'Our Society is Run by Insane People' by Steve

John Leake's Substack essay "Our Society is Run by Insane People" revives a 1968 John Lennon quote to argue that modern Western governance is defined by irrational, self-destructive decision-making. Leake compiles real archival news footage to demonstrate what he calls "chaotic insanity" in contemporary policy and culture, suggesting that the individuals steering society are pursuing objectives that look increasingly detached from observable reality. A central theme of his work is that this irrationality does not merely produce bad policy; it actively suppresses attempts to correct course, particularly through the censorship of dissenting voices by major technology platforms.

High-profile censorship at then Twitter (now X) and then Facebook (now Meta) provides concrete examples of this dynamic. The most widely documented cases are the suppression of the New York Post's October 2020 reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop and first daughter Ashley’s diary. In the weeks preceding the presidential election, Twitter blocked users from sharing links to the stories and locked the Post's account for weeks, citing a "hacked materials" policy. Facebook simultaneously "deamplified" the story, algorithmically reducing its reach. Subsequent reporting and government testimony confirmed that the laptop contents were authentic and not Russian disinformation, meaning the platforms had suppressed a legitimate news story based on false premises.
  The COVID-19 pandemic produced a wave of similar interventions. Twitter placed Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya—co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued against school closures and for focused protection of the vulnerable—on an internal blacklist that suppressed his visibility. Facebook removed pages and posts questioning lockdown efficacy or discussing the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis, only to reverse course months later when the lab-leak theory gained mainstream credibility. These were not isolated content-moderation judgments; as revealed in the "Twitter Files" and subsequent litigation, they often occurred in coordination with government agencies that flagged speech for platform suppression.  According to former Twitter executive Yoel Roth, the company did employ a number of former FBI agents in roles related to trust, safety, and security.

Leake's thesis is that such censorship reflects the same irrationality he critiques in governance more broadly. Rather than engage with inconvenient evidence—whether about a laptop and dairy, a pandemic policy, or vaccine safety—institutional power chooses to make the evidence disappear. The result, he argues, is not a healthier public discourse but an ideologically captured one, where officially sanctioned narratives override empirical reality. In this framework, the coordinated suppression at YouTube, Twitter and Facebook is not a side issue but a defining feature of how an "insane" system maintains control: by pathologizing dissent and silencing those who question its coherence.

My book Songs about the Heartland is dedicated to survivors of cancel culture.

Editorial comments expressed in this column are the sole opinion of the writer