Topics: revolution at the NYT, open war on open speech at Reddit and Twitter, the French Revolution, ascending Marxism, the American Cultural Revolution, and a lay of the land.

What the hell is going on at the New York Times? Following their recent editorial shake-up, hints of division and a toxic workplace environment at the legacy media institution have increasingly leaked to social media:

Allegations of such division have been publicly denied by many of the activists on staff who are themselves credited with fomenting the divisive environment. And oh, who to believe?!

Well, last week things took a wild turn. First, a popular blogger was driven from public for fear of his safety after the New York Times planned to dox him. It’s yet unclear why the Times originally intended to move forward with the doxing (and still may, it should be noted), especially considering it’s well within their guidelines to protect anonymity where, among other things, safety is concerned. Regardless, the fallout was severe. The drama of course further soured opinion across the technology industry on the overtly anti-tech media outlet, but notably technologists at the New York Times themselves seemed disturbed by the behavior of their colleagues. Tech absolutely leans politically left, but in its own particular way. Anonymity, privacy, and freedom of information are all core values of a large majority of technology workers, and these are all values for the most part at odds with a newly authoritarian left. Many on the left, particularly in media where the phenomenon has metastasized, still deny the authoritarianism is real, or in any sense meaningful. But it’s important not to be gaslit, here. The problem is obvious, and serious.

Still in the thick of the Slate Star drama, Dan Saltzstein, a Deputy Editor at the New York Times, endorsed the French Revolution.

Controversial among anyone with even passing knowledge of what actually took place during the French Reign of Terror, which is to say literal mass murder and one of the most infamous dictatorships in history, the tweets went viral, and have since been deleted. But the political tell, here, is significant. If you’ve spent any amount of time on Twitter in the last few years you know the socialist obsession with the French Revolution, and guillotines in particular, is nothing new. The mass murder stuff is just a joke, I’m often told. I shouldn’t take these things so seriously. The problem is we so often find the people joking about mass murder in service of some greater good actively defend the position when questioned on its merits.

Our existential problem is the men and women who believe, in an almost religious sense, that America should be dismantled, and all perceived ‘enemies of the people’ purged, increasingly seem to be running many of the most influential institutions in our country. It is not a small thing that the New York Times, ostensibly charged with sharing information instrumental to the health of our Republic, is staffed by people who believe mass-murder is on occasion justified. To be clear, they should be allowed to write whatever they want. But we really should start listening to them when they tell us who they are.

Open censorship intensifies. Reddit banned around 2000 political subreddits this week for the thoughtcrime of an ambiguously-defined “hate speech.” The pro-censorship conversation in tech has always been a proxy war for a national conversation on whether or not “hate speech” should be protected under the Constitution. The use of scare quotes is important, here, as the term is sufficiently ambiguous that it can be used to ban anything, including much of the content in this wire. So let’s table the question of whether or not massive, online companies have the right to censor content, or in the case of Twitter have the right to actively curate and publish content, while under the protection of Section 230. Should we be censoring speech?

For many, the moral right to freedom of opinion falls apart the moment someone says something they find in some way deeply repugnant. Fortunately, we have no shortage of practical reasons to protect the value. First, our most recent cases of high-profile censorship have had little to do with hatred in even the ambiguous sense of that word. Mostly, they have centered on questions of truth and expertise. True things, it is apparently believed by the pro-censorship contingent, are things said by experts. But the “experts” in science and technology whom our media selects to represent “truth” are invariably chosen among ideological kin. Sometimes they’re right about things. But sometimes they’re not, and when they aren’t oh boy. They really aren’t.

For many, taking Trump’s side on any issue at all is just impossible. So let’s focus on something less politically charged. Who do we trust with our health? YouTube banned the dissemination of information out of sync with the World Health Organization this spring. But the WHO has been wrong about everything from human-to-human transmission and the efficacy of masks to the question of whether or not we were even experiencing a pandemic earlier this year. And on that question of masks, our own Anthony Fauci, who has been for months beyond reproach, recently admitted the public was intentionally misled. If we were to steelman the argument for banning content as essential to curbing hatred (which would be a major historical aberration), we would still need to acknowledge the scope of our current censorship already extends well beyond the ambiguously-defined “hateful" bounds of censorship proponents. But on the more narrow topic of explicit political speech, we also have an issue.

The most important reason we resist political censorship is it is by its nature a tool available only to people in power. From a position beyond criticism, typically at a moment of genuine popularity, power has again and again been centralized, and checks to power abolished. This is a phenomenon so typical I would venture to call it historical law. Power-crazed lunatics have attempted to maintain power by controlling what is said about them for as long as there has been a press interested in saying things about them. The acceptable bounds of speech — again, recently defined in terms of what is and is not “hateful” — will be set by adherents of whoever is in charge. The question we must always ask ourselves when contemplating censorship is would we feel comfortable were the bounds of acceptable speech determined by the person we most despise politically? Because eventually they always are.

Hello from Cuba. MVP of the week goes to Antonio García Martínez. Epic thread on Cuba’s Marxist takeover, his family’s escape, and an implicit warning.

^ Follow this man.

Lay of the land. There’s simply no longer any denying Karl Marx is seriously back in play. It should have been obvious the ascending DSA could not really be termed fringe when sitting congressmen began referring to themselves as “democratic socialists,” an entirely fraudulent term. Bernie Sanders supported widespread nationalization of industries across the country for decades. In San Francisco, my district supervisor Dean Preston has retweeted content calling for the nationalization of all American industry. Twitter search the word “guillotine” and you’ll find the overlap of “democratic” socialists and open discussion of violent Marxist revolution is one hundred percent. This is all literally just socialism — the real shit.

We’re currently staring down the barrel of a Cultural Revolution committed to destroying all art that evokes a positive, or heroic America. The mob has swiftly drifted from toppling Confederate statues to toppling statues in heroic memory of the Union because while many Americans are justifiably concerned with race, the mob is not. The mob is concerned principally with class, which would be obvious were we to simply take seriously the things being said by proponents of this advancing, authoritarian movement. We also need not limit ourselves to the endless guillotine imagery or “eat the rich” placards at protests ostensibly concerned with racist police. Chesa Boudin, the DA of San Francisco with — it is whispered in local circles — congressional ambition, has publicly written in defense of Marxist dictatorship. Infamously, he doesn’t prosecute property crime. He says this is an issue of social justice, and hides behind an appropriated legacy of black American trauma. But of course the real reason he doesn’t prosecute property crime is he doesn’t believe in the concept of private property.

Our only defense against what seems a swiftly-spreading ideological plague would be an open dialogue on the issues here presented. But it’s in the first place not clear open dialogue is enough. People seem, at the moment, to be quite seriously out of their minds. In the second place, open dialogue is increasingly at risk. At the root of every conversation on intersectionality and identity is a Marxist critique of liberty. But because Marxism has now so deeply confused itself into conversations on race and gender any criticism of obviously Marx-oriented protest is observed suspiciously. How long before defense of industry is itself deemed hateful?

Of course the giant orange elephant in the room is Donald Trump. As he is symbolically the head of all things “right wing” we have been deluded into a false choice: the populist, authoritarian right, or the populist, authoritarian left. It is impossible to critique the authoritarian Marxism now dominant online without being painted immediately a Trump supporter, which no classical liberal is. So mostly reasonable people just say nothing. But this environment didn’t just happen. We find ourselves in this psychological prison because classical liberals refuse to fight for their values. And if populists are the only people willing to fight, what hope could we possibly have of an end to this obvious madness?

A republic, if you can keep it.

If we aren’t willing to defend liberty, technology, or industry we don’t deserve their fruits. And come on, people, the ground floor least you can do is tweet about it.

-SOLANA