The Day The Regime Jumped The Shark

a story of censorship and national security

The prolific advocate for a free and open internet, Mike Benz, just sat down for the second time this year with Tucker Carlson. It is essential viewing.

Upon watching it I felt compelled to expand upon a couple key insights drawn from this interview and synthesize them with my understanding of the current state of American politics and lessons gleaned from my first month attending a professional development course.

The Key Revelation

In order to maintain the international rules-based order central to the National Security Strategy (NSS), the ruling class¹ can’t afford for Western democracies to elect nationalists and populists to prominent positions of power. We can see this spelled out in Part I of the NSS (emphasis mine):

We face two strategic challenges. The first is that the post-Cold War era is definitively over and a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next. No nation is better positioned to succeed in this competition than the United States, as long as we work in common cause with those who share our vision of a world that is free, open, secure, and prosperous. This means that the foundational principles of self-determination, territorial integrity, and political independence must be respected, international institutions must be strengthened, countries must be free to determine their own foreign policy choices, information must be allowed to flow freely, universal human rights must be upheld, and the global economy must operate on a level playing field and provide opportunity for all.

The second is that while this competition is underway, people all over the world are struggling to cope with the effects of shared challenges that cross borders—whether it is climate change, food insecurity, communicable diseases, terrorism, energy shortages, or inflation. These shared challenges are not marginal issues that are secondary to geopolitics. They are at the very core of national and international security and must be treated as such. By their very nature, these challenges require governments to cooperate if they are to solve them. But we must be clear-eyed that we will have to tackle these challenges within a competitive international environment where heightening geopolitical competition, nationalism and populism render this cooperation even more difficult and will require us to think and act in new ways.

So here we have an acknowledgment that nationalism and populism pose a challenge to a core strategic objective of the NSS. Alongside the stated commitment to respecting foundational principles of self-determination and political independence, this presents a problem though. Nationalism and populism are features of popular backlash in Western democracies to the impression that these governments prioritize the interests of a relatively small transnational elite over their native populations. In his interview with Tucker, Benz reveals one of the “new ways” to “think and act” the establishment has developed in an attempt to resolve this paradox:

[Since they are committed to] this concept of championing democracy, [they] need to redefine what democracy is. [They] need to make it not about the consensus of individuals, how people vote, but make it about the consensus of institutions. And [they] will simply define democratic institutions as anyone who supports the US foreign policy establishment and its transatlantic partners in the UK.

While this successfully resolves the paradox with the wonders of postmodern torture of language, it simultaneously destroys the spiritual foundation and legitimacy of the United States Federal Government. The Constitution doesn’t start off with “We the Institutions”, it starts with “We the People”. To better appreciate the gravity of this departure, let us consider this section of America’s other primary founding document, the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

In the American conception of Government, just powers are derived from the consent of the governed, so what happens when the ruling class attempts to instead derive power from an entirely different source? To his credit, Tucker picked up on the implications immediately:

They're playing with revolution here… They've lost their legitimacy. So I'm not going to try to overthrow the us government. I'm 55. I'm not going to do that. But at some point, you know, someone's going to try to do that, and it's going to be kind of hard to see whether or not justified in doing that, because it's not legitimate. Their legitimacy comes from the consent of the governed. That's our system. And when they no longer have the consent of the governed, they're not legitimate, period.

The Culmination of a Long Trend

The title of this post refers to a television trope used to describe a show that crossed the threshold from mediocrity into terminal decline. Happy Days wasn’t the show it used to be long before they decided to center an entire episode, a season premier no less, on Fonzie anticlimactically jumping over a shark on water skis. America is similar in a lot of ways. Alongside the managerial revolution we had a lot of warnings. The nation’s most highly decorated military man at the time, Smedley Butler, told us that “War is a Racket.” President Eisenhower warned us of a grave threat of misplaced power in a scientific technocratic elite in his farewell address. JFK was in the midst of reforming aspects of the security state when he was assassinated. Even Nixon was railroaded over the Watergate scandal while pursuing realist foreign policy objectives in the face of the significant threat posed by Communism.² The CIA’s Legacy of Ashes should inform us that clandestine meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations can’t be assumed to advance American interests. More recently, the Global War on Terror has suggested the same. Political opposition to these practices has always been suppressed by powerful interests. From the time Edward Bernays helped develop the unique American type of propaganda known as “public relations” to the evolution of the information ecosystem pre-internet into massive apparatus capable of Manufacturing Consent, the American people have been on the receiving end of the informational instrument of power. There were always limits to the employment of this means, however. The first amendment forbids with great clarity government action directed at abridging the ability of Americans to express dissent. When public relations have sought to sway opinions, the costs of such information campaigns have constrained their scale and scope. Branding oligarchy as democracy in an era when meaningful limits on government spending have evaporated threatens to overcome these obstacles once and for all, unfortunately.

Consent and Coercion

Before, while consent could be manufactured, it was voluntary. People still had to be convinced, and if they weren’t, there were political consequences. Right now, the people aren’t convinced, and in order to avoid the consequences, our elite have unilaterally decided that they are justified in using coercion to tip the scales. There are mountains of evidence to support this claim in the Twitter files, and Mark Zuckerberg of all people has openly expressed his regret about caving to coercive government pressure to censor speech deemed threatening to establishment corporate and political interests. This apparatus now threatens to bankrupt X by supporting its banning in Brazil to prevent Bolsanaro from returning to office while the EU threatens to follow suit to prevent populist leaders from winning free and fair elections throughout Europe.³

Not only have our 1A rights been infringed upon, the entire complex directed towards the task was funded by the US taxpayer and deployed worldwide. Now we don’t have corporate interests investing in public relations to maximize profit, we have a conglomeration of public-private partnerships using OUR money to wrest power out of the hands of ordinary Americans and determine global political outcomes permanently.

Way Ahead

What saddens me most is that many of the individuals employed by the US Government or receiving government money to partake of this treason don’t seem to recognize this for what it is because of some very clever rhetorical tricks being employed. To them, we’re not Americans with a different conception of how to advance American interests, we’re “threat actors.” When we argue, nothing we say can be a legitimate criticism of policy that is fundamentally opposed to America’s founding principles. No, the only possible characterization of us speaking our minds is that we’re spreading “disinformation.” By framing dialogue this way and employing coercion to suppress this dissent under a national security predicate, they totally insulate themselves from all communication based resolutions to this fundamental conflict. The only way forward is to completely discard this militarized information operations framework. Training people to systematically ignore anyone who disagrees by labeling them a “threat actor” is divisive and dangerous. It takes the innate confirmation bias and puts it on steroids. There is a reason the first amendment was listed first. Without the unabridged freedom of expression, America is not a democratic republic, but an oligarchy ruled by those who determine who is and is not a “threat actor.” I’ve tried to argue that this approach is illegitimate, but those afflicted with spook psychology easily dismiss such arguments by appealing to utilitarian consequentialism, so I’ll quickly make my case in those terms.

The freedom of expression and ideas of popular sovereignty that emerged out of Western governments aren’t mere accidents of history. These features are integral to the ascendance and subsequent global dominance of Western liberal democracy. If the objective of the NSS is to achieve a better future consisting of a free, open, secure, and prosperous world, the only way for this to be possible, let alone likely, is steadfast commitment to freedom of expression. Words have meaning, and to believe that constraining the definition of free and open to only apply to institutions, and not the American people writ large is dangerously delusional. In order to forge the international cooperation needed to achieve these strategic objectives, we can’t afford to suffer delusional midwits interfering with our ability to communicate. We indeed face complex challenges as a nation, and yes, globally, but the idea that the best ideas to face these challenges are already known and reside in the minds of an elite that has amassed a dizzying track record of failure is hubristic nonsense. We do have a chance at a better future, but that chance is entirely dependent on the incompetocracy getting out of the way to allow us to pursue the truly creative and innovative solutions that will be required to get us there.

Thinking Differently

I don’t have the hubris to believe I have all the answers, but I do want to provide an example of what I consider to be the kind of “different thinking” we need to achieve the kind of security and prosperity ostensibly being targeted by the NSS…

What if populism and nationalism don’t constitute difficulties to overcome in fostering the cooperation we need to confront the challenges we face, but instead provide the key to a sustainable solution? What if political empowerment of the bulk of European populations and their descendants is the only thing that can maintain the relative stability and prosperity associated with the international rules-based order? Shortly after France collapsed into the Terror, it emerged as a neigh unstoppable empire. How? In no small part because ordinary French citizens were given a stake in their nation. Could it be that the sense among native populations across Western democracies is that they no longer have a stake in the system? That their interests in their respective nations are being sold out from under them by a transnational oligarchy who castigate any and all opposition as bigots or “threat actors?”

Is it possible that the classic paradigm of international relations, Political Realism, expresses a timeless truth in its recognition that peace and stability emerges not from fleeting hegemony, but from a balance of power? How better to achieve this balance of power than through widespread populism and nationalism where sovereign nations are governed by the will of their respective peoples where Western values reign, and by whatever functional alternative where they do not? I worry that the establishment is trapped with assumptions that have become so ubiquitous in their incestuous circles they can no longer recognize them as assumptions. I’m also growing ever more confident these assumptions, dependent as they are upon hypocrisy and self-contradiction, are dangerously wrong. Perception is easier to control than reality, especially the perception of a small and ideologically insulated elite, but reality has ways of inevitably exerting itself to break through such delusions. Free and unrestricted communication is one of these ways assuming those in power have the wisdom to listen.

1. When I reference the ruling class or regime, I’m referring to the professional-managerial class. In order to understand the philosophies that animate and inform the behavior and decision making of this group

N.S. Lyons

work, especially his 2023

Dudley Newright

article of the year The China Convergence.

2. It appears Nixon had no hand in the Watergate break in.

3. More intel gleaned from Benz. The blob has evidently worked with the EU to craft online content rules to ban X which would threaten the social media company with insolvency.