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, it was correct. But understood in the original sense of the Greek word apocalypsemeaning “unveiling”, Obama could not give the same reassurance in 2025. Trump’s return to the White House augurs the apocalypse of the secrets of the Old Regime. The revelations of the new administration need not justify revenge – reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation. But for there to be reconciliation, there must first be the truth.

U apocalypse it is the most peaceful way to resolve the war of the old guard on the internet, a war that the internet has won. My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein calls the keepers of pre-internet secrets the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC)—the media organizations, bureaucracies, universities, and government-funded NGOs that they traditionally delimit public conversation. In retrospect, the Internet had already begun our release from DISC prison after the death in prison of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. Nearly half of Americans polled that year challenged the official story that he died by suicide, suggesting that DISC had. lost full control of the narrative.

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 doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Like a strangely postmodern detective story, we wait 61 years for a denouement as the suspects—Fidel Castro, 1960s mobsters, Allen Dulles of the CIA—gradually die. The thousands of classified government files on Oswald may or may not be red herrings, but opening them up for public inspection will give America some closure.

We cannot wait six decades, however, to end the deadlock on a free discussion about Covid-19. In emails cited by Anthony Fauci’s senior adviser, David Morens, we learned that the National Institutes of Health apparatchiks hidden his correspondence from Freedom of information Scrutiny of the act. “Nothing,” wrote Boccaccio in his medieval epic of plague The Decameron“It is so indecent that it cannot be said to another person if the proper words are used to convey it.”

In that spirit, Morens and former US medical adviser Fauci have the chance to share some indecent facts about our own recent plague. Did they suspect that Covid came from research funded by US taxpayers, or from an adjacent Chinese military program? Why did we fund the work of the EcoHealth Alliance, which sent researchers to remote Chinese caves to hunt for new coronaviruses? Is “gain-of-function” research a recipe for a biological weapons program? And how has our government prevented the spread of such questions on social media?

Our First Amendment frames the rules of engagement for domestic free speech struggles, but the global reach of the internet tempts its opponents into a global war. Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned X without American support, in 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 internet anonymity? We also put together a two-minute critique of the UK, which has arrested hundreds of people a year for online speech that caused, among other things, “annoyance, inconvenience or unnecessary anxiety”? We can expect no better from the Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support a free Internet in Oceania.

Darker questions always emerge in these last dark weeks of our interregnum. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently suggested on the Joe Rogan podcast that the Biden administration debanked crypto entrepreneurs. How much does our financial system resemble a social credit system? They were an IRS contractor illegal escapes of Trump’s anomalous tax records, or should Americans assume their right to financial privacy depends on his politics? And you can talk about the right to privacy at all when Congress conserve Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under which the FBI conducts tens of thousands of warrantless searches of American communications?

South Africa has confronted its history of apartheid with a formal commission, but answering the above questions with piecemeal declassifications suits Trump’s chaotic style and our Internet world, which processes and propagates short packets of information. The first Trump administration has moved away from declassifications because it still believes in the deep right-wing state of an Oliver Stone movie. This belief has been shattered.

Our ancien régime, like the aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France, thought that the party would never end. 2016 shook their historicist faith in the arc of the moral universe, but by 2020 they hope to write Trump off as an aberration. In retrospect, 2020 was the aberration, the rearguard action of a struggling regime and its struldbrugg reign. There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past.

The future demands fresh and strange ideas. New ideas were able to save the old regime, which hardly recognizes, let alone answers, our deepest questions – the causes of the 50-year slowdown in scientific and technological progress in the United States, the price racket real estate rising, and the explosion of public debt.

Perhaps an exceptional country could have continued to ignore such questions, but as Trump realized in 2016, America is not an exceptional country. It’s not even bigger.

Identity politics endlessly links ancient history. The study of recent history, to which the Trump administration is now called, is more treacherous – and more important. U apocalypse it cannot solve our struggles over 1619, but it can solve our struggles over Covid-19; do not judge the sins of our first leaders, but 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.