The platform that needs to be constructed for democracies isn't some faint ideal that we ought to do. It's increasingly clear to me that the lack of this organ comprises a national security crisis. The absence of the ability to make sober determinations about how democracies are being manipulated is creating an escape velocity for those manipulations, because it's disrupting the function of democracy faster than democracy can manage that dysfunction. This is a cat-and-mouse game, so what's needed is a civic network to be instantiated rapidly.
This is not needed as an idea that has to happen at some point because it would be nice. It was needed years ago. This function was needed years ago, and the goal is to step into the hardest conversations. Now, the thing about very hard conversations is that we're so concerned about them, yet the conflict is all people tend to look at. The conflict, when it's had honestly, is the solution to the problem. The conflict is the solution.
When you've structured an investigative capacity that's manned by people who are credible as good-faith actors for trying to create the most honest representation of the conflict they can create, and they're feeding that forward so we can distinguish between what's noise and what's signal here, how bad is this? Let's talk to the people who are on the other side. Let's understand what they really think about this. That's going to be an urgent thing for law enforcement to know. It's going to be an urgent thing for understanding who is really in support of our constitutions, who's really in support of the threads and the fibres that hold together our civic bonds of trust, and who are people who are seeking to deliberately undermine them.
Understanding the difference between those kinds of narratives is absolutely crucial for the functioning of democracy, so I think having a capacity to resolve the threats that bad actors, those that are hostile to democracy, are enjoying, and being able to spotlight them, we can say—