The Language of the Debate (13)

Joe Rogan recently interviewed former US State Department Cyber Division head Mike Benz for his podcast. If you have ever watched Rogan on YouTube, as well over 68 million people did when he interviewed incoming President Donald Trump back in October, you’ll know his style is unusual compared to other media figures in that he tends to let his guests actually talk, making his podcast one of the most genuinely informative opinion platforms available.

He certainly let Benz talk. You can find the first part of the interview transcribed here and the second here, or you can just watch the whole thing here. (Caution: Rogan can be fairly profane.)

Why does this matter? Well, the second part of Rogan’s interview has Benz explaining the recent redefinition of the word “democracy”. If you thought the media was using the term in weird and self-contradictory ways lately, you were not wrong. Like so many words and phrases in the vernacular, “democracy” no longer means what it used to.

17. “Democracy”

Merriam-Webster still says democracy means “government by the people: rule of the majority”. That’s what it meant when I was growing up, and that’s what it means to most people today. When someone says a policy, initiative or even a war is “good for democracy”, we understand it to mean that it will allow more citizens to participate in the process of governing the country; that the will of the majority will be more efficiently and comprehensively carried out; that the average Joe on the street will have more say in what happens to him and his family. We hear it as a good thing.

So the spate of strange usages of “democracy” in the media recently kind of threw me. “Unfettered free speech,” we are now told, “is a threat to democracy.” We need more internet censorship in order to be more free. Does that make any sense to you? It does to New York Times writer Emily Bazelon and numerous others of her ilk.

The ‘Threat’ of Populism

A 2017 conference at Stanford University seriously debated the question “When Does Populism Become a Threat to Democracy?” Apparently, significant numbers of reputable intellectuals actually sat there discussing this subject with straight faces. How is that possible? For all intents and purposes, populism IS democracy. How can more input from the grassroots be a threat to input from the grassroots? One can only conclude the intellectual elites are using a different dictionary than I am.

Sir Ed Davey recently accused Elon Musk of “interfering with our country’s democracy”. That’s not the first time Musk has been viewed as a threat to democracies around the world, and it’s certainly possible some of Musk’s actions in leveraging his immense wealth and influence to benefit his corporations have been less than perfectly democratic. But Davey was not concerned about any of that. His problem with Musk is that he’s using his media platform to draw attention to the British government’s unwillingness to launch a statutory inquiry into the largely-Pakistani grooming gangs in Rotherham, Cornwall, Derbyshire, Rochdale, Telford and Bristol. Such an inquiry might certainly lead to the embarrassment of public figures or threaten public order. It might even lead to a long-overdue change in immigration policy for the UK. It could not possibly threaten democracy. Once again, when politicians refer to “democracy”, they are not using the word the way everyone else does.

What’s Really Threatened

The answer, of course, is that free speech, populism and even Elon Musk flapping his gums are not real threats to democracy. They threaten the unelected shadow governments that run Western democracies, which is an entirely different thing. The argument of the intellectuals is that the average man or woman on the street is too ignorant and easily misinformed to be allowed to have his or her opinion count.

That may or may not be a valid point, but what it most definitely isn’t is democratic. Not at all.

Mike Benz explains this apparent widespread incomprehension among the elites as to the meaning of democracy like this:

“I did a compilation of all these DHS officials, State Department officials, Pentagon officials, completely changing their justification for why we need internet censorship. Before Russiagate and after Russiagate. And they switched from saying, ‘Russian disinformation is the threat. So that’s why the Pentagon is involved; that’s why the state and CIA and FBI is involved,’ to saying, ‘Well, actually, domestic disinformation is a threat to democracy. So regardless of whether it’s the Russians or not, we need to censor Americans to preserve democracy.’

They pulled off a cute trick where they doctrinally redefined democracy to mean a consensus of institutions rather than individuals.”

So then, it’s not that they don’t understand what “democracy” means and entails. It’s that they hope we don’t.

Losing the Magic

It will take a while for trading on the need to “preserve democracy” to become entirely useless as a tool of media manipulation, but it will happen. If “racist” and “antisemite” can lose their mesmerizing rhetorical magic, any word can. The takeaway for Christians, I suppose, is not to vote on the basis of rhetoric. Or, perhaps more usefully, not to take the word of established liars, even if they keep saying things you’d love to believe.

The whole interview with Benz is worth a read. It’s quite an eye-opener. If President Trump really intends to rein in the Deep State this time around, he’s got his work cut out for him.