The Winter of Empire
11th March 2022
ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.
Way back when the tech oligarchs began to censure people, the primary reaction was that this was not allowed. Americans had been operating under the assumption that we had the right to speak freely about politics and we had the right to hear others speak freely about politics. That was the rule. What these tech companies were doing was un-American and immoral. In other words, they were breaking the rules.
It did not take long before people started losing respect for the rules, since they were no longer being applied fairly. Working around the arbitrary enforcement of ever-changing rules is now a primary enterprise. The new normal is that the people with power exercise it arbitrarily and capriciously. As a result, the people who prided themselves on obeying the rules now have no respect for the rules.
That has been the biggest change in the last half dozen years. It used to be that a room full of dissidents would be talking about how we can get the state to do a better job enforcing the rules. Now, the room is full of people who laugh at the rules and talk about ways to get around the latest schemes by the rule makers to benefit themselves and their allies at the expense of the decent people.