Politics & Power Quote by Peter King

Urgency is doing most of the work here. Peter King’s halting cadence - “in this - in this world - in this technological world” - performs anxiety in real time, as if language itself is struggling to keep pace with the threat he’s sketching. That stumble isn’t a weakness; it’s a rhetorical cue. He’s inviting the listener to feel that the terrain has shifted, that ordinary rules and civil-liberty reflexes are quaint in an era when information travels at the speed of a click.

The intent is straightforward: justify “firm, strong action” against some category of speakers, leakers, or disseminators by framing them not as dissenters but as endangerers. The subtext is more strategic: once you define a speech act as a lethal act, punishment stops looking like censorship and starts reading as public safety. “Serious” becomes a morality test, not a policy stance. If you hesitate, you’re not cautious; you’re complicit.

King’s language is also tellingly vague. “Those who are putting American lives at risk” is a flexible container: it can hold terrorists, whistleblowers, journalists, hackers, even platforms. The repetition - “this will put people’s lives at risk” - is less argument than incantation, a way to bypass messy questions (Who decides? What counts as risk? What safeguards?) and land on a conclusion that sounds like common sense.

Context matters: this is the post-9/11 national-security grammar that treats information as weaponry and speed as its accelerant. King isn’t merely responding to technology; he’s using technology as the alibi for expanding state power.