Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City

Journal. Joining me on today's show is

Martin Gurry. Martin's a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center and is the author of a terrific

book called The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.

He spent much of his career as a CIA analyst researching foreign media, and today he applies that skill set to examining the relationship between politics and information in the contemporary U.S.

He writes for a city journal regularly, and he maintains an excellent blog also called The Fifth Wave.

So, Martin, thanks very much for coming on.

Hey, happy to be here. So let's start with your article from our summer issue,

which is called the Elite Panic of 2022. It's gotten a lot of attention. You identify in the essay

several big disruptions to what had been, you know, steadily prevailing progressive authorities.

So from, you know, you describe a U.S. district judge's nullification of the federal mask mandate in travel to Elon Musk's bid to buy Twitter, to the Supreme Court's overturning of

Roe v. Wade. Each of these developments, you observe, seemed to force media and bureaucratic elites

and progressives generally to confront the possibility that their grip on power was loosening.

So what did the response to these incidents indicate to you about the elite conception

of the relationship between power and information?

Right. Now, the first thing I would say is that except for the last incident you mentioned, obviously the Dobbs ruling, these were not earth-shaking developments. These were pretty much pseudo events, I would call them, in which things did not go in the way that the elites wanted them to. The judge, Catherine Maisal, basically allowed masks to be taken off in mass transit and airports and airplanes.

Barack Obama gave a speech about disinformation.

And Elon Musk made what seems to have been a thwarted.

It's kind of unclear with all that stance, but an attempt to buy Twitter.

Not one of those three things is a major development.

What was remarkable was the just the existential screams from the elite class that each one of those events evoked.

And what I became clear as you look at what was being lost, they felt, is that this class is absolutely bent on control.

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