On the night of 1 June 2020, almost exactly five years ago, gunshots rang out not far from my apartment in East Midtown Manhattan. As my wife and I anxiously scrolled news feeds, our kids — then ages three and one — slept, oblivious to the coruscating sirens that carried hints of chaos beyond our door. At 11pm, I went out to see it for myself: gangs of looters smashing stores down Lexington Avenue, while NYPD patrols stood pat, unwilling or unable to confront them. Black Lives Matter.
That night and its aftermath, I now believe, were the biggest factor behind the backlash rippling through US culture today. That was when a Covid-era tension finally snapped; and many millions resolved that every claim issuing from reputable authorities must be a lie. The beneficiaries: YouTube crackpots, semi-literate weightlifting bros, amateur Holocaust revisionists, manosphere goons, spittle-flecked “X” racists commanding huge audiences.
The political consequences: allowing the Trumpian Right and its new tech allies to justify a raft of self-interested, pro-oligarchic measures by simply gesturing at the very real bogeys of that era: woke, DEI, debanking, censorship. This, even as many of these same moves will only deepen the power imbalances — between corporations and consumers, individuals and institutions — cast into stark relief in the plague-and-pandemic year 2020.
Watching the looting on Lex that night, I told myself they wouldn’t bother with our block, bereft of any cool shops. I was wrong. By the time I returned to our building’s lobby, I spotted those roving packs moving down the street. Over the next four hours or so, I joined our two doormen as they kept vigil, unarmed, while more and more looters came, some clearly pausing to size up our lobby. We were spared, but a restaurant and a salon downstairs were smashed.
In the Bronx, a car deliberately slammed into a black NYPD sergeant, sending his body flying like a ragdoll. Another officer was run over by an SUV in the Village. I’d never felt so unsafe, and I’d filed datelines from northern Iraq during the ISIS takeover. In a place like Iraq, you know you’re dealing with war and terror, and as a reporter, you typically move with the security forces. This, by contrast, was our home, and the police were overwhelmed and seemingly ordered to stand down.
As unnerving as these events were, the mainstream-media coverage was somehow more so. By about 3am, when things seemed to calm down, one of the doormen tuned into a newscast on his iPhone: “Protests continue tonight throughout New York,” the anchor began. We both burst out laughing. Protests — mere protests — was how the local affiliate of a major network was describing what looked more like a scene of war.
But the coup de grâce came on 4 June, when public-health experts at the University of Washington published a letter encouraging mass gatherings in the name of BLM. “We do not condemn these gatherings as risky,” they wrote. “We support them as vital to the national public health.” Some 1,200 health experts and practitioners worldwide would sign the letter. The same authorities had pushed for restricting Catholic masses, Jewish funerals, kids playing in the park.
I remember feeling at the time: This one might fucking break my mind. Up to that point, I’d spent my entire career at mainstream publications (albeit on Right-of-centre comment pages). Yet I could see why many Americans would come to react to any assertion by mainstream outlets, even the Right-coded ones, with a skulk: What kind of ideological bullshit are you trying to pull on me now?
Strengthening this hermeneutic of permanent and total suspicion was the social-media censorship that accompanied dishonest coverage. The New York Post, where I served as the op-ed editor at the time, faced the business end of this censorship more than once. In February 2020, Facebook banned a Post opinion essay for raising the possibility that the novel coronavirus had leaked from a lab. The piece didn’t assert definitively that the virus had leaked, mind you. It merely noted that it might have, given that the epicentre, Wuhan, was home to a major Chinese virology lab.
Today, the CIA assesses that a lab leak was the “more likely” cause. By banning even the Post’s reasonable speculation about the possibility in 2020, and numerous other steps of the kind, Big Tech and its media allies helped stoke public mistrust. They thus lent a powerful mystique to opportunistic nutters offering a kind of gnostic progression: They banned lab leak. Justified looting. Called women “bodies with vaginas” in their medical journals. In which case why not: They lied about 9/11. Are you sure Hitler was the bad guy in the Second World War?
I don’t know how mainstream institutions — do they even deserve that label anymore? — can repair what broke over the past decade or so, and especially in the pandemic. What I do know is that our society is in desperate need of repair. Because there is still no substitute for the truth procedures of rigorous institutional journalism, reasonable public deliberation, and scientific inquiry free from progressive or RFK-style Lysenkoism.
As it is, the so-called Tech Right led by Elon Musk (and increasingly joined by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos) are weaponising the — well-earned — public mistrust against the professional classes who were supposed to uphold these ideals. And they are doing so for their own profiteering and power-grabbing ends.
Consider social-media censorship. After 2020’s banning spree — and especially in the wake of the Hunter Biden laptop censorship that also targeted the Post — the populist Right began to take up serious reforms aimed at altering the power balance between individual users and platforms wielding Tolstoy-length “Terms of Service” written entirely in their own favour.
There was talk of abolishing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a Clinton-era law that allows bulletin-board style platforms like X and Facebook to act like publishers — that is, to censor and editorialise — without carrying any of the libel liabilities of a traditional publisher. The Right also invoked the so-called common-carrier rule — the ancient Anglo doctrine according to which private operators of public services like toll roads may not unreasonably discriminate against customers. A social-media platform shouldn’t be able to boot you for your views, the argument goes, any more than your landline provider could remove you based on what you said on the phone.
Then came Musk with his purchase of Twitter (renamed X). Immediately, he began giving ideological succour to the embittered Right, including the very-hard Right, agreeing with a white-nationalist user who claimed that Jews are behind multiculturalism: “You have said the actual truth.” Talk of Big Tech reform all but dissipated on the Right. Nothing has changed in the fundamental power imbalance between user and platform, and the latter’s arbitrary ability to shape how billions of people perceive and think about the world.
Instead of offering a genuinely free and productive digital public square, the new X (and Facebook, too) algorithmically de-emphasise news links, meaning that if you embed a news story in your post, other users are less likely to see it, regardless of the ideological bent of the story or opinion in question.
The content that thrives, especially on X, is monetised slop: “What do you notice?” asks a post depicting a tourist site — say, Niagara Falls — visited by Asian tourists: Get it? Foreign tourists are overrunning our … tourist sites. These posts typically garner thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands, of reposts and “likes”. The platform and the slop-monger profit; the user is rewarded with irrational anger and dead brain cells.
Or consider the problem of debanking. Beginning in 2021, financial institutions began to arbitrarily remove customers based on their political views. Most of the early victims belonged to the populist Right. Yet in one of his last acts as the Biden administration’s outgoing director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rohit Chopra promulgated a rule that would have barred banks from engaging in such practices.
Upon taking power, however, Trump II all but collapsed the CFPB. The new administration put the agency under the acting directorship of a hard-core pro-business libertarian, accepted a GOP proposal renouncing federal oversight of online payment processors, withdrew the Chopra anti-debanking rule, and iced an agency lawsuit against the banking association over the very issue of debanking.
“The content that thrives, especially on X, is monetised slop.”
“RIP CFPB,” Musk gloated. The Tesla and SpaceX boss has made no secret of his desire to turn X into a money app, meaning that by attacking CFPB, he preemptively defanged a potential regulator. At the same time, the Trump administration continues to raise the spectre of “debanking” — to justify loosening regulations against the scammy crypto industry.
Or consider campus free speech and inquiry. In 2021, I was asked to join the advisory board of the University of Austin, a new institution that was to champion the old-fashioned academic values abandoned by elite institutions in the name of woke. Yet more recently, UA parted ways with an administrator, she claims, after she made a mild post defending the idea of diversity — even as she criticised institutional DEI. Her post — “We can have criticism of DEI without wanting to tear down the whole concept of diversity” — enraged a Right-wing donor.
The university told advisers that this was a long-term programmatic decision. Yet in its on-record statement to the outlet that published her story, it only highlighted a ferocious opposition to diversity, thus seemingly confirming the ex-admin’s account: “UATX is unapologetically opposed to DEI.” Moreover, one of the university’s most powerful donors publicly rails about the need to root out “Communism” on campus — which, to his mind, seemingly means anything to the Left of Attila the Hun. (I resigned from the advisory board.)
There are many other examples. The point is this: there is a clear effort by a subset of the oligarchy to use the epistemic madness that peaked in 2020 and 2021 to bring about a regime that is even more corrosive to authentic freedom, sanity, and the common good; that doesn’t even pretend to keep to the guardrails that have guided the West for centuries, ensuring its success.
Can the institutions and the “responsible people” make a comeback? I’m really not sure. But any revival will have to involve a much deeper reckoning with the failures of that mad, mad year — 2020. Maybe start by calling riots and lawlessness what they were. Make peace with the biological reality of two sexes — man and woman. Retract the ahistorical claptrap of the 1619 Project, which still enjoys the imprimatur of The New York Times. When ideology corrodes public trust, there’s only one path to winning it back: intellectual humility.
