Readers will, I hope, forgive me for visiting a topic two weeks in a row. But perhaps they'll agree that the so-called Twitter Files remain the most important news story out there. Not, as already mentioned, because we've learned something new from them, but rather because they confirm what you and I—dissidents, whether you wanted to be or not—already knew. We have been, so to speak, repeatedly asked, "Who are you going to trust, us bureaucrats, or your own lying eyes?" And it is not only nice, but fundamental to rational self-rule that we know it was them, the bureaucrats, and not our eyes that were lying. 

The latest two installments of the files, from Michael Shellenberger and Lee Fang, might be the most shocking so far, but let us differentiate between shock and surprise. It is indeed shocking, in a democratic republic, to have confirmed for us that our national secret police were working closely with a corporate entity to manipulate our de facto town square and affect the outcomes of an election; the FBI prompted Yoel Roth to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story. It is indeed shocking, in a country committed to civilian rule, that our military would run influence campaigns on the de facto American soil of an American social media platform; the Pentagon ran psychological-warfare operations on Twitter with Twitter's help. But it should not be a surprise, even as we are so proud of our representative federal system, to have any of this confirmed. On the one hand, the FBI has a well established track record of shady political interference, too long to detail here—the left used to talk about this, along with the paleoconservative and libertarian right. On the other hand, Twitter represents the intersection of technology and journalism, and there are few parts of American society more bound up with the national security state than those.

The media are, as the Fourth Estate, central players in the information sphere, which is the area of concern to our and others' security services. Mass participatory politics is built on consensus formation of various kinds, and the First Amendment represents an attempt to create and protect a shared sphere for that meaning-making apart from the state itself. At this point in our moment of acceleration it is almost passé to interrogate the concept of a neutral public square, and I simply assert it has never existed.