A time for truth and reconciliation

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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 apocalypseObama, meaning “revelation,” cannot make the same assurance in 2025. Trump’s return to the White House proves that apocalypse from the secrets of the old regime. The revelations of the new administration should not justify revenge. reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation, but for reconciliation to happen there must first be truth.

It apocalypse 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 pre-Internet keepers of secrets the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC); The internet had already begun our liberation from DISC prison after the death in prison of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that year, with nearly half of Americans disbelieving the official story that he died by suicide, believing that DISC had lost the narrative control.

It may be too early to answer the internet’s questions about the late Mr. Epstein, but the same cannot be said about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Sixty-five percent of Americans still are doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Like an extraordinary postmodern detective story, we’ve waited 61 years for a verdict while the suspects—Fidel Castro, 1960s mobsters, the CIA’s Allen Dulles—slowly die.Thousands of secret government documents on Oswald may or may not be red herrings. but to open them up to public scrutiny would be to shut America out somewhat.

However, we can’t wait six decades to end the ban on free discussion about Covid-19. to hide their correspondence Freedom of information Inspection of the act. “Nothing,” wrote Boccaccio in his medieval plague epic The Decameron“is so obscene that it cannot be said to another, if the proper words are used to convey it.”

In that spirit, Morens and former US Medical Advisor Fauci will share some unsavory facts about our latest plague. Did they suspect that Covid was caused by US taxpayer-funded research or a related Chinese military program? EcoHealth Alliance’s work that sent researchers into remote Chinese caves to extract new coronaviruses Is ‘gain-of-function’ research a bioweapons program? is a nominal word. And how did our government stop the spread of such questions on social networks?

Our First Amendment Rules of Engagement for Free Speech, But the Global Reach of the Internet Is Embracing Its Opponents in a Global War Can We Believe a Brazilian Judge Banned X Without American Support in a Tragicomic Perversion of the Monroe Doctrine? c we were complicit in Australia’s recent legislation requiring age verification for social media users, marking the beginning of the end of internet anonymity we even put together a two-minute critique of the United Kingdom, which arrests hundreds of people a year for online speech that causes, among other things, “distress, inconvenience or undue distress.” We can expect no better from the Orwellian dictatorships of East Asia and Eurasia , but we need to support free internet in Oceania.

Darker questions still emerge in these dark final weeks of our interstate government. Venture capitalist Mark Andreessen recently suggested on Joe Rogan’s podcast: How Much Like a Social Credit System Has Our Finance System Been? is an IRS contractor illegal leaks Are Trump’s tax records abnormal, 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? maintains Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under which the FBI conducts tens of thousands of searches of Americans’ communications.

South Africa grappled with its apartheid history with a formal commission, but answering the above questions with piecemeal declassifications would be in keeping with both Trump’s chaotic style and our internet world of curating and disseminating information in short bursts. The first Trump administration avoided declassifications until now believed in the deep right-wing nature of Oliver Stone’s film This belief has faded.

Our old regime, like the aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France, thought the party would never end. 2016 shook their historic faith in the moral universe, but by 2020 they hoped to write off Trump as an aberration was the diversion of his ruler of Struldbrug, the rearguard action. There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past.

The future requires fresh and strange ideas. New ideas could save the old regime, which barely accepted, let alone answers to our deepest questions. national 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 big anymore.

Identity politics endlessly rewrites the old history. The study of recent history is more treacherous and more important apocalypse may not solve our fights over 1619, but it can solve our fights over Covid-19. it will not judge the sins of our first rulers, but the sins of those who rule us today.