The Crisis, No. 7
On false witness
I must apologize for berating a subject, but I must return to the topic of Bari Weiss. In particular, her intrepid media venture, The Free Press, for which friends of the fascist regime rewarded her with $150 million, as a token of thanks for her efforts to give their constructed false reality narratives the presumption of validity vis-à-vis the reports from reality that professional journalists otherwise produce.
I think we should look past all the pretense and see what the The Free Press is and who funds it. And why.
Marc Andreessen. David Sacks. Bobby Kotick. Howard Schultz. Allen & Co. These are the investors. These are the men who built The Free Press into a $100 million company before Paramount acquired it for $150 million and installed Weiss at CBS News.
No reasonable person could consider them neutral observers of our American life. Andreessen and Sacks are architects of and believers in the pernicious network state ideology I described in Crisis No. 2—the intellectual framework that treats democratic accountability as an obstacle to be escaped. Kotick ran Activision Blizzard through scandal after scandal. These men have interests. They have agendas. And they funded a media operation designed to make those interests and agendas look like independent thought.
The Free Press is named after Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense. This is an obscenity. Paine wrote to liberate. Weiss writes to obscure. Paine challenged power. Weiss serves it while pretending to challenge its critics. The appropriation of his legacy is itself a kind of false witness—a theft of revolutionary credibility to dress up a reactionary project. Paine would have recognized her immediately for what she is.
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There is a posture I am seeing from certain quarters of the business world. It goes like this: “Both sides of this conflict in Minneapolis should de-escalate. Some peaceful arrangement between the parties should be established.”
As if these people stand outside as scorekeepers. As if they are neutral referees calling for calm.
No.
You attended the inauguration. You donated to the inaugural fund. You invested in the media apparatus that launders the regime’s lies. Your fellow travelers watched the Melania documentary while Alex Pretti’s body was still warm.
These choices are now on the record.
The posture of neutrality is itself the lie. The call for “de-escalation” is not an honest plea for peace. It is a demand that the occupied stop resisting while the occupation continues. It is telling citizens to be quiet about being killed.
There are no “both sides” in Minneapolis. There is an occupation force that has killed two American citizens in a month. And there are citizens resisting that occupation. One side has three thousand armed federal agents. The other side has signs and the willingness to stand in subzero temperatures.
To treat these as morally equivalent parties in a dispute that requires mutual de-escalation is not neutrality. It is propaganda. It is false witness.
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The function of The Free Press is to provide vocabulary.
Not argument. Vocabulary. The words and frames that allow people to support the regime without feeling like they are supporting the regime. The rhetoric of “heterodox thinking” that makes reaction look like courage. The pose of “independence” that disguises alignment.
When a tech executive wants to support Trump but doesn’t want to be seen as a MAGA partisan, The Free Press gives him language. He’s not pro-Trump—he’s “skeptical of mainstream narratives.” He’s not abandoning democratic principles—he’s “questioning liberal orthodoxy.” He’s not enabling fascism—he’s “engaging with uncomfortable ideas.”
This is the service Weiss provides. This is what the $150 million purchased. A laundromat for ideology. A place where positions that would be recognized as reactionary propaganda in their native habitat—Breitbart, Daily Wire, Fox opinion—get washed and pressed and sent back out as respectable commentary.
The contributors Weiss announced for CBS News are Free Press people. Niall Ferguson. Coleman Hughes. Arthur Brooks. The pipeline is direct. The laundromat now has a storefront in a legacy news organization. The vocabulary of false witness will now be broadcast to millions.
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The Free Press is, in truth, a confab of intellectual degenerates who use their rhetorical skills to present the costume of honest commentary, when really it’s just a marketing scheme for their status management within a corrupt political-economic order.
I use the word “degenerates” deliberately. Not as epithet but as description. To degenerate is to decline from a higher state to a lower one. These are people who have the education, the rhetorical training, the access to information that would allow them to see clearly what is happening—and they have chosen to use those gifts in service of obfuscation. They have taken talents that could illuminate and deployed them to obscure. That is degeneration. That is the corruption of capacity.
They know what they are doing. That is what makes it unforgivable.
A propagandist who believes his own propaganda is merely deluded. But the Free Press stable—the Fergusons, the Hughes, the whole roster—they are too smart to believe. They see the occupation. They see the killings. They see the ransom demand for voter databases. And they produce content designed to make their readers feel comfortable not seeing it.
They have chosen to sell their credentialed minds for the purpose of lending respectability to the indefensible. That choice defines them now.
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The CEOs and VCs who funded The Free Press, who attended the inaugurations, who now call for “de-escalation”—they imagine themselves as above the fray. They see themselves as the adults in the room, the pragmatic voices urging calm, the reasonable people who can see both sides.
They are not above the fray. They are in it. They funded it. They chose it.
When you invest in a media operation designed to launder regime propaganda, you are not a neutral observer. When you attend the inauguration of a president whose agents kill citizens in the streets, you are not standing outside the conflict. When you call for “both sides” to de-escalate while one side has guns and the other side has cardboard signs, you are not a referee.
You are a participant. Your neutrality is a costume. Your reasonableness is a performance. And we see through it.
The false witness is not just Weiss. It is the entire ecosystem—the funders, the contributors, the platforms, the executives who pretend they are merely observing a conflict they helped create. They testify to a neutrality they do not possess. They claim to stand outside a game they have been playing from the start.
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Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
The commandment is ancient. The violation is contemporary.
To bear false witness is not only to lie about what you saw. It is to claim you saw nothing when you saw everything. It is to pretend you are not involved when your fingerprints are on the weapon. It is to call for peace while funding war.
The investors in The Free Press bore false witness when they presented their propaganda operation as independent journalism. The CEOs at the Melania screening bore false witness when they pretended their attendance was apolitical. The voices calling for “de-escalation” bear false witness when they treat an occupation force and occupied citizens as equivalent parties.
They are all false witnesses. They have all seen what is happening. They have all chosen to testify otherwise.
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We see you.
We see the investments. We see the donor lists. We see the guest lists and the seating charts and the photographs with the accused sex pest who directed the First Lady’s vanity documentary. We see who was at the inauguration and who was at the White House and who was at Davos laughing at the jokes.
The receipts exist. You created them. You posed for the photographs. You signed the checks. You did this openly because you thought you had won, because you thought there would be no accounting, because you thought the rest of us would forget.
We will not forget.
When this is over—and it will be over—there will be a record. Not of what you said, which was designed to obscure, but of what you did, which was visible to anyone paying attention. The investments. The donations. The attendance. The silence when silence was complicity and the noise when noise was distraction.
You are not scorekeepers. You are not referees. You are not neutral observers.
You are participants in a project of domination. That fact is now documented. It will not be forgotten, and it will not be plausibly denied.
The false witness will be called to account.
Right or Wrong. Legal, or not legal
When 100,000 people gather peacefully on the streets of Minneapolis and chant "get out of our state," they recognize that what is happening to them is unjust. When nine million people march throughout our country and say “no king”, they understand that Trump's desire to be a king is wrong.
We know what is right and wrong instinctively. When the pilgrims and Puritans came to America, they knew they were mistreated in Europe. No question. They came to America to live freely and establish a just government. When the Declaration of Independence was written, there was no legal argument; they said they were mistreated, wronged, and leaving.
Our state's representatives agreed with the new government that there would be three branches of government: the executive, the judicial, and the Congress—the House of Representatives—which would oversee the other two branches. This was declared, and it was the agreement that the government and the states signed.
Now we have a dysfunctional president who will be declared incompetent next year, who seeks to be king of the Americas, a Congress filled with dead bodies from both Republicans and Democrats, and a Supreme Court that has been influenced and tainted by significant money.
So why do we think we must follow this agreement? The government broke this contract, so any talk of legal reasons for our obligation is pointless.
We don't need to debate whether Alex Pretti was armed; it's clear ICE agents mistreated him. They assaulted him, threw him to the ground, and shot him ten times — there's no need to argue; we understand what is right and what’s wrong.
Two legal issues are repeatedly discussed: the supremacy clause and the legality of ICE. The supremacy clause provides a mechanism for resolving conflicts between state and federal laws, stating that federal laws are the highest authority and take precedence over state laws, with disputes resolved by the Supreme Court.
ICE, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is a federal law enforcement agency under the United States Department of Homeland Security. It was established as part of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 following the September 11 attacks. ICE has become an unchecked, untrained, and uncontrollable clandestine military organization whose activities Congress should be reviewing, controlling, and modifying. However, our Congress consists of a group of dead men unwilling to uphold their responsibilities and has violated the constitutional requirements.
We should have the freedom to make the right decisions, decisions we know are correct, without being constrained by legal or other restrictions. We should not get lost in the legality issue. We should trust our ability to understand what is right and wrong; we know this instinctively, we sense it, and we should rely on that. Just as the people of Minneapolis realize it, no one needs to tell them right from wrong; they inherently know it as we do.
Again, our governors of the Democratic states are acting like wimps; they are not utilizing their united power. They are watching wrongs being committed in their states and doing nothing because of the supremacy clause. What is right is for them to order ICE out of their states and organize the state police and police from other Democratic states to surround ICE and escort them out. This should be done in all the Democratic states.
For decades after reading Amusing Ourselves to Death, and being familiar with the ancients, finger on the pulse of destructive attributes within human communities, you shall not bear false witness. I tried to warn those under my care about how human community was impossible without honest truth telling. The onslaught of Fox News and other wings of propaganda were having their way with so many. Now the legacy media as you point out are being reduced to the same. I watched my own family members get sucked into the whirlpool of nonsense. You shall not bear false witness, the price will cost you everything.