American Restoration Newsletter #4

Please forward to anyone who should have it...and no one who shouldn't.

It’s been way too long since I’ve cranked out one of these newsletters/updates, so I’ll start with an apology to those of you who’ve missed them.  What can I say?  Sometimes life gets in the way of productivity.  I regret that I’ve been mired in one such period, but I seem to be pulling myself out of it and I thought that I would catch you up. 

Among other things, it means that I’ve spent far too little time pitching The New Civil War, my takedown of America’s corrupt elite class (i.e., urban, educated, affluent, professionals).  If, like me, you’re a card-carrying part of that elite , and you’re not embarrassed and disgusted at what we’ve become, you’re not paying enough attention.  Seth Forman, another card-carrying member, amplifies my case in his American Greatness review.  I may have shared that review before, but what the hell.  Indulge me.

Over the past few months, I’ve published columns on two topics: The looming danger of Chinese spyware on proud display in America’s homes, schools, offices, and governments; and Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.  As is invariably the case, the former topic the more important of the two but the latter has generated far greater interest.

My take on Chinese spyware is straightforward: We need to pay more attention to it.  At a bare minimum, our government procurement agents need to stop buying Chinese computers and installing them in sensitive public sector settings.  (If you hit a paywall, the text is also here).  How did we arrive at such an impasse?  What are we doing about it?  What does it foretell about the future we are creating?  As luck would have it, I address those questions, too.  (Shouldn’t be a paywall but the text is here, anyway).

On the Musk/Twitter front, I’m drawn back to my passion around the turn of the millennium (or Y2K, for those old enough to remember).  Back then, I set out to understand what it meant to live at the moment of transition from the late industrial age to the early information age.  My first (real) book, Digital Phoenix: Why the Information Economy Collapsed and How it Will Rise Again (MIT Press, 2005) described the patterns we would see as each new industry ratcheted forward into the information age. 

One predictable pattern was that as a frontier technology matured, it would become a platform on which the next frontier industry could build.  Powerful incumbents would try to leverage their dominance into the new niche, effectively harming consumers and stifling innovation.  That’s where social media has been for the past half-decade.  We’re ready for a new bout of competitive innovation among those eager to provide curation and other services to social media users.  The folks who own those networks would prefer to control, manage, and own all such services. 

Musk threatens to break open their oligopoly and give those entrepreneurial innovators some breathing room (I’m not thrilled with some of the editing on that one, so I’ve posted the version I submitted here).  Of course, in our overly political society (who knew that telling your son he’s a boy was a political act?) everything assumes political overtones.  A billionaire taking a public company private is no exception.  So I also delve into how Musk’s gambit plays itself out as the newest front in the battle for America’s soul and the nature of morality (again, no paywall but knock yourselves out).

And just to prove that the latter topic has generated interest, I got two invitations to discuss Musk and Twitter on drive-time radio, with Mark Reardon in St. Louis and John Howell in Chicago.

Thanks for making it this far. If you have, I’d be remiss were I to let you go without reminding you that there’s now a hat available for tipping (and subscribing)!

Enjoy!  

As always, feedback and comments are welcome.

-Bruce

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For more information about Bruce D. Abramson & American Restorationism, visit: www.BruceDAbramson.com

To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see:  The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).

To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).