The New Dark Age
America is entering a new dark age. We have an administration that is intent on remaking our society from top to bottom which, at its core, is an attack on knowledge and the infrastructure of civil society. On multiple fronts, we are seeing both the erasure of history and the loss, destruction, and privatization of historical data on an unimaginable scale. This is combined with attacks on both the educational and scientific systems that undergird our cultural and civic life. At the same time, we are witnessing the construction of a powerful surveillance state and attacks on the legal system leading to a degradation in the rule of law. We seem to be attempting to withdraw from the world, economically and, with our xenophobic policies, literally physically. Under this administration, we are increasingly becoming an isolated and closed society where information is tightly restricted, and opponents of the administration can be summarily dispatched to foreign concentration camps. The goal is an autocratic state based on some combination of kleptocracy, white Christian nationalism, and technocratic patriarchy.
Our recent history is being lost due to the nature of our digital age. Digital decay is the loss or degradation of digital information over time. This is due to the natural decay of the storage equipment, so-called link rot, where the link to other sources has been severed for one reason or another, or simply the inaccessibility of the data. Storage decay is serious issue as some digital media (e.g. Betamax) simply become obsolete or the storage device literally starts losing information. Unpowered hard drives and flash drives like USB sticks and SD cards often last less than 5 years. Around 40% of web pages that existed in 2013 are no longer reachable. Not all of this is strictly digital decay as a portion of this total are pages that have simply been deleted or made private by the account owner. More concerning is the fact that 20% of government web pages have at least one broken link as do 23% of news pages and 54% of Wikipedia pages. Content from news sites like MTV News and Gawker is now inaccessible because those entities have ceased to exist.
Digital decay may be a problem for future historians, but it is the Trump administration’s scrubbing of our nation’s history and our government’s data that is truly concerning for all of us today. The Republicans’ attack on DEI is literally whitewashing history, removing minorities in much the same way Stalin removed his murdered advisers from photos. The stories of Blacks like Harriet Tubman, the Tuskegee Airmen, and Jackie Robinson; of women buried at Arlington National Cemetery and women’s contribution to NASA; of the Navajo Code Talkers, Japanese-American troops, and even the Iwo Jima flag-raising from World War II; all of them deleted from government websites, (although some have now been restored after public outcry). Trans people have had their sex changed on government documents and been denied passports. The thought policing that includes bans on hundreds of words has become so extreme that information about the Enola Gay has been deleted.
Across the country, primarily in Republican-controlled areas, book bans are increasingly common as are restrictions on what subjects may be taught or even discussed in publicly funded schools. The latest round of DOGE cuts to the NEH means funding for local libraries and museums will be slashed and programs that help early childhood development like Head Start will end. At the Naval Academy, books about the Holocaust have been removed but “Mein Kampf” and “Camp of the Saints”, which originated the Great Replacement theory, remain. Universities that do not conform to the administration’s ideological dictates are threatened by the President with revocation of their tax-exempt status and cuts to funding. Other universities are seeing their funding cut for no particular reason at all. Much of that funding supports critical research that backs our nation’s scientific, medical, and innovative capabilities as well as local health care facilities. Foreign faculty and students are having their legal right to be here summarily revoked and are ordered to leave the country. Experts from other countries are being warned not to come here for fear of detention. In every way, we are witnessing a full-on assault on education and the transfer of knowledge.
Other cuts at the NIH, NOAA, NASA, USAID and the Education Department have terminated clinical trials and ongoing treatment plans for millions, ended critical research into diseases like cancer and ALS, killed studies into climate change and our changing natural environment, and threatened studies of educational achievement, some of which have been going on for over 150 years. The current HHS Secretary refuses to believe in the efficacy of vaccines and instead promotes quack cures even as a massive measles outbreak spreads across the country. At the same time, the President proposes higher tariffs on imported drugs. The President is claiming the power to secretly repeal government regulations on a massive scale and the government is simply ceasing to collect critical public safety data. Moreover, huge datasets of public information across a whole range of agencies have been taken offline and are only now available through the generosity of non-profits and universities, if they are available at all. The fear, of course, is that this information will eventually end up being privatized.
This week we learned of the first confirmed security breach caused by DOGE access to secure systems, with 10 gigabytes of personal data stolen. Interestingly enough, it occurred at the NLRB, long a thorn in Musk’s side. The DOGE boys also rather guiltily tried to hide their tracks after the breach, threatening the whistleblower who reported it. We also know that much of the early access to government systems was in violation of existing security standards and privacy law and that DOGE was offloading data onto private servers. The lack of transparency about DOGE’s access, their efforts to hide their responsibility for the NLRB breach, and even the illegal use of Signal relating to the Houthi attack are yet more examples of the administration attempting to erase what should be public knowledge.
While the administration hides its own activities, it appears to quickly be building a massive surveillance state that will ensure it knows ours. The IRS has now begun sharing data with immigration authorities. In addition, we know DOGE is also using Social Security data to target immigrants. DOGE has also received access to US Treasury data. Normally, sharing this personal data across agencies is highly restricted by the Privacy Act, requiring a highly specific purpose for its use and detailed record-keeping of the personal data shared. It is doubtful the DOGE is complying with either. Even more concerning is the fact that DOGE is partnering with Palentir, a noted purveyor of high-tech surveillance technology, to build a “mega-API” into the IRS data. It is not that hard to understand that being able to combine IRS, Social Security, Treasury, and social media data could provide a pretty comprehensive view of the activities of every American.
That surveillance state will only augment the authoritarian tendencies of this administration. It has abrogated Congress’ power of the purse, either through illegal impoundments or the metaphorical equivalent of a neutron bomb, eliminating the people but leaving the agency standing. As of this moment, the administration is in open defiance of at least three court orders – on returning Kilmar Garcia from El Salvador, on lifting the ban on the AP, and on restoring FEMA funding. In fact, the administration made a twofer, signaling its intent to do nothing to return Garcia at an event where the AP was denied access. The administration claims it has the power to kidnap anyone, citizens included, and send them off to a foreign gulag where their constitutional rights will be inaccessible. The administration is essentially trying render people nonexistent and destroy them financially by moving them to Social Security’s death master file. They are toying with the courts, sending lawyers who claim not to know anything when they are not openly lying to the judge or obliquely directing judicial orders to be ignored and firing those attorneys that dare speak the truth. It is revoking visas for the mere exercise of legitimate freedom of expression and targeting law firms that would dare to represent the administration’s opponents. In addition, the administration is continually setting up systems to facilitate a “snitch state”, setting up lines to report illegal immigrants, supporters of DEIA, and even “anti-Christian” bias which is both indicative of a budding theocracy and a code for anti-white. Educational institutions are capitulating, helping to snitch to ICE on their own students. Lastly, they are preparing to fund a massive police state, allocating more money for it than the entire budget of every American state and local police force combined.
Trump is using the fraudulent invocation of “emergencies” to seize even more power, having called nine national emergencies since he took office. He has used one of those “emergencies” to raise tariffs to even higher levels than the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the 1930s that supercharged the Great Depression. Worse, Trump’s almost daily flip-flopping on the size, scope, and length of these tariffs have tanked the stock market, raised interest rates, weakened the dollar, and will probably create stagflation, chronic shortages of certain products, and induce a recession. It is probably only a matter of time before the administration challenges the independence of the Federal Reserve, destroying faith in the US economy as a whole and the dollar in particular. It is impossible to figure out what the administration’s economic intentions are, simply because Trump is demented and erratic and there are differing factions in his administration pushing their own agendas. For Trump, the fantasy is that income from tariffs will replace the income tax. Others think that across-the-board tariffs and restrictive immigration policies will revive their vision of America’s golden age of manufacturing. Others are interested in diminishing the dollar’s position as the global reserve currency because they believe it hurts America’s manufacturing and exports. Lastly, there are the tech bros who want deregulation, private control of government data, and to remake government and society led by a technocratic elite.
As the administration’s economic policies will isolate us economically, our abandonment of our allies and harassment of foreigners will isolate us politically. The destruction of USAID and the new tariffs have already critically wounded America’s soft power. The threats against NATO, Greenland, Canada, and Mexico actually galvanize the rest of the world against us. Immigration policies that throw legal foreign visitors out of the country and harass foreigners travelling into the country will isolate us physically. Already over a dozen countries now have advisories against travelling to the US. Once again, the administration’s policies will result in a diminution of knowledge as foreign experts refuse to come to conferences in the US and the administration blocks American experts from attending conferences overseas.
Very few Americans currently understand how bad it can and will become going forward, nor how quickly it will happen. It’s not about “waste, fraud, and abuse”; it’s about all the federal protections that we take for granted – food safety, disease tracking, weather reporting, product safety, consumer protections, etc., etc. – becoming unreliable or nonexistent. It won’t just be a recession; it will be a total reordering of our economic life. It’s not about DEI; it is about eliminating women and minorities from history and civic society. It’s not about deregulation; it’s about replacing our existing governance structures with a technocratic, theocratic autocracy. It’s not about “cancel culture”; it’s the elimination of free speech and the imposition of government imposed forced speech. It’s not about antisemitism; it’s about attacking sources of knowledge. It’s not about “open borders”; it’s about sending opponents, whether citizens or not, to the gulag; It’s not about “terrorism”; it’s about an excuse to implement fascism. It’s more than simply protectionism; it is isolationism, a complete withdrawal from the world. It is not just attacking elites; it is fervently anti-intellectual, interested in destroying real knowledge and replacing it with governmental diktats. It is more than authoritarian; it is intent on destroying the current American society and rebuilding it with its own warped visions. It is not just Trump; it is a group of apocalypticists and eugenicists surrounded by a plethora of fascistic sycophants and pathetic cowards.
The future may be darker than we can imagine. If we are very lucky, the sheer incompetence of Trump and his acolytes, along with federalism and the power of the individual states, may save us from the worst. If we are lucky, we may only face an autocratic takeover and the establishment of a technocratic oligarchy that would somewhat resemble what happened to post-Soviet Russia. We are just as likely face something like Mao’s Cultural Revolution where intellectuals and knowledge were suppressed in order to strengthen state power and the leader’s personality cult. At absolute worst, may end up with a more mollified version of Pol Pot’s Year Zero, a retreat from the world accompanied by a forced “cleansing” of society, the dismantling of the existing social compact and the erasure of prior knowledge, in order to build a new utopia. Pol Pot ended up killing millions. Certainly, thousands of Americans will die from the administration’s destruction of public health and public knowledge, but the destruction of USAID and other foreign assistance will kill millions of others around the world. The new dark age will not just be America’s; it will also extend into the wider world.