Election day in the USA

No matter the outcome the great reshuffle is here to stay

U.S. greetings. After speaking at the recent Brownstone conference in Pittsburgh I’ve stayed ringside for the main event.

The street “vibe” I’m getting is Trump. My cab driver last night was a Trump-voting Haitian immigrant who arrived in the U.S. 30 years ago. He said his annual earnings had nearly halved in the past four years, which he blamed on the Democrats, in particular the illegal arrival of swathes of his countrymen that had reduced wages.

Meanwhile, my old U.S. progressive networks (to the degree I still connect with them) are rather subdued – it turns out you can only sustain hyper-joy for so long. I get from them a sense of resignation that woke supremacy has passed in the “anti-disinformation” and digital free-expression fields. This doesn't mean many won’t continue the authoritarianism—at Harvard, speakers are still pushing to “break free” from the First Amendment—but the period of their ideas going largely unchallenged is over. I expect the conversations to open up post-election, though they will continue to be stunted. A watershed moment will come, when is anyone’s guess.

At this stage, I don’t feel I can trust polls or the betting markets. What I do trust is that the great reshuffle that began in earnest a decade or so ago is here to stay and that public awareness of growing censorship is a big reason why. Independent-minded progressives like RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, and Joe Rogan, have moved to the Trump camp, and the Cheneys and other Neocons are now central to the new Democrats. Taboos have been broken on both sides, and a great re-sorting is the result.

Further evidence of that is Mark Zuckerberg admission that Facebook helped censor Covid content and the Hunter Biden laptop story, and that his new “goal is to be more neutral” (however much you believe him). Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post (among others) refused to endorse a candidate, citing how much trust the media had lost due to their partisanship. 

Paradigms are shifting. If nothing else, things are getting clearer. The shakeout will continue no matter the result.

If Trump wins I expect some major internal jostling that the new free speech wing may or may not win. Free speech has featured heavily in Trump’s campaign but among the vanguards is Elon Musk, who is consistent one day and lumpy the next. He continues to down-rank Substack posts shared on X and, among other things, has “over moderated” vis-a-vis the Israel-Gaza conflict. Trump has also suggested flag burners get a year in jail.

The response to October 7 showed that many fair-weather free advocates on the Right can change their tune overnight. There is a Republican wing that also can’t keep its hands off the administrative state when it comes to speech. That said, on average the Trump camp is better on free speech and recognises there is a problem - one that corporate Democrats and their new woke allies largely created.

Over at my non-profit liber-net, we’ve put together a white paper for how the next administration could dismantle the Censorship-Industrial Complex and make major reforms to censorship programs operating with the support of the federal government. That report complements another we recently released on digital free speech and censorship across the States.

Whatever happens, today a stone is laid marking the before and after times. May the after times be better.