What Happens Next

We returned, again and again, to the deeper question: if power no longer recognizes truth, what holds a civilization together?

We have a crisis of science and a crisis of faith, Alex said. And it s kind of the same thing.

People are not only disoriented. They re unmoored. The institutions that once offered knowledge and meaning, universities, newsrooms, hospitals, have lost the public s trust. But they ve also lost something older and more essential: a connection to the transcendent.

Faith in free speech and a faith in democracy are faiths, I said. You can t completely reason your way to it. You advocate for it out of a kind of love.

This isn t theory for us. We ve both lived through the moment when everything official was wrong, and every institution demanded submission.

I don t wanna live in an unfree society, I said. I would really fight to the death to defend my freedom of speech.

During COVID, Alex said, I felt like I ll die, I ll be homeless, I don t care. You could give me this really nice life, but I have to comply with this nonsense? I ll reject it. Because I just want to be free.

This is the heart of the book we ve been working on. These ideologies, DEI, gender medicine, environmental hysteria, aren t just policy mistakes. They provide the experience of spirituality, I said, but they re not real. And they re completely disconnected from reality.

I mentioned a scene from the first season of the HBO series, White Lotus. A college student urges a Hawaiian boy to rob the white family she s vacationing with. He protests: But not those whites. She replies: It doesn t matter. That s the ethic of the new ruling class. Not judgment, not evidence, just doctrine. And punishment.

They take one narrow thing, race, gender, trauma, and build an entire moral structure around it, Alex said. Then they say, Shut up. Don t ask questions.

We don t know what the administration will do next. Whether the Epstein files will be released. Whether a list of clients will be named. Whether the men now in charge of the FBI will follow through on what they once demanded.

But we know what we ll do. We ll keep reporting. Keep asking questions. Keep refusing the comforts of silence. Because if the deep state can survive even a populist presidency, then winning elections is not enough.

via www.public.news

Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag on the Epstein Files and all they seem to be fixing to dreg up. “Unmoored”– that’s exactly how I feel, at least when I think of this stuff, which I concede I do as little as possible.