Last week, a first generation American, a graduate of Harvard and Yale who built his fortune as a biotech entrepreneur, stepped forward and announced that he is running for the Republican nomination for president.

Vivek Ramaswamy is already familiar to many on the political right for taking on many of the ideas of the left. He was an early and sturdy opponent of the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) agenda. He has correctly diagnosed the grievance and entitlement mentalities as the foundation of many of the pathologies we are experiencing in the United States. He routinely expresses skepticism about what he calls the “climate change religion”.

Like newcomers to the United States sometimes do, he has a way of seeing clearly, thinking clearly and speaking clearly about the problems we face.

Consequently — and in refreshing and marked counterpoint to the current batch of Republicans — he has proposed an agenda focused on specific and measurable items. He has tweeted, for example, that: “I will end affirmative action. I will totally dismantle climate religion. I will use our military to secure our borders from the drug cartels and end the fentanyl crisis.”

He talks about “dismantling” the federal bureaucracy and “defeating” communist China.

Given the aversion of most Republicans to any sort of policy discussions at all (the party is still working from the 2016 platform because no one wanted to talk about policy in 2020), the presence of someone in the race who wants to engage aggressively on policies is going to make life difficult for other candidates, especially those driven primarily by personality.

More importantly, however, Mr. Ramaswamy clearly has something beyond a traditional political campaign in mind. He routinely uses the language of a revival or a crusade to set right what has gone wrong.

“Today, we’re starting a cultural movement in our country, … our movement to create a new American dream for the next generation. This time it isn’t just about money. It is about the unapologetic pursuit of excellence itself.”

“It means that we believe in merit; believe in accountability; believe in free speech; believe in American exceptionalism. If you’re on board with these ideals, then we’re already on the same team. We’re ready to fight for the future of America.”

Moreover, Mr. Ramaswamy is not boring or predictable. He transmits a sense of real urgency, unfiltered by message testing or political consultants, which is something Republicans have not done since the 2016 cycle. He’s not angry or hostile. His demeanor seems more evangelical than anything else.

It is a refreshing change.

With respect to his personal history, Mr. Ramaswamy embodies what we all like to think about the United States; that it is a place where hard work and diligence is more important than the social status of your parents or who you know. He was first in his class in high school (St. Xavier’s in Cincinnati), summa cum laude at Harvard, and received a law degree from Yale.

He’s a successful entrepreneur. He’s made money. He’s met payrolls.

All that said, it seems unlikely that Mr. Ramaswamy will survive the grind of nomination process. It is rare for someone new to politics to win a major party presidential nomination, and the two major parties have nominated someone under the age of 40 for president just twice (both times in the 19th century).

But he can alter the terms of this election cycle, how the current Congress proceeds on issues like the debt ceiling and what the Republican Party looks like and sounds like after 2024.

For now, that may be enough.

*****
This article was published by The Daily Caller and is reproduced with permission.

The McCarthyism of Democrats is largely unknown because they are much better than Republicans at scrubbing the history of negatives about themselves.

The odds are pretty good that you’ve heard of Republican Senator Joe McCarthy and his witch hunts, which began in the late 1940s to uncover communists in the US government, Hollywood, and elsewhere.  After all, thousands of articles have been written about witch hunts, scores of movies have been produced about them, and, according to Amazon, 65 books have been written about them.

Not only that, but the word “McCarthyism” has come to mean the subversion of civil and political rights in the name of national security or patriotism, by means of demagoguery and largely unsubstantiated accusations. The word is typically associated with actions of the right, not the left.

The odds are also pretty good that you have not heard of A. Mitchell Palmer, the progressive Democrat US attorney general under President Woodrow Wilson, whose witch hunts to find communists in 1919 and 1920 were more egregious and numerous than McCarthy’s.

Although I’ve been a history buff over my adult life, I didn’t know about Palmer and his travesties of justice until recently reading Young J. Edgar:  Hoover and the Red Scare, 1919-1920, by Kenneth D. Ackerman.  The book details how J. Edgar Hoover, as a young man before becoming the head of the FBI, had worked for Palmer in rounding up actual and suspected communists and violating their due process rights.  Most were immigrants and members of labor unions.

To quote the nonpartisan book:

The result was a civil liberties catastrophe:  Between five and ten thousand people—the exact number is impossible to calculate—were rounded up and detained, often beaten and terrified.  They were dragged from their homes and families, many taken from their beds in the middle of the night or arrested en masse at dances, theatres, or neighborhood clubs, locked for weeks or months, often railroaded through sham hearings, cut off from lawyers and friends, and kept in decrepit, overcrowded, make-shift prisons.  None of these immigrants was accused, much less convicted, of violating any state or federal law.  For most of them, no evidence was ever presented beyond the unsubstantiated word of a Justice Department agent on a pre-printed form that they belonged to some organization—not that they actually did anything or even said anything.    

So why are Palmer’s travesties less known than McCarthy’s?  Is it because Palmer didn’t blacklist Hollywood notables, thus giving Hollywood no reason to produce movies castigating him?  Is it because Palmer’s victims tended to be working-class people without the means or platforms to sway public opinion, while McCarthy’s victims tended to be educated professionals with the means and platforms?   Is it because McCarthy’s congressional hearings were televised, but television didn’t exist in the Palmer era?

Even if the answer is yes to each of these questions, that doesn’t explain why the facts of Palmer’s travesties didn’t later become better known or at least used by Republicans to put McCarthy’s Red-baiting in historical context.  Instead, Americans have been left with the belief that there was no Democrat precedent or parallel to McCarthyism. 

For sure, no one deserves to lose civil liberties and face persecution for holding unpopular beliefs and being foolish.  But, as an aside, it’s noteworthy that the fools who believed in Bolshevism in 1919 were not as foolish as those who believed in it in 1950.  In 1919, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution was just two years old, and it was easy for idealistic intellectuals and poor industrial workers in America to be enamored with the idea of a worker’s paradise.  But by 1950, the horrors of communism were obvious to anyone who took the time to look.  Many American intellectuals on the left kept their blinders on, however, in their yearning for a utopia of equal outcomes.  That yearning continues today, but in terms of race, not class.    

Palmer’s crusade targeted the very same working class that Woodrow Wilson and other progressive and populist Democrats claimed to want to protect from the capital class and big business—from horrible working conditions, from the destitution caused by illness and workplace accidents, from tainted food, and from goons and scabs hired by industrialists to break strikes (and heads).

Succumbing to pressure from Congress and the public, and responding to Germany’s belligerent submarine blockade of American ships, Wilson would go on to send the working class to die in the trenches of Europe in the First World War.

In an example of how the parties have switched roles and constituents over time, Trump’s populist wing of the GOP is now an advocate for the working class, while today’s Democrat Party has become beholden to big banks, big tech, and big education.  Also, Trump wanted the US to stay out of European conflicts and for Europe to pay for its own defense—or the opposite of what Wilson ended up doing.

Roles and constituents have also switched regarding immigration.  Republicans are generally in favor of immigration restrictions, especially at the southern border, while Democrats are not in favor.  But one hundred years ago, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant progressives wanted to stop emigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, because, as they expressed in vile racist terms, they saw emigrants from those regions as non-White, inferior, and un-American.  The progressives and their allies in the press laid the groundwork for the passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, which accomplished most of what they wanted.

Now, ironically, progressive Democrats, under the guise of anti-racism, demean Americans of Southern and Eastern European ancestry as White, privileged, and racist.

I wish they’d make up their minds so that I would know as an Italian American whether I’m non-White, inferior, and un-American, or whether I’m White, privileged, and racist.

The ultimate in cancel culture and speech codes also occurred one hundred years ago, when the Wilson administration used a new espionage law to arrest reporters, pacifists, and common folk for speaking out against America’s involvement in the First World War.  This was in line with Attorney General Palmer’s arrest of union leaders and members who spoke in favor of communism and against capitalism.  A similar cancel culture was later adopted by Joe McCarthy, who has gone down in history as a right-wing reactionary, a label that could just as well be applied to the progressives who had preceded him.

Today, the current cancel culture and speech codes embraced by progressives are not as egregious, in that they have not resulted in arrests—at least not yet.  They’ve just resulted in careers being destroyed, similar to how McCarthy destroyed careers.  Don’t hold your breath waiting for movies to be produced about this.

Thankfully, Republicans have not borrowed something from the Progressive Era:  eugenics.  That was the decades-long movement to sterilize undesirables to keep them from procreating.  Working-class Republicans should be wary, though, given that Democrats have called them undesirables.

As evidenced by their belief in the Russian collusion hoax, Democrats are obsessed with the notion that Russia is influencing US elections.  They were also obsessed with Russians one hundred years ago.  At that time, they suspected all Russian immigrants of being Bolsheviks who were loyal to Russia and desirous of overthrowing democracy.  As such, they got special attention from Palmer in his roundups of alleged communists.

They had a point.  Back then, a lot of Russian immigrants, as well as Italian immigrants and other nationalities, were communists, or at least socialists.  Many others were anarchists.  The same for many union officials, including Eugene Debs, the socialist leader of the Industrial Workers of the World and a perennial candidate for president, who would get a million votes in one election, at a time when the US population was a lot smaller.  Debs would eventually be prosecuted and sent to prison, from where he ran for office once again.

All of these disaffected people had a shared goal, often stated in their publications, of overthrowing democracy and capitalism, using violent means if necessary.  The Trump loyalists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were sissies by comparison.

Bombings and assassinations were two of their means, and Attorney General Palmer was one of their targets.  Prior to his campaign to round up malcontents, his house in Washington, DC, was bombed in 1919.  The force was so powerful that the front of the four-story townhome was blown off and debris was scattered for blocks.  Miraculously, he and his wife, who was home at the time, were unscathed.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor, the future president and first lady, just missed being killed or injured by the bomb.  They lived across the street and had just parked their car in a garage a couple of blocks away after returning from a dinner engagement.  If they had returned several minutes sooner, they might have been directly across from the bomb when it went off.

It’s not surprising that in this atmosphere, and in the midst of a world war, Americans were willing to exchange some civil liberty for safety. As the New York Times wrote in 1919, “Aliens who belong to a society of revolutionists are not entitled to any tenderness from the Government.”  It also wrote: “The conspirators, pacifists of the malignant type who are associated with anarchist societies are not of the nation.  They have no right to be accounted citizens of the Republic.”

A similar tradeoff between civil liberty and safety was made 82 years later in response to the 9/11 terrorist attack, most notably in the form of the Patriot Act, which was signed into law by George W. Bush.  Many civil libertarians and Democrats have since decried the act and blamed Bush for bullying Congress into passing it. The New York Times would join the chorus, in a reversal of what it wrote in 1919.

As with so much of history, it has been largely forgotten that Democrats had assaulted civil liberties long before 9/11.  That’s because Democrats excel at cherry-picking history to make themselves look good and make Republicans look bad.  Republicans try to do the same to Democrats but are far less skilled at it.

From where I sit as a classical liberal, or a libertarian in today’s parlance, the McCarthyism of both parties scares me, especially with both parties once again beating war drums in tandem.

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter last October and the subsequent reporting on the Twitter Files by journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and a handful of others beginning in early December is one of the most important news stories of our time. The Twitter Files story encompasses, and to a large extent connects, every major political scandal of the Trump-Biden era. Put simply, the Twitter Files reveal an unholy alliance between Big Tech and the deep state designed to throttle free speech and maintain an official narrative through censorship and propaganda. This should not just disturb us, it should also prod us to action in defense of the First Amendment, free and fair elections, and indeed our country.

After Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter, he fired a slew of useless or insubordinate employees, instituted new content moderation policies, and tried to reform a woke corporate culture that bordered (and still borders) on parody. In the process, Musk coordinated with Taibbi and Weiss on the publication of a series of stories based on internal Twitter documents related to an array of major political events going back years: the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, Twitter’s secret policy of shadow banning, President Trump’s suspension from Twitter after the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot, the co-opting of Twitter by the FBI to suppress “election disinformation” ahead of the 2020 election, Twitter’s involvement in a Pentagon overseas psy-op campaign, its silencing of dissent from the official Covid narrative, its complicity in the Russiagate hoax, and its gradual capitulation to the direct involvement of the U.S. intelligence community—with the FBI as a go-between—in content moderation.

As Taibbi has written, the Twitter Files “show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government—from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.”

The Twitter Files contain multitudes, but for the sake of brevity let us consider just three installments and their related implications: the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the suspension of Trump, and the deputization of Twitter by the FBI. Together, these stories reveal not just a social media company willing to do the bidding of an out-of-control federal bureaucracy, but a federal bureaucracy openly hostile to the First Amendment.

Hunter Biden’s Laptop

On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published its first major exposé based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which had been dropped off at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019 and never picked up. It was the first of several stories detailing Biden family corruption and revealing the close involvement of Joe Biden in his son’s foreign business ventures in the years during and after Biden’s vice presidency. Hunter, although doing no real work, was making tens of millions of dollars from foreign companies in places like Ukraine and China. The Post’s bombshell reporting shined a bright light on what was happening.

According to the emails on the laptop, Hunter introduced then-Vice President Biden to a top executive at Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that was paying Hunter (who had no credentials or experience in the energy business) up to $50,000 a month to sit on its board. Soon after this meeting, Vice President Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor investigating the company. In an earlier email, a top Burisma executive asked Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” to benefit the company. The Post’s ensuing stories revealed more of the same: a shocking level of corruption and influence-peddling by Hunter Biden, whose emails suggest his father was closely connected to his overseas business ventures. Indeed, those ventures appear to consist entirely of Hunter providing access to Joe Biden.

Twitter did everything in its power to suppress the Biden story. It removed links to the Post’s reporting, appended warnings that they might be “unsafe,” and prevented users from sharing them via direct message—a restriction previously reserved for child pornography and other extreme cases. In an extraordinary step, Twitter also locked the Post’s account and the accounts of anyone who shared links to its reporting, including White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany. These actions were justified under the pretext that the stories violated Twitter’s hacked-materials policy, even though there was no evidence, then or now, that anything on the laptop was hacked.

Twitter executives at the highest levels were directly involved in these decisions. Former head of Legal, Policy, and Trust Vijaya Gadde, the company’s chief censor, played a key role, as did former head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth. Oddly, all this seems to have been done without the knowledge of Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey. And it was done despite internal pushback from other departments.

“I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe,” wrote a Twitter communications executive in an email to Gadde and Roth. “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” asked former VP of Global Communications Brandon Borman. His question was answered by Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker—a former top lawyer for the FBI and the most powerful member of a growing cadre of former FBI employees working at Twitter—who said that “caution is warranted” and that some facts “indicate the materials may have been hacked.”

But there were no such facts, as Baker and other top Twitter executives knew at the time. The laptop was exactly what the Post said it was, and every fact the Post reported was accurate. Other major media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post would begrudgingly admit as much 18 months later, after Joe Biden was ensconced in the White House.

If there were no hacked materials in the Post’s reporting, why did Twitter immediately react as if there were? Because long before the Post published its first laptop story, there had been an organized effort by the intelligence community to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden. The laptop, after all, had been in federal custody since the previous December, when the FBI seized it from the computer repair shop. So the FBI knew very well that it contained evidence of straightforward criminal activity (such as illicit drug use) as well as of corruption and influence-peddling.

The evening before the Post ran its first story on the laptop, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sent ten documents to Roth at Twitter through a special one-way communications channel the FBI had established with the company. For months, the FBI and other federal intelligence agencies had been priming Roth to dismiss news reports about Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 election as “hack-and-leak” operations by state actors. They had done the same thing with Facebook, whose CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted as much to Joe Rogan in an August 2022 podcast. As Michael Shellenberger reported in the seventh installment of the Twitter Files, the FBI repeatedly asked Roth and others at Twitter about foreign influence operations on the platform and were repeatedly told there were none of any significance. The FBI also routinely pressured Twitter to hand over data outside the normal search warrant process, which Twitter at first resisted.

In July 2020, Chan arranged for Twitter executives to get top secret security clearances so the FBI could share intelligence about possible threats to the upcoming presidential election. The next month, Chan sent Roth information about a Russian hacking group called APT28. Roth later said that when the Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop broke, “It set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-leak campaign alarm bells.” Even though there was never any evidence that anything on the laptop was hacked, Roth reacted to it just as the FBI had conditioned him to do, using the company’s hacked-materials policy to suppress the story as soon as it appeared, just as the agency suggested it would, less than a month before the election.

Suspending the President

The erosion of Twitter’s content moderation standards would continue after the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, reaching its apogee on January 8, 2021, two days after the Capitol riot. That is when Twitter made the extraordinary decision to suspend President Trump, even though he had not violated any Twitter policies. As the Twitter Files show, the suspension came amid ongoing interactions with federal agencies—interactions that were increasing in frequency in the months leading up to the 2020 election, during which Roth was meeting weekly with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. As the election neared, Twitter’s unevenly applied, rules-based content moderation policies would steadily deteriorate.

Content moderation on Twitter had always been an unstable mix of automatic enforcement of rules and subjective interventions by top executives, most of whom used Twitter’s censorship tools to diminish the reach of Trump and others on the right through shadow banning and other means. But that was changing. As Taibbi wrote in the third installment of the Twitter Files: “As the election approached, senior executives—perhaps under pressure from federal agencies, with whom they met more as time progressed—increasingly struggled with rules, and began to speak of ‘vios’ [violations] as pretexts to do what they’d likely have done anyway.”

After January 6, Twitter jettisoned even the appearance of a rules-based moderation policy, suspending Trump for a pair of tweets that top executives falsely claimed were violations of Twitter’s terms of service. The first, sent early in the morning on January 8, stated: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” The second, sent about an hour later, simply stated that Trump would not be attending Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20.

That same day, key Twitter staffers correctly determined that Trump’s tweets did not constitute incitement of violence or violate any other Twitter policies. But pressure kept building from people like Gadde, who wanted to know whether the tweets amounted to “coded incitement to further violence.” Some suggested that Trump’s first tweet might have violated the company’s policy on the glorification of violence. Internal discussions then took an even more bizarre turn. Members of Twitter’s “scaled enforcement team” reportedly viewed Trump “as the leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence/deaths comparable to Christchurch shooter or Hitler and on that basis and on the totality of his Tweets, he should be de-platformed.”

Later on the afternoon of January 8, Twitter announced Trump’s permanent suspension “due to the risk of further incitement of violence”—a nonsense phrase that corresponded to no written Twitter policy. The suspension of a sitting head of state was unprecedented. Twitter had never taken such a step, even with heads of state in Nigeria and Ethiopia who actually had incited violence. Internal deliberations unveiled by the Twitter Files show that Trump’s suspension was partly justified based on the “overall context and narrative” of Trump’s words and actions—as one executive put it—“over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.”

That is, it was not anything Trump said or did; it was that Twitter’s censors wanted to blame the President for everything that happened on January 6 and remove him from the platform. To do that, they were willing to shift the entire intellectual framework of content moderation from the enforcement of objective rules to the consideration of “context and narrative,” thereby allowing executives to engage in what amounts to viewpoint discrimination.

Private companies, of course, for the most part have the right to engage in viewpoint discrimination—something the government is prohibited from doing by the First Amendment. The problem is that when Twitter suspended Trump, it was operating less like a private company than like an extension of the federal government.

***

Among the most shocking revelations of the Twitter Files is the extent to which federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies came to view Twitter as a tool for censorship and narrative control. In part six of the Twitter Files, Taibbi chronicles the “constant and pervasive” contact between the FBI and Twitter after January 2020, “as if [Twitter] were a subsidiary.” In particular, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security wanted Twitter to censor tweets and lock accounts it believed were engaged in “election misinformation,” and would regularly send the company content it had pre-flagged for moderation, essentially dragooning Twitter into what would otherwise be illegal government censorship. Taibbi calls it a “master-canine” relationship. When requests for censorship came in from the feds, Twitter obediently complied—even when the tweets in question were clearly jokes or posted on accounts with few followers.

Some Twitter executives were unsure what to make of this relationship. Policy Director Nick Pickles at one point asked how he should refer to the company’s cooperation with federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, suggesting it be described in terms of “partnerships.” Time and again, federal agencies stressed the need for close collaboration with their “private sector partners,” using the alleged interference by Russia in the 2016 election as the pretext for a massive government surveillance and censorship regime operating from inside Twitter.

Requests for content moderation, which increasingly resembled demands, came not only from the FBI and DHS, but also from a tangled web of other federal agencies, contractors, and government-affiliated think tanks such as the Election Integrity Project at Stanford University. As Taibbi writes, the lines between government and its “partners” in this effort were “so blurred as to be meaningless.”

The Deputization of Twitter

After the 2016 election, both Twitter and Facebook faced pressure from Democrats and their media allies to root out Russian “election meddling” under the thoroughly debunked theory that a Moscow-based social media influence operation was responsible for Trump’s election victory. In reality, Russia’s supposed meddling amounted to a minuscule ad buy on Facebook and a handful of Twitter bots. But the truth was not acceptable to Democrats, the media, or the anti-Trump federal bureaucracy.

In 2017, Twitter came under tremendous pressure to “keep producing material” on Russian interference, and in response it created a Russia Task Force to hunt for accounts tied to Moscow’s Internet Research Agency. The task force did not find much. Out of some 2,700 accounts reviewed, only two came back as significant, and one of those was Russia Today, a state-backed news outlet. But in the face of bad press and threats from Democrats in Congress, Twitter executives decided to go along with the official narrative and pretend they had a Russia problem. To placate Washington and avoid costly new regulations, they pledged to “work with [members of Congress] on their desire to legislate.” When someone in Congress leaked the list of the 2,700 accounts Twitter’s task force had reviewed, the media exploded with stories suggesting that Twitter was swarming with Russian bots—and Twitter continued to go along.

After that, as described by Taibbi, “This cycle—threatened legislation wedded to scare headlines pushed by congressional/intel sources, followed by Twitter caving to [content] moderation asks—[came to] be formalized in partnerships with federal law enforcement.”

Late in 2017, Twitter quietly adopted a new policy. In public, it would say that all content moderation took place “at [Twitter’s] sole discretion.” But its internal guidance would stipulate censorship of anything “identified by the U.S. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” Thus Twitter increasingly allowed the intelligence community, the State Department, and a dizzying array of federal and state agencies to submit content moderation requests through the FBI, which Chan suggested could function as “the belly button of the [U.S. government].” These requests would grow and intensify during the Covid pandemic and in the run-up to the 2020 election.

By 2020, there was a torrent of demands for censorship, sometimes with no explanation—just an Excel spreadsheet with a list of accounts to be banned. These demands poured in from FBI offices all over the country, overwhelming Twitter staff. Eventually the government would pay Twitter $3.4 million in compensation. It was a pittance considering the work Twitter did at the government’s behest, but the payment illustrated a stark reality: Twitter, a leading gatekeeper of the digital public square and arguably the most powerful social media platform in the world, had become a subcontractor for the U.S. intelligence community.

***

The Twitter Files have revealed or confirmed three important truths about social media and the deep state.

First, the entire concept of “content moderation” is a euphemism for censorship by social media companies that falsely claim to be neutral and unbiased. To the extent they exercise a virtual monopoly on public discourse in the digital era, we should stop thinking of them as private companies that can “do whatever they want,” as libertarians are fond of saying. The companies’ content moderation policies are at best a flimsy justification for banning or blocking whatever their executives do not like. At worst, they provide cover for a policy of pervasive government censorship.

Second, Twitter was taking marching orders from a deep state security apparatus that was created to fight terrorists, not to censor or manipulate public discourse. To the extent that the deep state is using social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to subvert the First Amendment and run information psy-ops on the American public, these companies have become malevolent government actors. As a policy matter, the hands-off, laissez-faire regulatory approach we have taken to them should come to an immediate end.

Third, the administrative state has metastasized into a destructive deep state that threatens to bring about the collapse of America’s constitutional system within our lifetimes. Emblematic of the threat is the fact that “the intelligence community” has proven itself incapable of not interfering in American elections. The FBI in particular has directly meddled in the last two presidential elections to a degree that should call into question its continued existence. Indeed, the FBI’s post-9/11 transformation from a law enforcement agency to a counter-terrorism and intelligence-gathering agency with seemingly limitless remit has been a disaster for civil liberties and the First Amendment. We need either to impose radical reforms or scrap it entirely and start over.

The late great political scientist Angelo Codevilla argued that our response to 9/11 was completely wrong. Instead of erecting a sprawling security and surveillance apparatus to detect and disrupt potential terrorist plots, we should have issued an ultimatum to the regimes that were harboring Al Qaeda: you make war on these terrorists and bring them to justice or we will make war on you. The reason not to do what we did, Codevilla argued, is that a security and surveillance apparatus powerful and pervasive enough to do what we wanted it to do was incompatible with a free society. It might defeat the terrorists, but it would eventually be turned on the American people.

The Twitter Files leave little doubt that Codevilla’s prediction has come to pass. The question we face now is whether the American people and their elected representatives will fight back. The fate of the republic rests on the answer.