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Khanna Becomes First in Congress to Sign 'Peace Pledge' Promising to Reject AIPAC Funds
The co-founder of AIPAC Tracker said the pledge is meant to give lawmakers who once backed Israel "a bridge to get on the right side of history."
Jun 17, 2026
Rep. Ro Khanna has become the first member of the US Congress to sign a "peace pledge" promising to swear off funds from the Israel lobby and block US support for countries that violate human rights.
The pledge was created by the political action committee Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption, which runs the widely shared "AIPAC Tracker" social media campaign that names and shames politicians who receive support from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other pro-Israel groups that have spent tens of millions in recent election cycles to influence members of Congress.
Lawmakers who sign the pledge agree not to take money from AIPAC or pro-Israel lobbying groups and promise to make campaign finance reform a key priority.
Acknowledging the consensus among human rights organizations that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, signatories also commit to taking actions in Congress to oppose US military and diplomatic support for Israel or any other nation whose military commits gross human rights violations.
They also agree to oppose efforts by the US government to sanction members of the International Criminal Court who seek the arrest of accused war criminals, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Signatories also agree to support First Amendment protections for speech critical of Israel as well as efforts to use financial pressure against the country, like the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which members of Congress have sought to criminalize.
In a video in which he signed the pledge on Wednesday, Khanna (D-Calif.) described its commitments as "pretty common sense."
"It means that we shouldn't be sending our tax [money] for foreign wars overseas, we should be spending it here at home," he said. "And it says we shouldn't be taking money from AIPAC or all of its affiliate PACs or bundled money from those organizations, and that we have to recognize the genocide that took place in Gaza."
He said, "I'm going to be signing this pledge, and I hope others will follow."
The push for lawmakers to sign the pledge comes as support for Israel has plummeted to historic lows, especially among Democratic voters in the wake of the Gaza genocide, its accelerating ethnic cleansing campaigns in the illegally occupied West Bank and southern Lebanon, and its role in pressuring the Trump administration to launch and continue a devastating war against Iran.
Voters increasingly view AIPAC as having undue influence over American lawmakers, and many Democrats—including longtime supporters of Israel—have seen the writing on the wall and become vocal critics of the lobby.
Khanna is one of them, having previously accepted money from the liberal Zionist group J Street and voted to fund Israel's Iron Dome in 2021 and in favor of a resolution conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism in the wake of October 7, 2023.
Cory Archibald, the co-founder of Track AIPAC, said the goal of the pledge is to give these politicians an opportunity to transform themselves on the issue while also forcing them to put their votes where their mouths are.
"While we have created a very successful pressure campaign to highlight and expose the extent of the influence of AIPAC and their allies on our lawmakers," she said Wednesday on the Breaking Points podcast, "we also have a responsibility as an organization to give people a bridge to get on the right side of history and to reflect that their policy positions have changed and to chart a new course."
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'They Get Rich. Maine Pays the Price': Platner Campaign Takes Swing at Collins and Corporate Lobbyist Husband
The campaign highlighted findings that the lobbying firm run by Collins’ husband brought in $76 million in federal contracts while she pushed K Street-friendly legislation in the Senate.
Jun 17, 2026
Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner's campaign is taking aim at Sen. Susan Collins and her lobbyist husband, calling her long history of supporting policies that helped his firm "the biggest political scandal in Maine" in an ad released Wednesday.
It follows a report out the previous day from Zeteo revealing that Collins' husband, Tom Daffron, worked as recently as last year for a firm owned by Scott Reed, the lobbyist who leads Pine Tree Results, a billionaire-funded super political action committee (PAC) that is spending millions to support Collins' (R-Maine) campaign for reelection.
While not necessarily a violation of the law, which prohibits super PACs from coordinating with the campaigns they support, the Platner campaign described Daffron's lobbying work as “only the latest example of the blurred lines between Collins, her husband, and the Washington insider network that has surrounded her political career for decades.”
Daffron’s activity as a Washington lobbyist stretches back more than two decades, before his marriage to Collins in 2012. In 2006, Daffron became the chief operating officer of the lobbying and consulting firm Jefferson Consulting Group.
A veteran of national Republican campaigns, he also served as a consultant on Collins’ 1996, 2002, and 2008 Senate bids, and ran her leadership PAC from 2003 until 2012. As far back as 2001, the Portland Press Herald described Daffron as "a close friend [of Collins] and one of the top advisers in her ‘kitchen cabinet.'"
Platner’s ad accuses Collins of having overseen "over $76 million in taxpayer dollars to his company,” which the campaign has argued was due in part to contracting reform legislation she wrote, and which passed in 2008. That law was said to “improve the federal acquisition workforce,” an area in which Jefferson Consulting specialized.
The Platner campaign cited a 2020 article by Salon, which found that:
Between 2006 and 2016, Daffron’s firm landed more than $76 million spread across dozens of federal contracts related to acquisition and procurement, according to searches on USAspending.gov.
In 2010, Jefferson Consulting reported providing acquisitions services and support to nearly two dozen federal agencies. Certain specific provisions included with Collins’ 2007 contract reforms appear to have benefited Daffron’s firm directly, by adding new requirements for acquisition services that Jefferson specialized in.
The ad also highlights Collins' role in voting against several ethics and transparency efforts that could have impacted firms like the one run by Daffron.
One amendment she voted against in 2006 would have required members of Congress to disclose when they or their staff were discussing a possible future private-sector role while serving in government. It would also have restricted lobbyists from giving gifts to lawmakers, such as free lunch or paying for travel or tickets to events.
In 2012, Collins helped to defeat another amendment that would have targeted the so-called “political intelligence” industry that profits from acquiring insider information and passing it on to investors, corporations, and other clients.
Platner: Susan Collins has gotten 21 times wealthier just in the last 15 years. Has anybody else gotten 21 times wealthier since Susan Collins was elected to office? Does Maine have 21 times the schools and hospitals? No, we have less. Susan Collins is getting rich while we're… pic.twitter.com/ZsB2v9JyVu
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 10, 2026
Platner has attacked Collins over her husband's work in recent days, thundering before a crowd on the night of his primary victory last week that “Susan Collins has used her privilege to funnel... federal contracts to her lobbyist husband. If that’s not corruption, I don’t know what is.”
Collins has denied the accusation, saying "It’s just not true, and it’s obvious that Mr. Platner has a problem with the truth.”
Platner has also highlighted Collins' own personal net worth, which had grown from just over $205,000 in 2011 to at least $4.3 million today, when including the estimated value of her stock holdings.
"Has anybody else gotten 21 times wealthier since Susan Collins was elected to office?" Platner asked last week. "Does Maine have 21 times the schools and hospitals? No, we have less."
The ad continues to hammer on this theme of self-dealing, calling out that "Collins voted for new forever wars that gave billions to companies they invested in."
"They made millions," the ad states. "They get rich. Maine pays the price."
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88 Corporations That Paid No US Federal Income Tax in 2025 Spent $852 Million on Recent Lobbying, Elections
"The result," said the author of a new Public Citizen analysis, "is a self-reinforcing loop where corporate cash buys policy, and policy pays cash back."
Jun 11, 2026
Eighty-eight corporations that paid no federal income tax last year spent roughly $852 million on US campaign contributions and lobbying during recent election cycles, a report published Thursday revealed.
The report, "The Current Price of Zero," was authored by Eileen O'Grady, a researcher at Public Citizen's Congress Watch division. The publication draws upon an analysis published in April by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) showing that at least 88 of the nation’s largest companies paid no federal corporate income tax in fiscal year 2025, despite reporting combined US pretax income of around $105 billion.
"Using data from OpenSecrets, which compiles and publishes campaign finance and lobbying data, we found that from the 2020 election cycle through the 2024 cycle, these 88 companies have spent nearly $852 million on lobbying and campaign contributions," O'Grady wrote. "We highlight the companies that spent the most money on lobbying, hired the most lobbyists, lobbied specifically on tax issues, and contributed the most cash to political campaigns."
The federal corporate income tax rate is 21%, indicating that the 88 companies in the report dodged a combined $22.1 billion in taxes last year. Additionally, they received $4.7 billion in tax rebates, bringing their total tax breaks to approximately $26.7 billion.
“The largest and richest corporations in the country are paying zero in federal income tax, and that is a slap in the face to the American taxpayers who are struggling to afford necessities like groceries and healthcare,” O’Grady said in a statement.
"Meanwhile, these companies are spending money that could have gone to the public good on lobbying for even more special advantages and tax breaks," she added. "In this backwards, cash-fueled system, the deck is being stacked ever higher in favor of corporations, and against working people.”
The report's key findings include:
- The 88 corporations that paid no federal corporate income tax in 2025 spent $712 million on lobbying and $140 million on campaign contributions over the last three election cycles;
- Comparing the taxes the corporations saved against the cost of their political spending, they collectively made a 3,000% return on investment;
- Coinbase Global spent the most of any company—$89 million—followed by CVS Health ($66 million), Honeywell International ($56 million), American Electric Power ($47 million), and Duke Energy ($35 million);
- On average each year, these companies together have sent 1,119 lobbyists to influence the federal government, including on tax issues and legislation that changed the tax code in favor of corporate giveaways; and
- Since the beginning of 2025, these companies have collectively laid off at least 21,200 workers and announced plans to lay off thousands more.
"Our findings suggest that while Republicans lawmakers rewrote the tax code to enshrine massive giveaways to wealthy corporations, those same corporate tax dodgers poured millions into lobbying and political campaigns that yielded further tax breaks, which in turn has bankrolled even more political influence," O'Grady wrote. "The result is a self-reinforcing loop where corporate cash buys policy, and policy pays cash back."
The report singles out two related pieces of legislation—President Donald Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed into law by Trump last July 4—which enabled "several common strategies the companies used to get tax breaks and rebates."
"The most commonly used corporate tax giveaway, accelerated depreciation, enabled more than half of the companies to collectively avoid $11.4 billion in taxes by allowing them to write off capital investments immediately," O'Grady noted.
"In addition, a tax break supercharged under the Big Ugly Law allowed more than 30 companies to immediately write off research and development expenses, which alone netted them at least $4.4 billion in savings," she added, using a common liberal epithet for the OBBBA.
Since the US Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling—which affirmed that political spending by corporations, nonprofit organizations, labor unions, and other groups is a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment—nearly $20 billion has been spent on US presidential elections and more than $53 billion on congressional races, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets. Spending on 2024 congressional races was double 2010 levels, while presidential campaign contributions were more than 50% higher in 2024 than in 2008, the last election before Citizens United.
Ultrawealthy and corporate megadonors played a critical role in Trump’s 2024 victory. Fossil fuel interests spent more than $445 million during the 2024 election cycle on campaign donations, lobbying, and other efforts to elect Trump and his Republican allies, plus pass policies that benefit their climate-wrecking businesses. Artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency are fast emerging as some of the most prolific lobbyists. Trump and Republicans in Congress have promoted policies and legislation boosting these sectors and shielding them from government regulation.
Elon Musk—the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and majority owner of X who could soon become the world's first trillionaire—is the most prominent of the numerous Trump donors who have been rewarded with Cabinet nominations and other key appointments in “an administration dominated by billionaires and corporate interests,” as Americans for Tax Fairness executive director David Kass described it.
O'Grady wrote that "corporate tax dodgers spend lavishly on lobbying and campaign contributions that feed into more tax breaks, which in turn fund even more political spending on policies that serve to pad corporate profits—and the cycle continues."
To remedy this, the report asserts: "It is imperative that Congress undo the Republican tax giveaways to corporations like bonus depreciation and research and development write-offs. In addition, the corporate rate must be increased to at least the 35% rate that stood before the 2017 law."
"Corporations should not be able to deduct multimillion-dollar bonuses. And Congress must prevent multinational corporations from avoiding taxes by booking profits in offshore subsidiaries by equalizing the domestic and international tax rates," the publication concludes. "With these and other reforms to our tax code, our nation could have more than enough revenue to breinvest in American communities and make life more affordable for everyone. It’s time to finally put people over corporate profits."
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As AIPAC Spends Millions to Oust Him, Massie Unveils Bill Requiring Pro-Israel Lobby to Register as Foreign Agent
“The lobbying that happens on Capitol Hill should be reported if it’s a foreign country, whether it’s Great Britain, Australia, Turkey, Qatar, or Israel,” said the Kentucky Republican.
May 15, 2026
As the Israel lobby attempts to end his political career, the Republican Rep. Thomas Massie has introduced a bill that would require lobbyists working for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, commonly known as AIPAC, to register as foreign agents.
The bill, known as the Americans Insist on Political Agent Clarity (AIPAC) Act, would amend the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA), which requires those working to influence government policy on behalf of a foreign power to register with the US Department of Justice (DOJ).
Most lobbyists and donors for AIPAC are American, leading the DOJ to classify it as a domestic, rather than foreign, lobbying group. But critics have argued that it engages in extensive coordination with the Israeli government and that groups lobbying for the interests of other countries are treated with stricter scrutiny.
“Today, I introduced a bill called the AIPAC Act… which would make AIPAC subject to the Foreign Agents Registration Act," Massie (R-Ky.) announced on Redacted News Thursday. "For some reason, they’re immune right now, and I think not just the money that’s spent in politics, but the lobbying that happens on Capitol Hill should be reported if it’s a foreign country. Whether it's Great Britain, Australia, Turkey, Qatar, or Israel, it needs to be reported."
Massie has established himself as the leading Republican critic of President Donald Trump in Congress, agitating for transparency from the DOJ on the Jeffrey Epstein files and stridently opposing increased military spending and the president's aggressive overseas wars, including in Iran.
He has also distinguished himself as one of the few Republicans willing to publicly criticize Israel and call for the US to "immediately terminate" military aid in response to its killing of tens of thousands of women and children in Gaza.
His debut of the AIPAC Act comes as he's in the fight of his political life in Kentucky, where pro-Israel lobbying groups have unleashed a flood of money to unseat him in next week's Republican primary.
The United Democracy Project, an AIPAC-affiliated super PAC, has spent about $2.6 million, according to Axios, while the Republican Jewish Coalition has dropped $4 million to support Massie’s opponent, retired Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein. The Christian Zionist group Christians United For Israel has dropped six figures on a campaign to blanket “every available billboard," it said, in Kentucky’s 4th congressional district with anti-Massie messaging.
Trump has also thrown his support behind Gallrein, and two of his senior political advisers, Chris LaCivita and Tony Fabrizio, have raised more than $2 million for their MAGA KY PAC from a trio of top pro-Israel billionaires—hedge fund manager Paul Singer, investor John Paulson, and a group linked to casino mogul Miriam Adelson, according to Axios.
In all, the GOP primary in KY-04 has become the most expensive House primary on record in US history, with more than $25 million spent on advertising in total, surpassing the 2024 Democratic primary in New York's 16th district, where AIPAC and its allies unleashed another torrent of cash and successfully felled the progressive Rep. Jamal Bowman (D).
"[The money] didn't come from regular people. It's come from billionaires, and 95% of it... has come from the Israeli lobby," Massie said of the funds spent to oust him during an appearance on Tucker Carlson's podcast last week. "Their position is more war, it's more strife, it's more bombs, it's more foreign aid, and those are the things that I've been voting against."
Right now, the ad blitz—which has portrayed Massie as disloyal to MAGA—has put the incumbent in a position to lose his race. A Quantus Insights poll earlier this week showed him trailing with 43% of likely voters to Gallrein's 48%.
Massie said: "The real reason that this race is a serious race, and I may lose, is because a foreign lobby has fully funded to the extent that they've never done in any Republican race ever before."
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Warren, Scott Propose Lifetime Lobbying Ban for Ex-Lawmakers
“It’s simple: Members of Congress should spend their time in Washington serving the American people, not preparing to cash in big time with a cushy lobbying career after they leave office,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
May 14, 2026
US Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Rick Scott introduced a bipartisan bill on Thursday to permanently ban members of Congress from becoming lobbyists after leaving office.
Right now, ex-lawmakers are given just a brief "cooling-off" period before they are allowed to return and lobby their former colleagues—one year in the House of Representatives and two years in the Senate.
According to OpenSecrets, about 41% of former members of the 117th Congress have gone on to work for a lobbying firm or client, which Warren (D-Mass.) said raises the prospect that they're "thinking about how they can make money in their next gig while in office."
The bill she co-introduced with Scott (R-Fla.), known as the Banning Lobbying And Safeguarding Trust (BLAST) Act, would replace the cooling-off periods with a permanent ban, forbidding former lawmakers from registering as lobbyists or engaging in the activities that would require them to do so.
It also bans ex-congresspeople from making lobbying contracts, which are often used as loopholes to avoid formal registration.
Those who violate the act could face up to five years in prison for knowing and willful violations.
“It’s simple: Members of Congress should spend their time in Washington serving the American people, not preparing to cash in big time with a cushy lobbying career after they leave office,” Warren said. “It’s long past time to close the revolving door that’s corrupted our government and destroyed public trust in elected officials. This bipartisan bill is an important push to get that done.”
While Warren has a long record of seeking to limit the influence of money in politics, Scott's presence as a cosponsor was a head-scratcher for many observers.
A former healthcare CEO whose company was hit with the largest healthcare‑fraud settlement in US history, he has always been a reliable partner to corporate interests and has been cited as one of the top Republican recipients of fossil fuel and defense industry money.
Nevertheless, Scott described the "revolving door between Capitol Hill and K Street" as a major reason trust in institutions is at an all-time low among Americans.
Regardless of his own intentions, Scott is seizing on a sense of distrust among the American public that is both very real and very bipartisan.
With this coming midterm election cycle expected to be the most expensive in history, 72% of Americans said in a Politico poll released last week that there is "too much money from special interest groups in American elections," while just 5% disagreed. This belief was virtually equal between Republicans and Democrats.
And while more Democrats (76%) felt it necessary to curb billionaire control of politics, over half of Republican voters (54%) also agreed that billionaires had "too much influence" over elections.
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Bernie Sanders Leads Senators in Demand to End Super PACs in Democratic Primaries
“We cannot allow unlimited outside spending to distort our elections or drown out the voices of working people."
Apr 27, 2026
Sen. Bernie Sanders is leading a coalition of Democratic senators pushing for the party's leaders to require candidates to swear off billionaire- and corporate-backed super PACs, or political action committees, in this year's primary elections.
Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) joined the independent senator from Vermont to send a letter to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair Ken Martin on Sunday.
Five of the senators are members of a group of Senate Democrats known as the "Fight Club" that has formed to oppose Schumer's preferred candidates in contested Democratic primaries, many of whom are closely aligned with the party's traditional corporate backers.
While the senators applauded the DNC's resolution last month broadly condemning the influence of dark money in party elections, calling it an "important first step," they said Democratic leaders needed to take more "concrete steps to curb the influence of dark money," particularly the artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency industries and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
"Corporate-funded super PACs are shaping the 2026 elections as we speak, and the scale of their resources is unprecedented," the senators said. "Crypto-aligned groups are preparing to spend $200 million, and AIPAC-affiliated groups already control more than $90 million. The AI industry has already spent over $185 million this year alone. These sums are being deployed to influence Democratic primaries and overwhelm candidates who rely on grassroots support."
April's broad anti-dark money resolution was passed by the DNC in lieu of one that directly singled out “the growing influence” of AIPAC, specifically over its more than $100 million spending blitz in 2024 to oust progressive candidates. Despite a dramatic shift toward opposition to Israel among Democratic voters over the past three years, that resolution was voted down by a DNC panel.
AIPAC continues to dump massive amounts of money behind its preferred candidates. The senators' letter notes that "in Illinois alone, outside groups spent over $50 million in recent Democratic primaries." Nearly half of that money was spent by AIPAC, which secretly funneled money to support its candidates using shell groups that appeared to be unaffiliated.
The group has used similar tactics in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Ala Stanford, a candidate for Pennsylvania's 3rd District in Philadelphia, was recently revealed to have received $500,000 worth of backing from AIPAC through a super PAC despite claiming to have received no support from the Israel lobby.
Meanwhile, in Maine, a clique of Republican billionaires who back Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine)—including Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman and Palantir CEO Alex Karp—also recently dropped $2 million to fund an ad campaign seeking to hamper the chances of the Democratic Senate primary front-runner Graham Platner.
"We cannot allow unlimited outside spending to distort our elections or drown out the voices of working people," the senators said in Sunday's letter.
The senators noted Schumer's past statement that overturning the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which opened the door for the flood of corporate money into elections by allowing individuals to independently spend unlimited amounts in support of candidates, was "probably more important than any other single thing we could do to preserve this great and grand democracy.”
They said that while reversing the ruling remained a "critical long-term goal," the party "has the authority—and the responsibility—to act now with clear, enforceable rules."
"National and state parties should require all Democratic candidates to sign a pledge opposing billionaire- and corporate-backed super PAC spending on their behalf in Democratic primaries," they said. "The DNC, state parties, and committees working to elect Democrats to the House and Senate have many potential tools at their disposal to enforce that pledge, including withholding endorsements for those who make endorsements in the primary, and they should use whatever tools necessary to do so."
Sanders has said that simply requiring candidates to take a pledge is not enough and that party leaders need to be diligent about holding them to it.
“If the Democrats are going to be honest and consistent in terms of their concerns about money and politics, they’ve got to clean up, in my view, their own house immediately,” he said in an interview on Saturday. “That means getting super PACs out of Democratic primaries, congressional as well as presidential.”
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The Military-Industrial Complex 2.0: Big Tech's War of All Against All
Silicon Valley wants us to believe that the only way to “win” a future war is by handing the keys to our political world to a clique of self-defined superior beings.
Mar 10, 2026
“I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us,” said Alex Karp, the CEO of the emerging military tech firm Palantir. Far from an offhand outburst, his statement reflects a broader ethos taking hold in Silicon Valley’s military-tech sector, one that treats coercion as innovation, cruelty as candor, and the unchecked application of technological power as both inevitable and desirable.
Karp loves verbal combat as much as he likes running a firm that makes high-tech weaponry. His company has helped Israel increase the pace at which it has bombed and slaughtered Palestinians in Gaza, and its technology has helped Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) accelerate deportations, while also helping locate and identify demonstrators in Minneapolis. Not only is Karp unapologetic about the damage done by his company’s products, he openly revels in it.
This February, he told a CNBC interviewer that, “if you are critical of ICE, you should be out there protesting for more Palantir. Our product actually, in its core, requires people to conform with Fourth Amendment data protections.” (That amendment being the one that protects citizens from “unreasonable searches and seizures.”) Yet Karp’s speculation hasn’t led him to ask ICE to stop using his software in its war on peaceful dissent, nor has it dissuaded him from accepting an open-ended, $1 billion contract with ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
In keeping with his full-throated support for repression at home and abroad, at the height of the Gaza war, Karp held a Palantir board meeting in Tel Aviv, proclaiming that “our work in the region has never been more vital. And it will continue.”
Peter Thiel and Alex Karp clearly feel that what’s good for Palantir is good for America, but the vision of America they are promoting is both dangerous and dehumanizing.
In an interview with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, he summed up his philosophy this way: “I actually am a progressive. I want less war. You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabers—I’m trying to be nice here—out of our adversaries. If they are not scared, they don’t wake up scared, they don’t go to bed scared, they don’t fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us. They will attack us everywhere.”
Reality, however, is anything but that simple. Palantir’s technology has been used to kill tens of thousands of people in Gaza and beyond, including many who had nothing to do with Hamas, had no control over its actions, and often weren’t even alive when it won local elections in 2006 and began to administer Gaza.
There should be no question that Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 was unconscionable. Still, for Israel to react by killing more than 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, a relatively conservative figure that even the Israeli government now acknowledges, constitutes a grossly disproportionate response that most independent experts define as genocide. The idea that such mass slaughter can be justified as a way of scaring the bad guys and reducing violence is intellectually unsupportable and morally obscene.
So, welcome to the world of Alex Karp, one of the leaders of the new wave of techno-militarists in Silicon Valley.
Militarizing AI, or Techno-Optimism Run Amok
This is not your father’s military-industrial complex (MIC). The current stewards of the MIC—executives running industrial giants like Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman—are far more circumspect in what they have to say than Karp. Their leaders may occasionally make a statement about how increased tensions in the Middle East or Asia could generate demands for their products among US allies in those regions, but they would never engage in the sort of nakedly Orwellian rhetoric Karp seems to specialize in.
Still, the MIC of the future augurs not just a change in technology or business practices, but—as Karp suggests—a potential culture shift in which militarism is openly celebrated, without the need for any cover language about promoting global stability or defending a “rules-based international order.” Think of the new MIC as a rugged individualist, high-tech version of philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s “war of all against all.” And those running it want us to believe that the only way to “win” a future war is by handing the keys to our political world to a clique of self-defined superior beings headed up by the likes of Alex Karp, Palantir Founder Peter Thiel, Anduril head Palmer Luckey, and the inimitable Elon Musk.
Alex Karp has co-authored a book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, in which he articulates his vision of what it will supposedly take to make America globally dominant again. The book is a long lament about how most Americans have lost their sense of purpose and patriotism, frittering away their time in trivial pursuits like reality TV and video games. He and co-author Nicholas W. Zamiska call for a new unifying national mission to whip this nation of slackers into shape and restore the United States to its rightful place as the world’s unrivaled political and military power.
Karp’s answer to what’s needed: a new Manhattan Project (which, in case you don’t remember, produced the atomic bomb to end World War II). This time, the focus would not be on developing nuclear weapons but on accelerating the military applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and giving the United States a permanent technological advantage over China. It’s hard to imagine a more impoverished or misguided vision of America’s future, or one more drained of basic humanity.
Hawks, traditional realists, and techno-militarists will, of course, deride any humanity-first approach to foreign and domestic policy as naive, but in reality, it’s the new wave militarists who are the truly naive ones. After squandering trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives on the wars of this century—wars that failed to reach their advertised objectives by a long shot (just as the most recent one in Iran is sure to do), while making the world a significantly more dangerous place—they still mouth platitudes about pursuing “peace through strength” and using US military power to undergird a “rules-based international order.” Given the American losses in this century to far more poorly funded and less technologically sophisticated adversaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, such tired rhetoric is beginning to sound like a cruel joke, or indeed the gasps of the representatives of a declining empire.
Will Technowar Be Cheaper, and Will It Protect Us?
Putting ideology aside for a moment, there is the narrower question of whether the emerging tech firms can truly produce better systems of war making for less money. Palmer Luckey of Anduril—a protégé of Palantir founder Peter Thiel—made headlines recently when he told an interviewer from CNBC that the US could spend perhaps half of the current $1 trillion Pentagon budget and still have a more effective defense system if it simply stopped buying the “wrong things.”
The idea that a weapons contractor would offer to do more for less seems almost revolutionary in an age where greed and corruption in the MIC continue to run rampant. The philosophy behind Luckey’s statement to CNBC is, in fact, encapsulated in a remarkable Anduril document entitled “Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy,” a scathing critique of the current business practices of the Pentagon and mammoth military contractors like Lockheed Martin.
Luckey’s manifesto should be considered an assault on the top five arms conglomerates—led by Lockheed Martin and RTX (formerly Raytheon)—that now receive 1 out of every 3 contract dollars doled out by the Pentagon. Those huge firms have had their day, the essay suggests, doing necessary and useful work in the long-gone Cold War years of the last century. “Why can’t the existing defense companies simply do better?” it asks. “…These companies work slowly, while the best engineers relish working at speed…These companies built the tools that kept us safe in the past, but they are not the future of our defense.”
What this country needs is anything but a new priesthood of billionaire engineers to tell us that war is unavoidable, fear is the only path to peace, and democracy must bend a knee to the superior wisdom of those who code algorithms and build weaponry.
The document all but suggests that companies like Lockheed Martin should be given a lifetime achievement award and then shoved out of the way, so the likes of Thiel, Karp, Luckey, and Musk can take the helm of the arms industry.
But spending less on weapons—as useful as it would be given other urgent national priorities—can’t be the only goal of defense policy. The most important question is whether purportedly cheaper, more nimble, more accurate AI-driven systems can, in fact, be deployed in a way that would promote peace and stability rather than yet more war. In reality, there is a danger that, if the United States thinks it can use such systems to intervene militarily on a routine basis while suffering fewer casualties, the temptation to go to war might actually increase.
Even given all of the above, the idea of breaking the stranglehold of the big contractors on the development and production of the US arsenal is an attractive one. But the tech sector’s claims that it can do the job better for less remains to be proven. A drone is cheaper than an F-35 jet fighter for sure, but what about swarms of drones that are used in waves and replenished rapidly in the midst of a war, or unpiloted ships and armored vehicles that run on complex, unproven software that could well fail at crucial moments? And what if, as the tech sector and its growing cadre of lobbyists would prefer, the new age militarists are allowed to operate with little or no scrutiny, with a weakening of safeguards like independent testing and curbs on price gouging—safeguards that are already too weak to fully get the job done?
When President Ronald Reagan negotiated arms control agreements with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the last century, his motto was “trust but verify.” In the case of Palantir and its ilk, perhaps the motto should be “mistrust and verify.” We need to get beyond their marketing slogans and make them prove that their new tech can work as advertised and is indeed better than what came before. If so, then Palantir and Anduril should be treated as vendors and paid for their services, but with no right to attempt to shape our military budget or foreign policy, much less the fundamental workings of our already stumbling democracy.
The Military Tech Lobby: Disruptors on Steroids
Before the current surge of weapons development in the tech sector, there was a time when some Silicon Valley firms acted as if their products were so superior and affordable that they didn’t need to dirty their hands with traditional lobbying. Unrealistic as that might have been, Silicon Valley has now gone all-in on legalized corruption—from carefully targeted campaign contributions to hiring former government officials to do their bidding. Example number one is, of course, Vice President JD Vance, who was employed, mentored, and financed by—yes!—Palantir founder Peter Thiel during his rise to the Senate and then to the vice presidency. When he was selected for Donald Trump’s ticket in 2024, a flood of new money came into the campaign from the military-tech sector, including tens of billions of dollars from Elon Musk. Once on the ticket, one of Vance’s main jobs proved to be extracting even more donations from the Silicon Valley militarists.
Then came Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the organization that gave efficiency a dreadful name by cutting federal programs and personnel seemingly at random and gutting essential tools like the Agency for International Development (USAID) while leaving the Pentagon virtually untouched. Although USAID had its problems, it also funded essential development and public health efforts globally that sustained millions of people. An actual efficiency drive would have looked at what worked and what didn’t at that agency. Instead, Musk’s acolytes, who knew nothing about economic assistance, simply dismantled it.
There are now significant numbers of Silicon Valley executives in key positions in the Trump administration, led by Vance but including dozens of others in key posts in the military, the top leadership of the Pentagon, and across a range of domestic and foreign-policy agencies.
Peter Thiel and Alex Karp clearly feel that what’s good for Palantir is good for America, but the vision of America they are promoting is both dangerous and dehumanizing.
Coming Down to Earth (and Reining in the Technophiles)
The problem with the new techno-militarists isn’t that they’re mistaken about technology’s power, but that they’re dangerously wrong about who should wield it, to what ends, and under what constraints. Power without restraint is not innovation. It is recklessness dressed up as inevitability. A growing share of the tools that shape American foreign and domestic security policy is being designed, deployed, and promoted by a small group of private actors whose incentives are aggressively financial, whose worldviews are profoundly militarized, and whose accountability to the public is minimal at best.
What this country needs is anything but a new priesthood of billionaire engineers to tell us that war is unavoidable, fear is the only path to peace, and democracy must bend a knee to the superior wisdom of those who code algorithms and build weaponry. In reality, we’ve heard this story before—from Cold War nuclear strategists, Vietnam-era body-count enthusiasts, and the architects of the “shock and awe” doctrine that helped destroy Iraq. Each generation is promised that this technology (whatever it might be) will finally make war, American-style, clean, precise, and decisive. Each time, the bodies pile up anyway.
What makes today’s moment especially dangerous is the speed and opacity with which such systems are being developed and deployed. AI-enabled targeting tools, predictive surveillance platforms, autonomous weaponry, and data-fusion systems are all being integrated into the military and domestic policing structures with minimal public debate, weak oversight, and virtually no meaningful consent from the people who will live with—and die from—the consequences. The rhetoric of AI-driven disruption has become a convenient excuse for bypassing democratic processes altogether.
If technology is to shape the future of war (and it will), then society must shape the rules under which it operates.
The underlying premise of the techno-militarists is that permanent war is the natural state of our world and our only choice is how efficiently we decide to wage it. In reality, security is never produced by terrifying the rest of the planet into submission. It’s produced by diplomacy; restraint; adhering to international law and economic justice; and the slow, unglamorous work of building institutions that make mass violence less likely rather than more automated.
Alex Karp and his peers may see themselves as realists, bravely saying what others don’t dare to say. In truth, theirs is a brittle, nihilistic worldview that mistakes domination for strength and innovation for wisdom. Humanity deserves more than an endless arms race run by men (and they are almost all men!) who believe that they alone are fit to decide whose lives are expendable. The brave new war machine’s version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World should frighten us all.
If technology is to shape the future of war (and it will), then society must shape the rules under which it operates. The alternative is to surrender our moral agency to a handful of self-anointed visionaries and hope they get it right. History suggests that is a gamble we can’t afford to take.
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‘Arsonist as Fire Chief’: Fed Appoints Wall Street Lobbyist to Key Bank Oversight Role
"There can be little doubt that having a Wall Street lawyer-lobbyist in charge of supervising and regulating his former Wall Street clients will likely result in a catastrophe for the American people."
Feb 25, 2026
The Federal Reserve board has quietly appointed a prominent Wall Street lawyer and lobbyist as the central bank's director of supervision and regulation, a move that one critic said was worse than "putting the fox in charge of the henhouse."
"This is like appointing a lifelong arsonist as a fire chief," Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Markets, said in response to the Fed's decision to put Randall Guynn in a position to regulate the industry he has long represented.
Politico reported Tuesday that "Guynn, a prominent Wall Street lawyer, will become the next director of supervision and regulation at the Federal Reserve, effective March 8."
Before joining Fed staff last year as an adviser to the central bank's vice chair for supervision, Guynn worked for close to four decades at the corporate law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, where he recently chaired the company's Financial Institutions Group. According to Guynn's bio, he has "focused on advising banks of all sizes on their most critical financial regulatory issues and transactions."
Reuters, which first reported earlier this month that the Fed was expected to appoint Guynn to the bank policing role, noted that the decision "would mark a departure for the central bank, which since at least 1977 has filled the job with long-serving Fed career staff."
"The only reasonable expectation is that his leadership of Fed supervision and regulation will accelerate the Fed’s current push to implement policies that favor the biggest, most dangerous banks."
In a statement, Kelleher of Better Markets described Guynn as a "lawyer-lobbyist" who has "spent his entire professional life—almost 40 years—zealously and exclusively representing the interests of the financial industry, including the biggest financial firms on Wall Street."
A 2024 paper published in Cambridge University's Perspectives on Politics journal identified Guynn as part of a "vast subterranean world of regulatory influence-seeking" that has managed to escape the scrutiny of legislative lobbying.
"Reporting exceptions under the Lobbying Disclosure Act allow many of the most powerful advocates to characterize their activity as lawyering, not lobbying, and thereby fly under the radar," the paper notes.
Kelleher argued that, given Guynn's history, "the only reasonable expectation is that his leadership of Fed supervision and regulation will accelerate the Fed’s current push to implement policies that favor the biggest, most dangerous banks—his former clients just ten months ago and presumably his current circle of professional and personal friends."
"That will crush small banks, harm the Main Street economy, and make another financial crash inevitable. That’s what happened in the early 2000s when the Fed’s misguided belief that Wall Street could regulate itself directly led to the catastrophic 2008 crash," said Kelleher. "We don’t have to speculate. We can look at his attached record or read the remarkable story of how, as a lawyer-lobbyist prior to joining the Fed staff last year, he was instrumental in pushing through a back-door merger approval by the Fed."
"There can be little doubt that having a Wall Street lawyer-lobbyist in charge of supervising and regulating his former Wall Street clients will likely result in a catastrophe for the American people," he added.
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Senate Dems Push Trump DOJ to Reveal All Talks With Lobbyists About Ouster of Antitrust Chief
The removal of Gail Slater "raises significant concerns about this administration’s commitment to enforcing the antitrust laws for the betterment of consumers and small businesses," the lawmakers warned.
Feb 16, 2026
A group of Democrats in the US Senate is pressuring President Donald Trump's Justice Department to hand over any and all communications between the agency and corporate lobbyists related to last week's ouster of antitrust chief Gail Slater, which came weeks before the scheduled start of the closely watched Live Nation-Ticketmaster trial.
In a Saturday letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi—herself a former corporate lobbyist—the Democratic lawmakers raised concerns about the timing of Slater's departure, pointing to Live Nation-Ticketmaster's ongoing "attempts to evade responsibility by convincing Justice Department leadership to settle the case on terms favorable to the company, rather than fans, artists, and independent venues."
Slater's ouster as head of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division less than a year after she was confirmed in a bipartisan vote, wrote Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and six other Democratic lawmakers, "raises significant concerns about this administration’s commitment to enforcing the antitrust laws for the betterment of consumers and small businesses, including seeing through its cases against monopolies."
The antitrust suit against Live Nation, Ticketmaster's parent company, was launched in 2024 by the Biden administration and a coalition of state attorneys general. Their complaint accuses Live Nation of unlawful anticompetitive conduct that "allows them to exploit their conflicts of interest—as a promoter, ticketer, venue owner, and artist manager—across the live music industry and further entrench their dominant positions."
Semafor reported earlier this month that Live Nation executives and lobbyists "have been negotiating with senior DOJ officials" in an effort to "avert a trial over whether the company is operating an illegal monopoly." Those negotiations are reportedly being held outside of the antitrust division previously headed by Slater, who was ousted days after Semafor published its story.
The American Prospect reported that Kellyanne Conway and "MAGA influencer" Mike Davis are among those lobbying the Justice Department on behalf of Live Nation.
In their Saturday letter, the Senate Democrats called on the Justice Department to provide "the dates of each meeting with any representatives of Live Nation-Ticketmaster and the individuals present from the Justice Department, White House, or Live Nation-Ticketmaster for each meeting" and "all communications" between the DOJ and Live Nation-Ticketmaster regarding the dismissal of Slater or her deputies.
One of those deputies, Roger Alford, unloaded on the Bondi-led Justice Department weeks after his firing last summer for "insubordination." According to Alford, the DOJ is "now overwhelmed with lobbyists with little antitrust expertise going above the antitrust division leadership seeking special favors with warm hugs."
Alford pointed specifically to the merger settlement deal that the Justice Department cut with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks last year. Bondi's chief of staff reportedly overruled Slater's team to push through the settlement.
The Live Nation-Ticketmaster antitrust challenge could be "the next casualty" of the lobbyist-infiltrated DOJ, Alford warned.
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Trump Chief of Staff Wiles Subpoenaed in Foreign Lobbying Criminal Case
“This kind of entanglement shows exactly why a person with Wiles’ lengthy record of controversial corporate and foreign lobbying clients is too conflicted to be running the White House," said one advocate.
Feb 06, 2026
A court filing in a federal criminal lobbying case against a former Republican congressman confirmed what the government watchdog Public Citizen warned against as soon as President Donald Trump appointed Susie Wiles to be his chief of staff: that her "lobbying client list is both extensive and littered with controversial clients who stand to benefit from having their former lobbyist running the White House."
The court filing was submitted Thursday by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and sought to "quash" a subpoena that was served to Wiles in December.
Wiles was called to testify as a witness in the case against former Rep. David Rivera (R-Fla.) and his political associate, Esther Nuhfer. They are accused of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by lobbying on behalf of the sanctioned Venezuelan businessman Raul Gorrín.
According to a grand jury indictment from December 2024, Rivera sought to lobby top US government officials to remove Gorrín from the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List. He allegedly worked to conceal and promote Gorrín's criminal activities by creating fraudulent shell companies using names associated with a law firm and with a government official.
Rivera received over $5.5 million for his lobbying activities and did not register under FARA as required by law, according to the DOJ.
The Miami Herald reported late last month that Rivera and Nuhfer are "also accused of trying to 'normalize' relations between the [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro regime and the United States while Rivera’s consulting firm landed a head-turning $50 million lobbying contract with the US subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company."
Attorneys for Rivera subpoenaed Wiles at the White House, seeking to compel her to testify about her lobbying work for Ballard Partners on behalf of Globovision, a Caracas-based TV station owned by Gorrín.
As the Herald reported, Wiles worked at Ballard shortly after running Trump's presidential campaign in Florida. Due to her presidential ties she "brought an instant cachet" to the firm, where Gorrín was "hoping to gain access to the new Trump administration, which was threatening economic sanctions against the Maduro regime and Venezuela’s oil industry."
Gorrín was working with Ballard in an attempt to expand Globovision to the US as a Spanish-language affiliate—an aim that presented challenges due to the government sanctions and the Federal Communications Commission's limits on foreign ownership of US TV stations.
Rivera and Nuhfer's lawyers are seeking Wiles' testimony to show that her lobbying firm was trying to influence Trump, "on behalf of Gorrín, to bring about a regime change in Venezuela."
The subpoena document said the defendants' lawyers want to question Wiles on her "extensive communications" regarding Ballard's work with Gorrín and efforts to help the businessman gain access to Trump.
They are also seeking similar testimony from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who as a senator met privately with Rivera, Nuhfer, and Gorrín at a hotel in Washington in 2017, according to the Herald.
In the court filing, the DOJ said Wiles had "no apparent connection to any of the allegations in the superseding indictment concerning defendants’ activities as unregistered agents of the government of Venezuela."
Public Citizen noted Wiles' work with Ballard in November 2024 when it published the report Meet Susie Wiles’ Controversial Corporate Lobbying Clients, which revealed 42 lobbying clients the chief of staff had between 2017-24.
The client list was "extensive and littered with controversial clients who stand to benefit from having their former lobbyist running the White House," said Public Citizen on Friday.
In addition to Gorrín's TV station, Wiles' represented a waste management company that resisted removing nuclear waste from a landfill, a tobacco firm that sought to block federal restrictions on its candy-flavored cigars, and a foreign mining private equity firm seeking approval to develop a gold mine on federal public lands.
Jon Golinger, Public Citizen's democracy advocate, said Friday that the subpoena in the Rivera case raises even more questions about Wiles' potential conflicts of interest.
“This kind of entanglement," he said, "shows exactly why a person with Wiles’ lengthy record of controversial corporate and foreign lobbying clients is too conflicted to be running the White House."
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