 Jacob, would you comment on the mindset that is being evinced by Sam Harris in this discussion of why it was a great goddamn good thing that Twitter and Facebook suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story in the run up to the 2020 election? So my argument is that it was appropriate for Twitter and the heads of Big Tech and the heads of journalistic organizations to feel that they were in the presence of something like a once in a lifetime moral emergency, right? Whereas this is not the same thing as not liking George Bush or not liking John McCain or not liking Mitt Romney for their politics. This was, here's a guy who is capable of anything and we cannot afford to have four more years with this guy, right? And so what should well intentioned people do who have a lot of power in these various ways? You know, you're running the New York Times, you're running CNN, you're running Twitter, what should they conspire to do? What do you do with the Hunter Biden laptop story when we already know, we know how this played out in 2016 with the Hillary Clinton email press conference. That was the killing blow to her candidacy. It's like a coin toss for me, the Hunter Biden laptop thing. Because I do understand how corrosive it is for an institution like the New York Times to show obvious bias and inconsistency and dishonesty in how they, it's like they couldn't even frame it honestly. It's not like, the way I would frame it is listen, I don't care what's in Hunter Biden's. I mean, Hunter Biden at that point, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared, right? It's like, there's nothing. First of all, it's Hunter Biden, right? It's not Joe Biden, but even if Joe Biden, like even whatever scope of Joe Biden's corruption is, like if we could just go down that rabbit hole endlessly and understand that he's getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden's deals in Ukraine or wherever else, right? Or China. It is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in. Yeah, well, listen, I'm thankful, genuinely grateful to Sam Harris for, he just, he lines up so many corrupt and fallacious ideas in a row, and I think very usefully, and this is where, I think he does a real public service there, is he usefully shows the interrelation between these various kinds of fallacious and I think destructive thinking. So to take this from the top, here is a person, Sam Harris, who is a member of the United States whose whole career and reputation was built on being a sort of human truth optimizer, right? His whole career was that he was the dispassionate objective, the one who couldn't be swayed by primitive and atavistic beliefs in God or an intrinsic moral component in existence. He was above all of those things. And what it means in practical terms to be above all of those things is to be precisely the kind of technocratic judge of the good that Harris makes himself here. Now, not everybody, not every atheist takes this as far as Harris does, obviously, but I do think that it is not an accident that the same Sam Harris who made his name as the great truth engine, as the human truth machine, is now very flippantly saying it doesn't matter what the truth is, what matters is the greater good, which of course, he is in the position to decide not the American public or voters. No, Sam Harris can tell you, Sam Harris has decided that it doesn't matter what's on Hunter Biden's laptops, it doesn't matter that Twitter and Facebook censored and repressed this. What matters is that he recognizes the grave danger of Donald Trump. So here we have a very important connection which is the connection between the kind of underlying, let's call it the sort of metaphysical layer of the technocratic mind which he is a supreme representative of on the one hand and the oligarchic ruling party certainty that it is in the best position to decide whose votes should count, whose votes shouldn't count, what information can be seen, what information can't be seen. So I don't think you should look at this and think, ah, Sam Harris, great truth seeker hams, Sam Harris is being a hypocrite here. I don't think it's hypocrisy. I think it's a cop to call that hypocrisy. No, that is a perfectly consistent position for Sam Harris to take. And this is, you know, what was the Lenin call it? Like the highest form of imperialism. This is the highest form of technocracy or the highest form of the technocratic mind, Sam Harris is the supreme representative of the technocratic mind. And it's also worth thinking about if this was true, if Trump was indeed the danger that Sam Harris and others are suggesting he was, that justified everything, why did they have to keep lying about him? True, and I should say there are many, many reasons one could dislike Donald Trump and could strenuously and, you know, vociferously object to his presidency. The difference between that kind of political opposition and the ruling party is twofold. One, it's the degree of consensus across the ruling class and it's the use of the federal agencies, the use of the federal bureaucracy in order to delegitimize an elected president, Donald Trump. And the way that this works, where there is a sort of spontaneously emerging consensus, bottom up on the one hand, which is the cultural consensus among members of the ruling class, nobody needs to tell them Donald Trump is an ogre, is an existential threat. They all feel this viscerally, so there's that element, but that's met at the same time by a top-down coordinated effort across the agencies. And we see this with the FBI quite plainly. We see this with the people inside of the FBI who are working on the Trump investigation while exchanging texts about how they're gonna protect democracy by keeping him from getting elected. We see this with the Jim Baker, who was one of the lead counsels at the FBI, leaving that job to then take a job as the deputy lead counsel at Twitter just in time so that when the Hunter Biden laptop story began to emerge, he was in place as the deputy counsel at Twitter so that he could advise the company against, advise the company to go along with the requests, mandates essentially from the FBI that they not publicize the story. So that is the ruling party. It is the success of Donald Trump and these putative populist elements that produces the counter-reaction in the first place that leads the ruling party to decide it can no longer tolerate this degree of autonomy and needs to clamp down and effectively take control over the back end of these platforms. They don't do it all at once. They don't simply nationalize the industries as it were. So it's always an incomplete process and there's always a space open for these now sort of unofficially illegal is too strong but unofficially blacklisted parties to still find ways to prosper. And there's an argument to be made that the technology tends to benefit them in a kind of structural way. But it's just the sequencing is the only place where I would disagree with you. So what I trace in my essay and tablet is a chronology in which first you have the open even bombastic embrace of the internet as a technology of liberation and democracy by people like Donald, excuse me, not Donald Trump of course by people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama who are touting the benefits of social media in particular as a force for democratization across the world most famously in the case of the Arab Spring but also with the protests in Iran. And Clinton is the head of the internet freedom agenda at the State Department. One of her aides famously compares social media to Che Guevara as this revolutionary force, very telling like the platitudes they come up with here. So it's these same people, the very same people who then declare the internet the single greatest threat to democracy. What causes this utterly dramatic 180 where they go from touting the internet as a great force of democratization to then declaring that we need to enforce martial law on the internet, less civilization be destroyed they perceive it as a threat to their own power and continued mandate to rule. And it's as simple as that. That was Reason's live stream with Jacob Siegel. If you liked it and wanna hear the whole thing, go here. If you want to listen to another excerpt, go here and come back every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern time for Zach Weismiller and I, Reason live stream.