On Propaganda

Propaganda and the flow of information matter to the crypto industry because decentralized systems drop founder curation for democratic governance, which only works if every user reasons rationally from evidence.

A personal Twitter feed that is 90 percent Cardano news and 10 percent personal opinion draws polarized reactions, with fans calling him enlightened and critics accusing him of being swayed by team red or team blue.

Team red and team blue appear different but end up doing the same things, a pattern lived through twice: the 2007 Ron Paul campaign, whose three bipartisan pillars were following the Constitution, a humble foreign policy, and sound money, formed in reaction to the post September 11 surveillance state and a national debt that had nearly doubled, and the media's response to Bitcoin.

The Iraq War's justification, including Colin Powell's UN speech, was built on evidence its own architects knew was false, reinforcing the campaign's call to stop going to war on lies.

The Tea Party formed as a bipartisan reaction to the Ron Paul campaign's warnings, but Paul let it be co-opted, and it abandoned sound money and constitutional rights for fights over gay marriage and abortion.

Occupy Wall Street asked why no bankers went to jail after the financial crisis despite a sympathetic president holding a filibuster proof supermajority, but the protest was likewise co-opted and produced no reform.

Bitcoin, arriving in 2009, became the ultimate media counter information campaign, absorbing nine years of derogatory coverage, from drugs only narratives to Silk Road and Mount Gox to Stephen Colbert's mockery, without being propagandized out of existence.

In 2017 the media knowingly hyped a Bitcoin bubble it expected to burst, hoping the eventual 90 percent crash would sour public sentiment on crypto, but the movement stuck around anyway.

After the drugs and bubble narratives failed, permanent doubters like Peter Schiff and Nouriel Roubini kept predicting Bitcoin would go to zero, missing that the real questions it raises are about governance and society, not money.

Voting, property, and constitutional rights are inherited, not chosen: almost no one alive consented to the specific configuration of rights and money they were born into.

A giant unelected global governance framework, including the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, the IMF, and the Bank for International Settlements, decides how commerce and money work without anyone voting for it.

This global order has repeatedly shown it cares more about stability and nation state power than about individual liberty or human life: malaria, cheap to treat and killing more people than almost any disease besides influenza, goes uncured, while genocides against the Nuba people in Sudan and atrocities in Congo and Southeast Asia draw no response.

COVID-19, like any new disease, arrived with unknown transmissibility, case fatality rate, treatments, and vaccine timeline across 184 countries, making rapid research the reasonable response.

Every action carries a risk profile, from driving to smoking to John Nash's fatal taxi accident, so a new disease should be measured against that same risk spectrum rather than treated as uniquely catastrophic.

Known risks that kill 50 to 60 thousand people a year, like driving, provoke no political debate, yet the U.S. response to an unknown disease went further still, effectively suspending the Constitution, setting aside freedom of association, religion, and commerce without debate, and branding anyone who questioned it a conspiracy theorist.

As the elderly risk framing lost political traction, the media shifted to accusing lockdown skeptics of racism, even as the six trillion dollars printed, more than every U.S. president's national debt combined from George Washington through Bill Clinton and five times the cost of a universal basic income for most Americans, drew no real debate: team blue fixated on corporate board diversity and green energy riders while team red waved it through to support the president.

Treatments for ARDS improved more in three months of COVID than in the prior decade, with remdesivir among the emerging options and a vaccine plausibly available by early 2021, undercutting the narrative that this is the Spanish flu.

Anyone challenging the lockdown narrative was branded a racist Nazi by outlets like MSNBC, even as 30 million Americans lost their jobs and an estimated half of New York City's 20,000 restaurants, including favorites like Smith and Wollensky and the Carnegie Club, faced closure.

Sweden chose not to shut down its economy, judging the evidence insufficient to justify it, while parts of Asia, including Japan where he once lived, relied on the much older common sense practice of wearing masks to avoid spreading illness to others.

The WHO and CDC wavered for months on cheap cloth masks sold everywhere in Japan at convenience stores like 7 Eleven and Family Mart, missing that masks work by stopping a sick wearer from spreading disease, and Dutch antibody testing later found about 3 percent of the population already carried antibodies, evidence the virus had spread far wider quietly than confirmed cases showed.

Every country with a high case fatality rate shows the same pattern of patients over 55, obese, or smokers, while the case fatality rate among people under 40 runs below 0.1 percent, evidence the disease is far less lethal for the young than the messaging implies.

Team blue tolerates only two acceptable narratives, that Trump is evil or that society is racist, while team red is already written off as evil, evidence of a population incapable of thinking for itself.

Sean Hannity, whom he calls a skilled propagandist, assembled a montage of team blue figures dismissing COVID's seriousness in response to a New York Times article accusing Hannity of having blood on his hands over deaths tied to hydroxychloroquine, including people poisoning themselves with fish tank cleaner.

In truth both parties failed to take COVID seriously early on, until it was reframed as the defining event of the era, at which point team blue treated the lockdown as a chance to advance its preferred agenda about the structure of society.

Blaming disproportionate minority infection rates on racism ignores that minority communities are more likely to hold jobs that cannot be done from home, and that shutting down the economy hits minority owned businesses, including most of the affected New York City restaurants, hardest.

Promising evidence for hydroxychloroquine was dismissed for political reasons in favor of the patented and expensive remdesivir, an example of the fact based conversation the pandemic actually needed never taking place.

The predicted ventilator shortage that would force doctors to choose between patients never happened, and decades of family medical experience show the US throws away PPE after every use even though countries like Congo and Sierra Leone safely reuse it while treating Ebola.

Hospitals had switched to just in time PPE purchasing instead of stockpiling, and no one had developed sterilization methods to make it reusable, turning a preventable supply chain failure into a justification for nationalizing American manufacturing under the Defense Production Act.

Instead of using media to fix the real PPE hoarding and coordination failures between hospitals, states, and the federal government, coverage stayed fixated on portraying Trump as evil and society as racist, while team red, wary of the fate incumbent parties suffered under Herbert Hoover in 1932, pushed to reopen the economy for a V shaped recovery without first getting the antibody test data to justify it.

The same pattern repeated after September 11, when a push to roll back new surveillance powers once the immediate threat passed was itself co-opted and killed, foreshadowing today's fight over whether the suspended rights and six trillion dollars in new spending ever get rolled back.

There is strong evidence the virus originated from a lab, a claim that gets anyone who raises it branded a conspiracy theorist, even though institutional accidents and cover ups, like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, are a matter of historical record.

An enormous cover up in November, December, and January cost the world the time it needed to decide whether shutting down the economy was actually necessary, yet investigative journalists show no interest in exposing it.

Cardano is built on the scientific method: observe, form a hypothesis, test it, and report the results, the same discipline behind building a fair and resilient voting system.

That same method underlies building farmer vouchers for millions of people, lending, and stablecoins, systems meant to be fair, resilient, and governed by immutable rules.

The Constitution and these blockchain systems both work like the laws of physics, consistent and indifferent to whether the outcome is convenient, echoing the old Bitcoin community line that the Honey Badger doesn't care, and only functioning if people are rational actors capable of reasoning about their own inputs.

His own COVID timeline started with intelligence community emails in December, then the WHO's early claim that human to human transmission was unlikely, then a comparison to the 2003 SARS outbreak that his doctor father expected to burn out like avian or swine flu.

As new data arrived he revised his view upward, from expecting it to blow over to warning his own company it could kill over a million people worldwide, while still never concluding that suspending the economy and printing six trillion dollars was the justified response.

The pandemic response is a case study in manipulated public opinion, proof that rights people assumed were fixed, from the ones he saw co-opted after 2007 and again with Occupy Wall Street in 2011, can be taken away at any time.

He tweets about politics not as a member of team red or team blue, and not out of support for a globalist agenda or Alex Jones style anti-globalism, but to push people to think for themselves, pointing to books on critical thinking and the scientific method plus cognitive biases like confirmation bias, negativity bias, and availability bias as the tools to do it.

His test for propaganda, citing the Dunning Kruger effect: if a topic you barely understand triggers a violent emotional reaction, or you cannot listen to the other side or argue their position, you are likely its victim.

The systems he is building push power to the edges with no president, governor, CEO, or leader, which makes them dangerous for anyone unable to critically evaluate whether evidence actually supports a claim.

Historically power was taken by force through religion or a totalitarian claim to divine right or kingship; now it is taken by convincing people they cannot think for themselves and then extracting their consent through propaganda instead.

Bitcoin proves the model can work: when the media machine attacked it, the community pushed back and won, which is why he stays in the space and keeps warning that the same tools built to hand power back to people could instead be used to take it away or enforce something worse.

His personal test against propaganda is to take the opposite side of a politicized belief and try to argue it honestly, and he closes by admitting his own opinion is just one man's, meant to carry no more weight than anyone else's.

Nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, and AI are the reasons some global regulatory function may still be needed, since the same systems built to restore trust and individual power could instead be misused to end the human race if built wrong.