“Governance on every level has reached a gruesome nadir. Western elites entrenched in both international and national bureaucracies have been accorded the power to abuse any kind of health scare to deprive populations of their liberty and impose massive financial costs on them to boot. These ‘deep state’ bureaucracies have intertwined themselves simultaneously with each other and with big business, producing a complicated, organic patchwork of links seemingly impossible to untangle, akin to the storied Gordian Knot. A radically different model is one in which part of the social contract involves citizens both producing and vetting news, underpinned by the recognition that media is such a vital public good that it is reasonable to press the public itself into its direct production and quality control.”