The Lie They Call Freedom

On rights, virtues, and the Promethean class

The tortured story of the humans who have organized themselves into what they call a “republic” continues apace. They spin in their contradictions. A small minority amongst them insist upon truth in both moral and factual matters. These minorities are asked, by the powers that be, to apologize for their observations. To check their tones. To consider that perhaps there’s more than one valid way of viewing the world.

Perhaps Trump really did win the 2020 election. Some people really think that. So what? Who is to say there is a correct version of reality?

This is the proposition that reactionary fascists demand we accept as a matter of respect for the basic rights of free speech.

⁂

Free speech. Those words. The First Amendment of our United States Constitution.

The meaning of those words was to restrain government from making laws that would restrict the public’s capacity to notice truth, and to communicate it without fear or favor. The Founders understood something that our present oligarchs pretend not to: that power lies, and that the people must be free to say so. The First Amendment was not a gift to the powerful. It was a constraint upon them. A recognition that the sovereign people cannot govern themselves if they cannot speak, and cannot speak meaningfully if they are punished for noticing what is true.

But these so-called free speech maximalists are not really demanding the right to speak freely. Who could be opposed to such a thing? Basic human dignity demands that we allow people to speak their conscience. As a liberal, I think this is a significant limitation on power. The people are sovereign; therefore, they must be able to speak.

But the value of truth matters too. It was the pursuit of truth—the recognition of the fallibility of human reason in the Age of Enlightenment—that led to this notion that political speech should be unburdened by the pain of loss of liberty. We protect speech not because all speech is valuable, but because we cannot trust power to distinguish the valuable from the dangerous. We would rather suffer lies than give censors the authority to define truth.

This is all correct. This is the liberal inheritance. I hold to it.

But here is what the free speech maximalists have done: they have transformed a right into a virtue.

Free speech is not a virtue. Speaking freely is not virtuous. It is simply a thing you are allowed to do, for the aforementioned reasons. The right to speak does not confer moral worth upon whatever is spoken. Lying is not good because it is permitted. Spreading disinformation is not admirable because the government cannot stop you. The protection of speech is not the same as the celebration of speech, and the license to say anything is not a license to say anything without consequence.

Surely there should be social consequences to lying. Surely there should be reputational costs to spreading poison. Surely the people have the right—the obligation, even—to judge what is said and to judge those who say it.

This is something the reprobates who now seek to consolidate around their version of “freedom” reject utterly. They want the protections of the First Amendment and the moral status of truth-tellers. They want to lie without being called liars. They want to spread propaganda and be thanked for their contribution to the marketplace of ideas. They want the benefits of liberal society without any of its obligations.

And for that reason, we must, as a People, reject them utterly.

⁂

They have failed the test.

They have been given great power and wealth, and they have turned around and asked us to show gratitude for their efforts. As if the mansions, the yachts, the beach houses in Central America aren’t enough gratitude. As if being permitted to accumulate more wealth than medieval kings while paying a lower effective tax rate than their secretaries isn’t sufficient reward for whatever innovations they claim to have bestowed upon us.

No. That is not enough for them. They seek to remove all constraints on themselves. They seek to exit the social contract entirely while continuing to benefit from it. They want the roads and the courts and the educated workforce and the military protection and the property rights enforcement—they want all of it—but they do not want to be subject to the democracy that provides it.

They call it “anarcho-capitalism” or “the right of exit” or “network states.” They dress it up in the language of freedom and innovation and disruption. They write manifestos about the “sovereign individual” unbound by the petty demands of citizenship.

It doesn’t matter what the fuck you call it. I know what it is.

It is a scaled-up version of the bullies with the secret place in the woods, where they take women to be abused, and whose secrets serve as a menacing warning to anyone who would challenge the proper order of things. The logic is identical. The strong should dominate the weak. The powerful should be unaccountable. The rules are for other people.

This is what they are building. This is what they have always been building. The technology and the money and the ideology are all in service of one goal: to create a world in which they are beyond reach. Beyond law. Beyond the claims of their fellow citizens. Beyond the obligations that every human being owes to every other.

⁂

I don’t think we should allow these Promethean mutants to do anything of the sort.

To the contrary, I think many of them should be in jail.

In jail for paying bribes to this administration. In jail for advancing the interests of foreign actors hostile to the continuance of constitutional government on these shores. In jail for committing treason against the idea that nobody is above the law.

They sought to put themselves outside the law and trap the rest of us within it. They sought to purchase a government that would protect their crimes and prosecute their critics. They sought—and I do not use this word lightly—to end the American experiment in self-governance and replace it with something that serves only them.

This is not hyperbole. This is not hysteria. This is a description of what they have done, in public, on the record, while we watched.

⁂

Jack Smith is testifying before Congress as I write this. He is stating, under oath, that Donald Trump caused January 6. That the evidence proved guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. That the Office of Special Counsel was ready to go to trial.

And across the landscape of American commentary, the response is not to grapple with what Smith is saying. It is to raise questions about Smith himself. Can we trust him? What about his funding? Might he be a partisan actor?

Meanwhile, the same voices quote Megyn Kelly without disclaimers. They retweet the Free Press without scrutiny. They treat every utterance from their side as credible and every utterance from the other as suspect.

The asymmetry is the tell. It was always the tell.

They know what Trump did. They know Smith is credible. The performance of uncertainty is the verdict they are trying to avoid delivering. And they perform it because they have chosen their side—not the side of truth, not the side of law, but the side of power.

⁂

I am often asked why I left my career in technology to write a newsletter about politics. Why I traded a lucrative future for this. Why I chose to make enemies of people who could have been useful to me.

The answer is simple: I could not be party to what they are building.

I was in those rooms. I heard the conversations. I watched them plan their exits and calculate their bribes and assure themselves that none of it was really wrong because the system was corrupt anyway, because everyone does it, because the rules are for suckers and they were too smart to be suckers.

I chose differently. I chose to stay in the room. To be a citizen in the full sense of the word. To pay my taxes and speak my mind and accept the obligations that come with membership in a political community.

And I chose to tell the truth about what I saw.

⁂

We have no need of these people. We have no need of their network states and their exit rights and their Promethean fantasies of transcendence. We have no need of oligarchs who believe that wealth entitles them to dominion. We have no need of propagandists who hide behind the First Amendment while working to destroy the republic it was written to protect.

We have no need of any of this.

And so I suggest we cast it off. I suggest we remember what we are: a self-governing people, capable of organizing ourselves without the permission of billionaires. I suggest we enforce our laws, including against the powerful. I suggest we rebuild the constraints that democracy requires—on wealth, on power, on the ability of any individual or faction to place themselves beyond accountability.

I suggest we do what republics do when they wish to survive: we defend ourselves against those who would destroy us. Not with violence. Not with censorship. But with the clear-eyed recognition that some people have declared themselves enemies of self-governance, and that we owe them nothing but opposition.

The tortured story continues. The humans who call themselves a republic are deciding, right now, whether they wish to remain one.

And still, the wire holds. And the beating heart of love for our community and our country—a feeling that has been so distant, behind all the dreary dispossession of social media engagement algorithms—still rumbles beneath all the noise.

---

Go Deeper into the Circus

---