications?

South Africa has faced its history of apartheid through an official commission, but to answer the above questions with a slight deletion would suit Trump’s confused style with our internet world, which operates and publishes such packages. informational briefs. The first Trump administration avoided criticism because it still believed in the seriousness of Oliver Stone’s film. This belief is gone.

Our old regime, like the nobles of pre-revolutionary France, thought that the party would never end. 2016 shook their historical belief in moral world but in 2020 they hoped to write Trump off as a freak. In retrospect, 2020 was a setback, a back-and-forth for a struggling government and its chaotic ruler. There will be no revival of the sentiments of the internet’s past.

The future needs new and amazing ideas. A new perspective would have saved the old regime, which did not recognize, let alone answer, our deepest questions – the causes of the decline of 50 years of scientific and technological progress in the US, a sign of rising real estate prices and a property boom. public debt.

Perhaps an exceptional country would have continued to ignore such questions, but as Trump understood in 2016, America is not an exceptional country. It’s not big anymore.

Identity politics always resonates with ancient history. The study of recent history, as the Trump administration is now called, is even trickier — and even more important. The apokálypsis it won’t solve our wars on 1619, but it can solve our wars on Covid-19; it will not judge the sins of our former rulers, but the sins of those who rule us today. The internet won’t let us forget those sins – but it certainly won’t stop us from forgiving.