Our Reckoning
And now we must clean up the mess.
It's like what Tom Cruise and friends did to the house in Risky Business. You expected the kitchen to be messy. But you didn't know that they destroyed the house.
For the next few months, prepare to see the rest of the damage, the aftermath of what we have wrought in America and our government. It is so tempting to move on, to avert our eyes from the carnage along the roadside. But we cannot. For the sake of future generations, for the Democracy, we owe it to ourselves to account.
As usual, good journalism is digging up the facts and telling us what happened.
We now learn precisely how the Capitol insurrection came about. We learn how militia frat bros planned to kidnap or kill the governor of Michigan because they didn't like her approach to COVID. Among the scariest details was a plan to take her to Wisconsin and put her on "trial," after casing her house. They actually practiced the kidnapping.
A sitting member of Congress is now inciting violence, denying the election results, and saying the Parkland, Fla. school shooting was a hoax. And her fellow Republicans say and do nothing.
The enablers of the past four years, Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, Mike Pence, Fox News, Facebook, all slink away to safety. Some will say they knew about Trump all along but were trying to protect the Republic. Some of them will now run for president while Fox News and Facebook continue making money off the QAnon conspiracy cult and its believers.
When you see these people on T.V., remember this. Cruz once called Trump a pathological liar. Graham said Trump's election would destroy the Republican party, "and we will deserve it." After the election, they pivoted and served him, played golf with him, and explained him away. Deep down, where they don't want to go, these people know what they did. Their type will always be with us. This is who we are.
Again, it is tempting to feel safe in our COVID bubbles; think the Democracy is strong and can survive; that Trump was an aberration. But we know too much now.
We have known for two centuries that the U.S. is a safe harbor to white supremacy. From South Carolina Sen. John Calhoun, father of the filibuster, secession, and slavery, to the KKK and now the Proud Boys and Fox News, they are all the same. They fear the loss of a white, Christian nation they believe is their birthright. And that nation is being lost to people who are not them. The U.S. is changing, and they don't like it. So they plot kidnappings, stage an assault on the U.S. Capitol, and try to subvert an entire government.
And for the last four years, they got away with a lot. The list is long, but Democracy survived - barely.
The institutions whose job it is to run the government held firm - barely.
We still have an FBI that investigates criminal behavior, and we will learn how deep the conspiracy to overturn the election went. We have a Federal Trade Commission entrusted with policing corporate behavior. We have a Securities and Exchange Commission whose job is to protect investors. The EPA enforces pollution laws. OSHA tries to make sure the workplace is safe.
Thus far, the FBI has told us that white supremacist terror groups are active and a threat to all of us. Of course, they have been telling us this for decades. We knew it in 1995 when ex-Army Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh was a white nationalist who turned into a terrorist, killing hundreds of innocents because he didn't like government.
The FBI is now telling us that these people are a threat to the Republic. They are armed, and they are organized. And they are dangerous. We shouldn't be surprised when the next school shooting, the next bombing, the next riot happens. These aren't accidents.
These aren't the black teenagers from Black Lives Matter that white politicians use as props to incite their voters. These are white people, committing crimes, threatening to kidnap governors they don't like, and storming the Capitol. They killed a police officer in the Jan. 6 riot.
We know what drives them - a feeling of being left behind by society, ignored by political leadership and a rigged system, and losing the grip on their identity to people of color. They have always been with us. But what's different today is the powerful forces driving them together and validating their bitterness.
On Facebook, these people receive reinforcement and validation, and instruction. Facebook is the dating platform where they can hook up with fellow terrorists.
After months of failing to find the right description for Facebook, my son finally came through. Mark Zuckerberg, he said, is like a "teenager with a machine gun. He just likes the sound. He doesn't care about the damage." Exactly.
Facebook is an enabler of all this hate. It's more powerful than Fox News because it designs its algorithm to bring dangerous people together. When they post something about taking over the government, Facebook gives them an ad for zip ties or guns or camo gear. They're directed to Facebook groups where they meet their fellow terrorists. AND IT'S FREE! because Facebook makes its money via advertising, not by subscriptions.
Zuckerberg's goal is to keep people on the site for as long as possible so they can see as many ads as possible. If you are a wannabe revolutionary, your Facebook stream becomes a county fair with everything a guy might need to break into the Capitol building and overturn an election. Remember that Zuckerberg and Facebook also own Instagram and Whats App. So now he controls the online activity of 2.7 billion people with annual revenue of $70 billion.
Why do we allow this? What have we wrought? We don't yet know. Mark Zuckerberg and his COO Sheryl Sandberg have become arguably the most powerful and dangerous people on the planet. And they continue to avoid responsibility for their actions. They continue to say they don't want to be arbiters of free speech. They want to be neutral places where people can say what they want. It's B.S.
They hide behind the First Amendment. And that is cowardly. We have a government for a reason: to protect people. We need to protect ourselves from these engines of fascism that have no regard for the public good. How? Repower the anti-trust division of the Justice Department to call Zuckerberg on the phone and threaten him with action if he doesn't stop fomenting violence.
Breaking up Facebook is good capitalism. It would create highly valuable new companies, lots of innovation and make a lot of people very wealthy. And they will go off and start new companies that employ thousands. Today, Facebook buys and destroys any potential competitor.
We have given these platforms immense power without regard to the resulting impacts on society. Zuckerberg and Co. have created a huge, powerful company that threatens Democracy. If we don't stop them, we will see more suicide, more teen depression, and more hate that leads to another Oklahoma City, another Capitol insurrection, or worse.
For 20 years, we have handed over our private information to Facebook, and they use it to sow hatred and undermine our Democracy and way of life. We must take back these platforms by invigorating a Democracy that works for people. Right now, it works for companies that would steal and use our personal information for profit. In truth, it is a coup. Just quieter.
Professor and writer Shoshana Zuboff puts it this way, echoing Justice Brandeis.
"Unless Democracy revokes the license to steal and challenges the fundamental economics and operations of commercial surveillance, the epistemic coup will weaken and eventually transform Democracy itself. We must make our choice. We may have Democracy, or we may have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both. We have a democratic information civilization to build, and there is no time to waste."
