Joe Rogan is not getting tired of politics. This is, in and of itself, a remarkable development. He hosted Donald Trump and JD Vance during the campaign. He also extended an invitation to host Kamala Harris; one gets the sense from the muddled reporting that neither side felt particularly motivated to overcome the logistical hurdles necessary to make it happen. In the crucial last days of the campaign, Rogan ended up endorsing Trump.

Your correspondent assumed that, once the candidate of free speech had been elected, he would return to interviewing comedians and dissident health gurus. Instead, he hosted Marc Andreessen to have a three hour discussion about politics. And then he hosted Mike Benz, a former official at State and current Executive Director of the Foundation For Freedom Online.

The most valuable part of the interview, for us, was Benz's recounting of how the US government's online censorship apparatus came to be and operates. In what will make limited government advocates shout vindication, this happened as a result of a slippery slope starting from a very good intention. But it is true that if you give government new powers, even for the best of ends, you create at least the possibility that these powers will eventually get used for worse ends.

And so, Benz detailed how this apparatus was originally created to counter ISIS. You may recall from the days of 2014 that ISIS was particularly noted for the talent and effectiveness of its online propaganda, and that this propaganda led to real tactical or even strategic outcomes in the field, since it motivated so many radical Islamists all around the world to support them or even travel to Syria and Iraq outright to join its army. Countering this propaganda was therefore legitimate not only from a moral point of view, but even (this is important) from a very concrete, military point of view since.

This also explains why this effort was run out of the State Department. Anyway, the basic set-up involved private contractors providing software, various kinds of NGOs providing network analysis and other services, and the State Department using all that data and getting tech companies to shut down ISIS propaganda.

So far so good. Terrorist propaganda is against most social media platforms' terms of service.

But, well, once you have a hammer, all sorts of things start to look like nails, don't they?

You had private companies and NGOs getting federal dollars to monitor "extremist" content on the internet. You had privileged lines of communication between the government and big tech social platforms.

In Benz's telling, the effort went from targeting foreign to domestic actors after the annexation of Crimea by Russia, during which it was thought (perhaps legitimately at first) that Russian propaganda and influence operations were trying to impact US political discourse.

The next stage, of course, was the Covid-19 pandemic, during which it was thought that countering "public health misinformation" was crucial to national safety. You can figure out the rest.

You may recall that, two days ago, when discussing Andreessen on Rogan and the issue of debanking, your correspondent averred that there was no policy remedy: the remedy was deterrence, i.e. consequences for those who engaged in this lawless, un-American behavior. On this particular issue, we do believe that there is a policy remedy, because there is an existing apparatus. There is a network of government bureaus and private entities that have been set up to do this stuff. Obviously, the bureaus should be shut down and everyone involved fired. Obviously, the subsidies to these entities should end. And an executive order should clarify and very narrowly define the topics and contexts in which government entities may request takedowns or "censorship" from big tech platforms, i.e. the topics we all agree on such as terrorism apologia, pedophiliac content, and so on.

Policy News You Need To Know

#DeadbeatVoterHypothesis — Charles Fain Lehman, Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and great specialist of all things vice and crime, has an op-ed in the NYT on what he calls politely "vice voters," voters whose main issue is, well, vice: pot, abortion, crypto day-trading, abortion, and so on. These voters might be a key swing voting group and, deliberately or not, Trump went after them. As Lehman points out, the problem with that is that vice is, well, bad, and not just in a moral sense, but in the sense that it has socially corrosive consequences, such that pandering to these voters leads to bad public policy.

LISTEN: We discuss this and other related issues in our podcast with Lehman. Links: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube.

#LameDuck — Now that the election is over and the cabinet has been appointed (or at least nominated), everyone is talking about the lame duck and the CR (again) these days. Watch this space. In the meantime, we liked this: "Republicans should resist any attempts to do anything more than a short-term one-sentence continuing resolution that ends on Jan. 20, 2025, Donald Trump’s inauguration day. Anything more will allow the Biden administration and Senate Democrats to handcuff an incoming Trump administration, in addition to a new Republican-controlled Senate, from implementing the will of the American people as expressed on Election Day. The danger for the American people, and a new Trump administration, is that a Democratic-controlled Senate and White House craft an appropriations measure that continues the liberal priorities soundly rejected recently by the voters." Brian Darling in The Hill.

#TradePolicy — In "a bitter blow to protectionists," Politico reports, citing five sources, that the highly intelligent and competent Bob Lighthizer will not be joining the Administration.

#ThinkTanks — Conquest's Third Law of Politics states: "The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies." The RAND Corporation is one of the most prestigious think tanks in the world. Among countless contributions, RAND analysts gamed out the doctrine of nuclear deterrence by mutually assured destruction, protecting the world from a nuclear holocaust. Today, the RAND Corporation still does valuable work, especially concerning veterans' issues. All of which is to say, it doesn't have to publish this sort of claptrap: "The high rate of disciplinary actions by [school resource officers, or SROs, who are specially-trained law enforcement officers who work in schools] is frequently discussed when examining the school-to-prison pipeline. In addition, critics argue that SROs have a disproportionately negative impact on students of color, contributing to persistent racial disparities in school discipline and criminalization of students. […] while SRO presence is associated with increased detection of some disruptive behavior […] existing research shows that SROs' presence is also often associated with increased disciplinary action and law enforcement referrals. In addition, research shows that students of color—particularly Black students—can be disproportionately negatively affected." Put aside the stilted, sub-ChatGPT-tier writing. (Actually, don't. Ce qui se conçoit aisément s'énonce clairement.) If "wokeness" means anything, it is this: the dogma that any group-level difference is both evidence and the product of discrimination and systemic racism. Research on differences in rates of disciplinary action in schools is voluminous, and not subject to serious question: the reason why black (or "Black") students are disciplined at higher rates is because they commit infractions at higher rates; schools that have relaxed disciplinary standards in order to be antiracist have found, not post-racial utopia, but that they, predictably, become dens of anarchy (punishing all students, but particularly the struggling/the vulnerable/students of color). If black students face "increased disciplinary action" it does not mean that they are "disproportionately negatively affected." Black people actually have the same amount of agency as any of God's children, they are not metaphysical perpetual victims who cannot be expected to follow rules. It is lunacy to describe a student committing an infraction and then being punished as being "negatively affected"; indeed, in many cases, a student may be very positively affected by receiving accountability for a mistake. Many people's lives have been turned around by such "tough love." This is bad. It's bad form, it's just shoddy scholarship wrapped up in bad writing. It's false on the merits. And it's racist garbage. It's 2024. Trump won. You don't have to do this anymore.

#LGBT — Reminder: today, the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in US v. Skrmetti, to decide on the constitutionality of state laws banning so-called "gender-affirming care" for minors.

#CorporateLaw — A Delaware court once again rejected Elon Musk's Tesla pay package, even though it was approved by a majority of the shareholders. As the WSJ ed board writes, rightly, the issue here isn't just Musk. The issue is that the precedent will enable all sorts of minority shareholder lawsuits that will bog down corporate operations.

#Immigration — Fox's invaluable Bill Melugin reports: "ICE announces they deported a Jordanian illegal alien who was ID’d as a known or suspected terrorist after he was arrested by Border Patrol near Lynden, Washington while attempting to cross the northern border illegally."

#Energy — Hoover's Richard A. Epstein has a good article looking back at the Biden Administration's energy policies and asking: "Just how far will Trump turn them back?"

#Ed — Nobody in DC believes President Trump will follow through on his promise to abolish Ed. Still, it would probably be good policy, and the case for good policy should be made, and Beth Akers at AEI makes it well.

#Reg — A very sad record about to be broken by the Biden Administration: "With four weeks remaining, the daily depository of proposed and final rules and regulations is poised to exceed 100,000 pages" More here.