Brownstone Institute
The Post-Ideological Age
Fr0m the Brownstone Institute
Conventional wisdom has it that the US and much of the Western world has polarized into right and left. These tribes are hard-core and share mutual loathing. That model of understanding pervades all popular media and consumes the culture, such that everyone feels the need to choose. It’s simple, harkens back to Cold War binaries, drums up media attention, and further divides the population in ways that benefit the leaders of both sides.
The reality underneath the surface is otherwise. The old ideologies are fractured and most serious people are trying to piece together something other than the old frameworks. The turning was slow at first, probably beginning at the end of the Cold War, but culminated in the response to the Covid crisis. Despite the claim, left and right have never been more scrambled. The reassembling is also occurring right now but it looks much more like the ruling class vs everyone else.
The Covid policy response confounded every ideological outlook. For the center-left that had always trusted public health, seeing the principles of 100 years shredded in an instant was a shock. For the center-right, to see the Republicans in power acquiesce to the idea of “shutting down the economy” was truly hard to believe. The concerns of the traditional civil libertarians, including free speech, were trampled. Those who had traditionally rallied around the rights and interests of business big and small watched with horror as Big Business joined the lockdown armies and small businesses were crushed. The believers in science as a standard of truth to rise above it all were astonished to see every journal and every association compromised by state priorities.
As for nearly everyone who believed that we still lived in a representative democracy, in which elected leaders held the power, they were astonished to watch as politicians became fearful and powerless over the many layers of entrenched bureaucratic experts in government, the deepest layers of which seem to be taking charge over traditional civilian agencies. The people who had always regarded pharma as constantly foiled by the FDA watched in amazement as these vaccine-wielding powerhouses called the shots over all approval processes.
As the dissidents began to cut through the censorship that was almost immediate in the spring of 2020, we discovered a fascinating thing. Our traditional allies were not with us. I’ve heard this from the right, left, and libertarians all. Whether in academia or media, no one was speaking out in ways we might have expected. As Naomi Wolf put it in a private seminar, in words that shocked me at the time, “all our past alliances, institutions, and networks have collapsed.”
There was something about the excuse for the imposition of sudden despotism that seemed to confound all the main voices on all sides. That was a clue that something was very wrong, and it was more than betrayal. It was a sign that we had profoundly misunderstood the intellectual lay of the land.
One might have supposed that church leaders would protest the closing of houses of worship. For the most part, they did not. It was the same with old-line civil liberties organizations. They fell silent. The Libertarian Party had nothing to say and neither did most libertarian think tanks; even now the party’s standard bearer was fully in with the lockdown program when it mattered. The left fell in line and so did the right. Indeed, major “conservative” outlets weighed in on behalf of lockdowns and vaccine mandates – same as the traditional “liberal” outlets.
And what did the dissidents have in common? They were concerned with evidence, science, calm, and traditional law and liberty. Crucially, they were in a career position to say something about the problem. That is to say, most of the dissidents were not in a position of dependency on the major systems of power and influence, whether in the nonprofit world, academia, Big Media and Tech, and otherwise. They spoke out because they cared and because they were in a position to do so.
Gradually over the months and years, we have found each other. And what have we found? We’ve discovered that people who were seemingly on different sides solely due to branding of the past had far more in common than we thought.
And as a result, and partly because we were now in a position to trust each other more than we might otherwise, we began to listen to each other. More importantly, we have begun to learn from each other, discovering all the ways in which our previous tribal connections had blinded us to realities that we had right before us the whole time but we simply could not see.
As an example, many on the left who had long defended the rise of government power as a check on the depredations of private business were amazed to see these very powers turned against the classes of people whose interests they had long defended, namely the poor and working classes. If nothing else, the pandemic response was a prime example of class exploitation of the people on behalf of the economic, cultural, and political elites.
Conversely, those of us who had long championed the rights of business were forced to look squarely at the reality that the largest corporations, heavily consolidated after decades of loose credit, were working so closely with government as if there really was no difference between the public and private sector. Indeed it was hard to tell the difference.
Those who had long championed the rights of media against elite attacks discovered that there really was very little difference between mainstream corporate media and government public relations departments, who in turn were carrying water for the most powerful corporations that stood to gain trillions from the whole caper.
Watching all this unfold in real time was an astonishing experience. Above all else, it was intellectually disorienting. And so those of us who care about holding an accurate understanding of the world had to regroup, draw on what we knew to be true which was confirmed but rethinking postulates and dogmas we assumed to be true but which turned out to be false in the emergency.
Yes, these days have ended, at least for now, but they leave a vast carnage of old ideological systems in the dustbin of history. Part of the job of Brownstone Institute, and perhaps even our main job, is to figure out the operations of the world in a realistic way, backed by evidence and the best theory, toward finding our way back to the fundamental principles that have built civilization over the centuries. That goal is inseparable from the very idea of rights, and public institutions that are responsive to the people.
What we have learned is that our ideological system not only didn’t protect us; they could not even fully explain the strange realities that unfolded.
Everyone in the dissident community agrees fully with the main theme of The Lord of the Rings: power is the great killer of the human spirit. Our job is to figure out who has that power, how to dismantle it, and the right path to preventing something like this from ever happening again. And by “something like this,” we mean everything: the exploitation, the restrictions on peaceful behavior, the agency capture and corporate aggression, the censorship and betrayal of the promise of the information age, the crushing of property rights and enterprise, and the violation of bodily autonomy.
In our quieter moments, all of us are wondering how we could have been so confused about the ideological bifurcations of the past. Why were we so entrenched in them? And to what extent did those ideologies create an artificial veneer over the growing problems underneath the binary overlay? This was surely the case and it went on for decades.
We think back now on populist movements of the past and see how many of them, whether ostensibly from the right or left, ultimately came from the same place, the perception that the system was being run by something or someone other than is being advertised. The Occupy Wall Street movement ultimately came from the same instincts as the Truckers Revolt in Canada that came some twelve years later, and yet one is called left and one is called right.
It is impossible to separate the BLM protests and sometimes riots from reaction against being locked up for the better part of two months from a virus that was known to be a threat mainly to the aged and infirm. That unleashed predictable anger that was often deeply destructive. And the shock and outrage at the vaccine and mask mandates stemmed from the same basic impulse: the human desire not to live in cages of someone else’s creation but rather be in charge of our own bodies and lives.
It’s the same with the anti-censorship movements today, and the growing nationalist movements around the world that wonder whether or not nation-states even have authority anymore to control the massive and hegemonic global forces that seem to be pulling the strings behind the scenes.
All these shifts in the firmament of opinion and politics come from the same place: the desire to take back control of our lives.
This means many things. It includes causes that many on the right have neglected: food freedom, medical freedom, corporate consolidation, the rise of the corporate state, private-sector censorship pushed by agency outsourcing, the militarization of civilian agencies, and deep-state power. And the same is true for the honest left, newly aware of the corruption of government, the rights of religious freedom and free enterprise, the evils of central banking and financial surveillance, and far more.
Looking back, much more makes sense. Consider the domestic discontent in the US that culminated in the implausible election of Donald Trump in 2016, an event that confounded the elite classes in media, government, tech, and pharma. Trump stood in symbolic opposition to it all and took some minor steps toward rolling back the empire at home and abroad. He was joined in this effort by political trends in the UK (with Brexit) and Brazil (with the rise of Bolsonaro). A new flavor of populism seemed to be on the rise.
There were many attempts to crush it here and abroad, starting far back but intensifying after 2016. The culminating moment was the Covid regime which was global in scope and involved a “whole of society” approach as if to say: we and not you are in charge. Look what we can achieve! Observe how little you really matter in the scheme of things! You thought the system worked for you but it is designed and run by us!
Is this sustainable? It is highly doubtful, at least not in the long term. What is desperately needed now is a paradigm of understanding that transcends the tribal alliances of the past. It really is the ruling elite vs. everyone else, an outlook that blows apart ideological divisions of the past and cries out for a new comprehension of the present moment, not to mention new plans of action. And this remains true regardless of the outcome of the election in November.
In the language of Thomas Kuhn, our times have seen the decisive collapse of old paradigms. They have fallen under the weight of too many anomalies. We have already entered into the pre-paradigmatic stage that seeks a new and more evidence-based orthodoxy of understanding. The only way we can get there is to enter into and enjoy the clash of ideas, in a spirit of freedom and learning. If nothing else, these are exciting times to be alive and active, an opportunity for all of us to make a difference for the future.
If you are interested in supporting the work of Brownstone Institute – the fellowships, events, books, retreats, and ongoing journalism and research – we invite you to do so. Unlike so many others, we have no government or corporate backing and depend entirely on your willingness to help. This is how we save intellectual integrity and how we save the world.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
How will he organize the “deportation” of illegal migrants? In the best case, it will be difficult. There will be scuffles and chases. Critics will charge the new Administration as cruel and worse. How much stomach will Republicans have for a messy process?
Trump enjoys the momentum. Four of the most recent major national polls show him up 2 to 3%, while Democratic-friendly outlets like the New York Times and CNN both show a TIE race in their final surveys. The 2016 and 2020 elections were razor close even though Clinton (5%) and Biden (8%) had solid polling leads at this point. We need to contemplate a Trump win not only in the electoral college but also in the popular vote.
Here are some thoughts:
- JD Vance ascendant, obviously. Big implications for the Republican trajectory.
- Will Trump replace Fed chairman Jay Powell? Or merely jawbone for a change in policy? In a new CNBC interview, former Fed governor Kevin Warsh argues that the Fed has juiced both the stock market and inflation. Would reducing inflation, which Trump has promised, automatically therefore lead to a stock market correction and economic slowdown? Not necessarily. If Trump unleashes productive economic activity and Congress ends the fiscal blowout, the Fed could normalize monetary policy without causing a major economic slump.
- Will Trump impose the broad and deep tariffs he proposed? Or will he mostly threaten them as a bargaining tool with China? I’m betting on some of the former but more of the latter. We notice, however, Trump allies are floating a trial balloon to replace income taxes with tariffs. As impractical and improbable as that may be, we’re glad to see the mention of radical tax reform reemerge after too long an absence from the national discussion.
- How will he organize the “deportation” of illegal migrants? In the best case, it will be difficult. There will be scuffles and chases. Critics will charge the new Administration as cruel and worse. How much stomach will Republicans have for a messy process? One idea would be to offer a “reverse amnesty” – if you leave peacefully and agree not to return illegally, we will forgive your previous illegal entry(s) and minor violations. This would incentivize self-identification and quiet departure. Plus it would help authorities track those leaving. Would migrant departures truly hit the economy, as critics charge? We doubt large effects. Substantial native populations are still underemployed or absent from the workforce.
- We should expect a major retrenchment of regulatory intrusions across the economy – from energy to crypto. Combined with recent Supreme Court action, such as the Chevron reversal, and assisted by the Elon Musk’s substance and narrative, it could be a regulatory renaissance. Extension of the 2017 tax cuts also becomes far more likely.
- Trump has never worried much about debt, deficits, or spending. But he’s tapped Elon Musk as government efficiency czar. It’s an orthogonal approach to spending reform instead of the traditional (and unsuccessful) Paul Ryan playbook. Can this good cop-bad cop duo at the very least return out-of-control outlays to a pre-Covid path? Can they at least cancel purely kleptocratic programs, such as the $370-billion Green Energy slush funds? Might they go even further – leveraging the unpopular spending explosion and resulting inflation to achieve more revolutionary effects on government spending and reach? Or will the powerful and perennial forces of government expansion win yet again, sustaining a one-way ratchet not even Elon can defeat?
- What if the economy turns south? One catalyst might be the gigantic unrealized bond losses on bank balance sheets; another might be commercial real estate collapse. Although reported GDP growth has been okay, the inflation hangover is helping Trump win on the economy. But many believe the post-pandemic economic expansion is merely a sugar-high and has already lasted longer than expected. A downturn early in Trump’s term could complicate many of his plans.
- How will NATO and its transatlantic network respond? Or more generally, what will the neocon and neoliberal hawks, concentrated in DC and the media, but little loved otherwise, do? Does this item from Anne Applebaum — arguing Trump resembles Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin all rolled into one — portend continued all-out war on prudent foreign policy? Or will they adopt a more sophisticated approach? If the neocons move wholesale and formally (back) into the Democratic fold, how long will the coalition of wokes and militarists hold? On the economic front, Europe, already underperforming vis-a-vis the US, will fall even further behind without big changes. Reformers should gain at the expense of the transatlantic WEF-style bureaucrats.
- Can Trump avoid another internal sabotage of his Administration? Before then, if the election results are tight, will the Democrats seek to complicate or even block his inauguration? Can he win approval for his appointees in the Senate? Can he clean house across the vast public agencies? How long will it take to recruit, train, and reinvigorate talented military leadership, which we chased away in recent years? And how will Trump counter – and avoid overreacting to – taunts, riots, unrest, and lawfare, designed to bolster the case he’s an authoritarian?
- Will the Democrats reorient toward the center, a la Bill Clinton? Or will the blinding hatred of Trump fuel yet more radicalism? Orthodox political thinking suggests a moderation. Especially if Trump wins the popular vote, or comes close, pragmatic Democrats will counsel a reformation. James Carville, for example, already complains that his party careened recklessly away from male voters. And Trump’s apparent pickups among Black and Latino voters complicate the Democrats’ longstanding identity-focused strategy. Other incentives might push toward continued belligerence and extreme wokeness, however, and thus an intra-party war.
- Will the half of the country which inexplicably retains any confidence in the legacy media at least begin rethinking its information diet and filters? Or has the infowarp inflicted permanent damage?
- Will big business, which shifted hard toward Democrats over the last 15 years, recalibrate toward the GOP? Parts of Silicon Valley over the last year began a reorientation — e.g. Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and before them, Peter Thiel in 2016. But those are the entrepreneurs. In the receding past, businesses large and small generally lined up against government overreach. Then Big Business and Big Government merged. Now, a chief divide is between politically-enmeshed bureaucratic businesses and entrepreneurial ones. Does the GOP even want many of the big guys back? The GOP’s new alignment with “Little Tech” is an exciting development, especially after being shut out of Silicon Valley for the last two decades.
- Industry winners: traditional energy, nuclear energy, Little Tech. Industry losers: Green Energy, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Food. Individual winners: X (nee Twitter), Elon Musk, RFK, Jr.
- How will the Censorship Industrial Complex react? A Trump win will pose both a symbolic and operational blow to governmental, non-governmental, old media, and new media outlets determined to craft and control facts and narratives. It will complicate their mission, funding, and organizational web. Will they persist in their “mis/disinformation” framing and their badgering of old media and social media companies to moderate content aggressively? Or will they devise a new strategy? A.I. is pretty clearly the next frontier in the information wars. How will those who propagandize and rewire human minds attempt to program and prewire artificial ones?
- How will Trump integrate RFK, Jr. and his movement? Will RFK, Jr. achieve real influence, especially on health issues? Big Pharma and Big Public Health will wage a holy war to block reforms in general and accountability for Covid mistakes in particular.
- Trump has promised to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. On one hand, it should be easy. Despite what you hear from DC media and think tanks, Ukraine is losing badly. Hundreds of thousands are dead, and its military is depleted and faltering. Ukraine should want a deal quickly, before it loses yet more people and territory. Russia, meanwhile, always said it wants a deal, even before the war started, focusing on Ukrainian neutrality. Why Ukrainian neutrality should bother the US was always a mystery. And yet even critics of the West’s support for Ukraine, who want an agreement, think it will be difficult to achieve. The Western foreign policy establishment has invested too much credibility and emotion. It will charge “appeasement” and “betrayal” and make any deal difficult for Trump. Russia, meanwhile, has secured so much territory and now has Odessa and Kharkiv in its sights. Putin will not be eager to accept a deal he would have taken in 2021 or before. The far better path for all involved was a pre-war agreement, or the one negotiated but scuttled in April 2022.
- What if A.I. launches a new productivity boom, enabled by an agenda of energy abundance, including a nuclear power revival? The economic tailwinds could remake politics even more than we currently see.
- Can Trump, having run and won his last campaign, consolidate gains by reaching out and uniting the portions of the country willing to take an extended hand?
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.
It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.
Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.
Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.
The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.
In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.
It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.
What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.
We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:
Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.” All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.
To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”
When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.
Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years, Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.
Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th election.
Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.
Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.
This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.
Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.
Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.
No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.
All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.
One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.
As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.
The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.
Authors
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