The youth of today live in the Nixon Whitehouse

The surveillance apparatus Nixon constructed is now universal, omnipotent, and unavoidable.

Claiming executive privilege, then U.S. President Richard Nixon, staring at the end of his political career and potentially a post-presidential life blanketed with criminal records, refused to hand over the unedited copies of conversations which were recorded in the White House. In the Spring of 1974, the Watergate scandal quickly became a political hurricane that tore the Nixon establishment from its very foundations, yet part of the President’s downfall was sown retroactively through his recording of countless conversations.

The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed these tapes, however Nixon only handed them over following a thorough edit of over 1,000 transcripts. When the unabridged versions were made public, this information was incredibly damaging, revealing his role in the Watergate hotel break-in and attempted coverup. Nixon leapt before he was pushed and resigned, to be replaced by his Vice President Gerald Ford, who pardoned him.

The surveillance apparatus Nixon constructed is now universal, omnipotent, and unavoidable. As technological devices simultaneously became smaller and more powerful, with society increasingly hypnotised by internet fame and ‘living online’, the population at large decided to document every aspect of their lives on social media. Some have decided that every single activity is to be put on display as if they are docile animals at the zoo to be gazed at for amusement.

The generation born in the twenty-first century knows nothing different to the world of mass self-surveillance, and they serve as the guinea pig generation. They regularly thrown into the colosseum to figure out what any unintended consequences could be. Given that teenagers on social media are not a representation of the calm, sensible and rational adults they will turn into, many have been fed to the lions.

Teenagers are, by their very nature, boisterous, rebellious, short-tempered creatures. The hormonal changes in the body mean that they struggle to control their emotions, while the undeveloped state of their prefrontal lobe (which does not fully mature until about the age of twenty-five) ensures that they are unable to process the long-term implications of their often unpredictable and destructive behaviour. This is why all the warnings from school that ‘what you post online will remain forever’ falls on deaf ears.

Humanity has always known the nature of teenagers, but never has a generation been so wedged under the microscope- teenagers have always done embarrassing, stupid, and edgy things, but the entire world could not see what was happening. Now they can.

This is coupled with a morally bankrupt civilisation that is hellbent on character destruction to satiate an addiction, utilising any person’s flaws as a weapon against them, which often involve digging into the past to unearth unruly behaviour. Therefore, many young people who were once documented offending the sensibilities of this new age dogma are caught out. The trigger-happy nature of an outrage mob means that context is entirely removed, the accused is held to the same standards as an adult, there is no statute of limitations, and the concept of ‘guilty mind’ (mens rea) reverts to either strict liability or gaslighting.

I will leave with one example. Sixteen-year-old Caleb Kennedy, born in 2004 (three years after the Twin Towers fell and the same year Facebook was invented) was a contestant on the U.S. TV show American Idol before an old video came to light, after which Kennedy was subsequently booted off the show.

The under ten second video shows one of Kennedy’s friends wearing what, at first glance, appears to be a Ku Klux Klan hood, although the family claims it was actually from a horror film; regardless, they wanted to play dress up as children normally do- but this part of the context does not really matter.

What does matter is that the video was recorded when he was twelve. Twelve! From that age (as stated before) it will take another twelve years plus extra time for the brain to fully develop. At that time in a young boy’s life, puberty is at the front door and testosterone begins to creep inside the male anatomy, meaning that they begin to push boundaries and ‘be edgy’- whether that involves satirising the Ku Klux Klan or dressing up as a character from a film that they are too young to watch.

Could Kennedy expect to know the consequences of what is clearly a few seconds of harmless fun? Unlike Nixon, it is not as if he’s committed any crime.