The point being that, to a great degree, Americans were under the thumb of the mainstream media – the gatekeeper of information that shielded us from much of the mendacity and corruption that were probably as plentiful then as now. Our trust in major institutions was strong because we knew little about what they were doing behind the veil of reported news.

Today we know much more, mostly because of the Internet and social media. News institutions no longer play the gatekeeper role to anything like the extent they used to. As the legacy media become less trustworthy and more nakedly partisan, other sources of information have not only stepped up, but have done so free of the restrictions that news placed on itself in the past. If you want to know the truth, Joe Rogan, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Mark Shellenberger, Bari Weiss and many others are likely more reliable than the Times or the Post. There seems to be an inverse relationship between the quantum of our knowledge about those institutions and our trust in them.

That goes a long way toward explaining the Biden Administration’s powerful embrace of censorship. It desperately wants to play the role of information gatekeeper that editorial boards used to. It wants to have the final say on what Americans can and can’t know. But much information has escaped the corral and theirs is a desperate effort to round it back up.

They’re doomed to fail.

[But not without a fight. I’m often reminded of the line from the end of “Serenity,” where The Operative warns Mal that the fight isn’t over. “Your broadwave about Miranda was weakened the regime,” he says, “but they are not gone — and they are not forgiving.” — Ed]