The Biden debacle is just the most recent example of what I’ve come to think of as “the gap.” By this I mean the growing gap between what many of us believe to be true, because we’ve seen it with our own eyes, and what the “arbiters” of truth allow us to say. On X, Antonio García Martínez, the former Facebook executive and author of Chaos Monkeys, put it this way: “For the past ten years, American life for the relatively astute and online has been a dance between the Things You Know Are True and when the mainstream factories of consensus opinion. . . acknowledge something as true, making it a sayable truth.”

On Covid, on Black Lives Matter, on Russiagate, on Hunter Biden’s laptop, the elites told us there was one correct viewpoint only until finally, years later, they acknowledged that our eyes hadn’t misled us. The elites had. Their view was the only “correct” one, and all right-thinking people couldn’t disagree. Only when the elites had a belated change of heart could the unsayable finally be said. Until then, we had to, well, mind the gap.