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Ukraine: America's Enduring Proxy War on Russia
Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war: Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale
Jul 21, 2026
In his farewell address of January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans against the "acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex," and the danger that "public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." Sixty-five years on, Eisenhower’s warnings have been repeatedly and tragically vindicated. American democracy hangs by a thread, while the military-industrial complex, now including Silicon Valley, runs American foreign policy over the objections of the American people.
The aim is American primacy, meaning the unchallenged wealth, power, and prerogatives of American elites, unchecked by any other nation or group of nations. What this means in practice is that Wall Street, military contractors, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil control American foreign policy to maximize elite wealth and access to global resources, supply chains, and strategic choke points. The rest of the world is to fall in line.
The military-industrial complex deploys a toolkit that we summarize as “regime control,” directed at subordinating the rest of the world’s governments to the United States. The instruments used for regime control include the imposition or removal of trade barriers; the access to or denial of technologies; the introduction or removal of economic sanctions; the ownership and manipulation of foreign media; electoral interference of varying extent; political assassinations, color revolutions, CIA-backed coups; the instigation of overseas bank runs and the supply of emergency loans when states submit; the freezing and unfreezing of foreign assets; the targeting of foreign officials with corruption claims, extradition, or kidnapping; and, when none of these suffice for regime control, outright war. The US wars of choice (really, wars for regime control) are perpetual, and lucrative for the war industries, though the deep state typically prefers that other governments cave in without a fight.
Geopolitical Pivots and American Primacy
Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard (1997) laid out the goal of regime control with remarkable candor. Eurasia is the board on which America’s global primacy must be secured. To succeed, America should dominate “geopolitical pivots,” meaning states that are unimportant to America per se but useful for weakening another major power. Brzezinski named key geopolitical pivots, the most important of which was Ukraine. He repeatedly proclaimed that Russia without Ukraine ceases to be a great power. He identified Iran as another pivot. Control over Iran secures America’s hold on the Persian Gulf, Mideast oil, and the Caspian region. It is no surprise that US wars rage in both places.
The US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing.
This is important to understand the decisions of six seemingly different presidents, who all pursued one consistent Ukraine policy. Bill Clinton set out to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and other border states of Russia, counting on Russia being too weak to object. He and subsequent presidents assumed that Russia would ultimately accept its diminished global status, accept the reality of NATO on its borders, and settle into a subordinate role of supplying raw materials to the West within an American-ordered Eurasia.
Clinton launched NATO enlargement in the 1990s, over George Kennan’s warning that it was "the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era" and despite the legally binding assurances given by the US to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would move "not one inch eastward." George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty and, at Bucharest in 2008, committed NATO to membership for Ukraine and Georgia, crossing what William Burns, then ambassador in Moscow and later CIA director, privately called "the brightest of all redlines" for the entire Russian elite. Barack Obama’s administration backed the 2014 Maidan overthrow of Ukraine’s elected, neutral government (we know this through Victoria Nuland’s intercepted call where she discusses choosing the next prime minister), and then supported the new regime’s bid to join NATO. Donald Trump, in his first term, sent Javelin systems to the US-backed regime in Kyiv to fight the breakaway, Russian-speaking Donbas. Joe Biden brushed aside Russia’s December 2021 draft security treaties without negotiating and scuttled the near-agreement between Russia and Ukraine at Istanbul in the spring of 2022, which would have ended the war. And so the war continues to this day.
Trump's Vacuous Anti-War Campaign Promises
Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 as the man who would end America’s forever wars. This turned out to be far from the truth.
The year 2025 opened with theater including the Oval Office humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February, the taunt that Ukraine had "no cards," and in March a week-long suspension of US intelligence sharing with Kyiv. That week proved two things. First, this is an American war: Deprived of US intelligence for only a few days, Ukraine’s deep-strike capacity and battlefield awareness visibly degraded. Second, the White House pressure was aimed not at peace with Moscow but at obedience from Kyiv. The US military spigot was reopened, and what followed, behind a proscenium of summits and phone calls, was the most systematic escalation of the American military role since 2022.
In June 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14307, "Unleashing American Drone Dominance," directing the rebuilding of the American drone industrial base and instructing that the Pentagon "must be able to procure, integrate, and train using low-cost, high-performing drones." In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth staged a drone demonstration at the Pentagon and stripped away procurement restrictions to "unleash" military drone dominance; the same month, on a call with Zelenskyy, Trump asked, according to the Financial Times’ later reporting, whether Ukraine could strike Moscow if given longer-range weapons.
From midsummer 2025, the US supplied the intelligence for Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign against Russian refineries, pipelines, and power stations, shaping route planning, altitude, timing, and mission decisions; by some officials’ account, setting the target priorities itself. In August came the Alaska summit, suggesting diplomacy, yet at the same time the sale of Extended Range Attack Munitions for Ukraine, with European allies paying. By October, Trump had formally authorized the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies to hand Ukraine targeting data for strikes on Russian energy infrastructure deep inside Russia, a step the Biden administration itself had refused as too escalatory, while Washington pressed NATO allies to do the same and openly debated Tomahawks with the range to reach Moscow. Through it all, CIA Director John Ratcliffe kept the agency’s presence in Ukraine at its highest level, increased funding for its programs there, coordinated Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries by sharing intelligence on infrastructure vulnerabilities, and patiently guided Trump toward blessing the campaign. The United States, it emerged, had spent billions building Ukraine’s drone program from the start, in an effort backed by the CIA throughout.
Trump lies constantly, and much of it is the improvisation of a vain and careless man. But the consequential lying is systematic, and in one direction: in the service of the military-industrial complex.
The Laboratory
Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war. Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale: millions of drone sorties, a continuous adaptation race against a peer adversary’s electronic warfare, and thousands of hours of combat data that constitute the most valuable military AI asset on Earth.
At the center of this sits Palantir, born of CIA seed money, running the Pentagon’s Maven targeting enterprise, and threaded through the British security establishment via a revolving door that includes a former MI6 chief among more than 30 UK officials hired or contracted by the company. Its chief executive openly boasts that Palantir software performs "most of the targeting" done by Ukraine. In January 2026 Ukraine’s defense ministry announced that Palantir was building the "Brave1 Dataroom" to feed real battlefield data into the AI brains of interceptor drones; by May, minister and CEO were discussing expanded cooperation in battlefield analysis and military planning, the ministry promising to "transfer the war onto Russian territory."
Nor is Iran a separate story from the Ukraine saga. Recall that in Brzezinski’s geography the arc from the Persian Gulf through the Caspian is the second great prize, with Iran as its keystone pivot. Ukrainian interceptor teams have deployed to Jordan against Iranian drones; the counter-drone systems proven against Russia are marketed to the Gulf. Two geopolitical pivots, one chessboard, and one ultimate source of these two wars of choice: the military-industrial complex.
Kissinger’s Admonition to Friends of the US
Henry Kissinger is famously credited with telling the truth to nations that the US would use and discard: To be an enemy of the United States may be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.
Ukraine is dying at American hands. Thirty years since Brzezinski pointed to Ukraine as the key geopolitical pivot for American primacy, Ukraine has been demographically hollowed and territorially truncated, with its energy grid pounded, its elections suspended, and its politics reduced to corrupted palace intrigues. This month’s rupture in Kyiv shows that in the midst of what Western coverage calls Ukraine’s great comeback, Zelenskyy dissolved his government for the fourth time in the war; dispatched his prime minister toward the Washington embassy to manage the "key partner;" and summarily sacked Mykhailo Fedorov, the popular minister celebrated as the architect of the drone ecosystem. A country truly winning its war does not behave this way.
The deepest cruelty is that Russia sought, repeatedly and for 30 years, a security arrangement with the US in which both countries and their neighborhoods would live in peace, mutual respect, and indivisible security. Yet the US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing. In the process, it sacrifices Ukraine and Iran to its hubris. Peace in Ukraine requires only that the US relinquish the hubris it has maintained for decades that Russia can be pressured into surrender, and instead accept Ukraine as a neutral bridge between Europe and Russia rather than a geopolitical pivot to be used against Russia. Eisenhower foresaw why acceptance of peace would be so hard: The military-industrial complex does not merely influence policy; it defines it. Until the American people reclaim the democracy from Palantir, BlackRock, SpaceX, Chevron, and their ilk, the battlefield “laboratories” will stay open, and Ukraine will pay the fatal price for American “friendship.”
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Workers Are Fighting Back Against Silicon Valley's Race to the Lowest Wage
There should be rules that prevent companies from using personal data to quietly lower pay for some people while others earn more for the same work, and working people should have the ability to organize.
Jun 12, 2026
Recent reporting has confirmed what many working people already feel every day: Companies are using personal data to decide the lowest wage someone will accept. What working people call exploitation, Silicon Valley calls innovation.
The seven largest gig platforms in the United States—Amazon Flex, DoorDash, Favor, Instacart, Lyft, Shipt, and Uber—are using data that tracks how long its users stay on an app, what jobs they accept, and how urgently they need income. This algorithm calculates what the employers can pay to get the job done at the lowest rate individuals will accept.
Not what their labor is worth. Not what is fair.
Gig work was sold as a way to make extra money on a flexible schedule. But that’s not what it looks like today. Nearly 1 in 4 people in the US now participate in some form of gig or freelance work. What was supposed to be a side hustle has become a main source of income for one-third of gig workers.
This isn’t just about gig work. It’s about whether we allow companies to rewrite the rules of the economy—or whether we demand a system that works for the people in it.
As layoffs rise and wages fall further behind the cost of living, more people are being pushed into this kind of work to keep up. Black people and other workers of color, who tend to be more dependent on this type of work than white people, have been especially hard hit. But these unfair practices can impact all workers.
“Under surveillance wage systems, different people may be paid different wages for largely the same work, and individual workers cannot predict their incomes over time,” the Washington Center for Equitable Growth reports. “Not only has pay for app-controlled jobs decreased over time,” but “people who work longer hours are paid less per hour.”
This is what happens when an economy limits options for some people, then funnels them into systems that take advantage of that lack of choice. Now they’re going even further—using data to predict what some experts call a “desperation wage,” or the lowest amount someone will accept based on their behavior.
And it’s not just happening in gig work. Similar systems are being used to set rent and adjust prices for goods and services in real time. The same idea applies: Use data to figure out the worst price or wage someone will tolerate, then charge just below that or pay just above it.
When you combine higher unemployment, lower wealth, and fewer protections, you get a system where some people have less room to say no—and are more likely to be taken advantage of. The message is simple: Take it or leave it. And for many, leaving it isn’t an option.
That’s why we’re starting to see pushback. Working people are demanding more transparency. Some are organizing. New models are emerging that promise fairer pay and more control. But these changes are happening because people are speaking up—not because companies chose to act.
So what needs to happen next is clear. If companies are going to use algorithms to shape pay and access to work, those systems should be transparent. People should know how their pay is calculated.
Workers should be able to see how much of each transaction goes to them compared with how much the company keeps. There should be rules that prevent companies from using personal data to quietly lower pay for some people while others earn more for the same work. And working people should have the ability to organize and push back.
Because this isn’t just about gig work. It’s about whether we allow companies to rewrite the rules of the economy—or whether we demand a system that works for the people in it. Technology should make work more stable, more fair, and more predictable. Right now, it’s doing the opposite. And that’s not inevitable.
It’s a choice.
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How to Defeat Trump's Unholy Alliance
Can the rest of us organize a powerful, humane alternative to Donald Trump's politics of hatred and division that could transform this country and the world?
May 28, 2026
Donald Trump’s America is a scary place in significant part thanks to an unholy alliance of MAGA devotees who don’t believe in science and see intellectuals as public enemy number one, and a gaggle of Silicon Valley militarists who think that they’re the smartest people in the room, if not the universe. Add in white Christian nationalists who abuse religious precepts to sow hatred and division and you have the foundations of the political base that elected Donald Trump (twice!). And worse yet, those groupings are likely to be with us long after our current president has gone off to that great cheeseburger stand in the sky.
Still, it’s worth reflecting on whether such an odd coalition of allies can survive without Donald Trump, or even with a president whose policies have become so harmful and irrational that they’re doing severe human and economic damage even to his most loyal supporters (not to mention the rest of us). And it’s also worth considering whether the pillars of the MAGA movement can manage to stick together in the ever-grimmer Trumpian years to come, not to speak of the post-Trumpian ones, or whether the rest of us can organize a powerful, humane alternative to his politics of hatred and division that could transform this country and the world.
The Know-Nothings Meet the Know-It-Alls
As a start, we have the latter-day “Know Nothings,” a term borrowed from a 19th century political movement. It’s not that members of that group literally know nothing. Some of them are quite skilled in their given professions and astute at assessing certain kinds of situations. Some are intelligent but woefully misguided. Trump supporter and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, for example, is a brain surgeon.
Members of the anti-science crowd are also often very good at communicating their messages, however wrongheaded or offensive they may be. The problem isn’t that they can’t take in information; it’s that they are distinctly anti-knowledge when it comes to, among other things, separating compelling conspiracy theories from well-documented facts.
Rather than DEI programs that stop at raising tough questions about America’s long history of systematic discrimination, what’s needed are programs that truly change people’s lives by creating better-paying jobs and affordable, quality healthcare for all.
The results of their ingrained antagonism toward basic knowledge are profound, making them a threat to public health and democratic practices. After all, we now live in a country where millions of people are against vaccinating their children to prevent potentially deadly diseases and don’t believe that perhaps the gravest threat to continuing life on this planet—climate change—is caused, or even influenced, by human activity or perhaps is even happening at all.
The dangerous delusions of Trump Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., now have the stamp of government approval and the power of the US government behind them. There is no way to estimate how many people have already fallen sick or even died unnecessarily due to the implementation of his crackpot theories, but the numbers will undoubtedly be significant. The American Public Health Association captured the grim mood of our moment perfectly in an April 2025 press release entitled “Secretary Kennedy and His Policies Are a Danger to the Public Health.”
On a different spiritual plane, tens of millions of Americans believe in the rapture—the notion that they and their kind will be called up to heaven in the end days, while the rest of us will be left behind, presumably to burn in hell (but not a climate-change version of the same). A 2022 Pew poll found that 39% of Americans believe “we are in the end times.” Already! And such a belief, of course, has an impact on how or even whether one wants to devote time and energy to fixing problems here on Earth.
Such an amalgam of opponents of science and skeptics about basic reality bears a distinct resemblance to the “Know Nothing” movement of the 19th century that thrived on anti-immigrant sentiments and half-baked conspiracy theories.
The anti-intellectual faction on the right has been propagandized for decades to believe that the biggest obstacle to a better life for them and their families isn’t the predatory corporations hollowing out our economy and manipulating our democracy, but a group of liberal intellectuals clustered on both coasts who allegedly want to replace this country’s bedrock beliefs with a set of “politically correct” prescriptions about how they should live their lives, especially when it comes to DEI or diversity, equity, and inclusion. In such a rendering of reality, that “new class” is seen as sapping the country’s strength and undermining the basic values that would make America great (again!).
The use of that “new class” as a political epithet emerged from the neoconservative movement of the 1960s and 1970s, as Andrew Hartman has explained at his blog on American intellectual history:
Out of their political repositioning in the late 1960s and 1970s, neoconservatives developed a critical theory (co-opted from anti-Stalinist thinking) about a so-called "new class" of intellectuals, broadly defined to include all professionals tasked with manipulating language—although more narrowly applied to humanists and social scientists. Members of this "new class," so the theory went, had turned their backs on the society to which they owed their high-ranking status.
However, the current Trumpian war on DEI should be considered an extension of a longstanding conservative effort to distract Americans from the real sources of their problems by promoting a politics of division and hatred. Mainstream accounts of the drive to eradicate concerns about diversity, equity, and inclusion from public life rarely point out that fighting DEI can fairly be characterized as fighting to make racism, misogyny, and anti-gay and anti-trans discrimination ever more acceptable in the sort of open, unapologetic fashion that prevailed before the modern-day civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights movements gained strength.
The crusade—and it’s nothing less than that—against DEI needs to be called out for what it is, not treated as some sort of skirmish over language. And rather than DEI programs that stop at raising tough questions about America’s long history of systematic discrimination, what’s needed are programs that truly change people’s lives by creating better-paying jobs and affordable, quality healthcare for all, regardless of race, gender, class status, or faith. Getting there will, however, require a flowering of faith of another kind—not religious faith, but faith that we can construct an accountable government that serves the public interest, rather than, as in the present age of Donald Trump, the interests of corporations and inhumane ideologues.
Silicon Valley Saviors
In contrast to the “know nothing” faction of the political right in America is the “know it all” faction—Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Elon Musk, and Palmer Luckey. They view themselves not just as business executives cashing in on the latest trend, but as superior beings who should be running the planet. They promise better living through technology and, as new age militarists, see robotic weapons as the future of warfare. But the idea that such new technologies will inevitably change our lives for the better or protect us from the worst has, at best, a mixed record. It depends, of course, on just who is using such technologies and for what purpose.
In addition to owning companies that create new systems grounded in artificial intelligence and machine learning, the new age militarists are angling to shape our foreign policy, our federal budget, and the future of our democracy. They literally want to become masters of the universe by figuring out how to live forever and promote the colonization of space. They dream of video games in which, as Palmer Luckey put it, “If you die in the game, you die in real life.”
To say that Thiel, Musk, Palmer Luckey, Alex Karp, and their financiers like Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz have a high opinion of themselves—and of the potential of the technology their companies produce—would distinctly be an understatement.
The political reach of the Silicon Valley crowd has grown dramatically in the age of Donald Trump. JD Vance, his vice president, was, of course, groomed and financed by Peter Thiel, the founder of the omnipresent firm Palantir, which provides technology to patrol the border, helps Immigration and Customs Enforcement identify suspects, and has provided software to Israel that its leaders have used to step up the pace of bombing in their genocidal war in Gaza. After a stint at one of Thiel’s venture capital firms, Vance won a Senate election in Ohio with major financial backing from him and his allies.
When Trump chose Vance as his running mate, champagne corks popped in Silicon Valley and the money started flowing to help Trump get elected, including up to a quarter of a billion dollars in dark money from Elon Musk. As a result, Silicon Valley now has its man in the executive branch.
Nor is Vance alone. Former employees of tech firms like SpaceX and Anduril are now embedded in key agencies of the federal government, and Secretary of—yes!—War Pete Hegseth has gone all in on integrating AI into US military planning and practice to the delight of the billionaire tech moguls and their hangers-on.
To say that Thiel, Musk, Palmer Luckey, Alex Karp, and their financiers like Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz have a high opinion of themselves—and of the potential of the technology their companies produce—would distinctly be an understatement.
Kathryn Boyle of Andreessen Horowitz, a self-appointed chief ideologist and cheerleader for the Silicon Valley tech takeover of America, gave a speech to the conservative American Enterprise Institute in February 2025 that analyst Gil Duran described as an effort to “equate most government actions with communist dictatorships… while positioning tech bros as the ordained saviors of the traditional family.” Boyle’s bread and butter argument—call it a potentially fatal kind of narcissism—was that only the “founders” (yes, they call themselves that!) are serious enough, skilled enough, and endowed by their creator with enough persistence to solve and reverse America’s imperial decline. The rest of us should just get out of the way and let the new techno-gods do their work.
Will Trump’s Patchwork Quilt Come Apart at the Seams?
The Trump coalition is a strange kaleidoscope of confusing views and contradictory cover stories: the know-nothings; the know-it-alls; the false prophets of white Christian nationalism, the billionaires and millionaires, the people who (once upon a time) watched too many episodes of "The Apprentice" and think Trump is a good businessman; those who want yet another tax break; those men among us who want to control what women do with their bodies, and the (mostly) men who feel liberated because Trump openly and repeatedly makes racist, sexist, anti-gay, and anti-trans statements, legitimizing vocal expressions of prejudice in a way not seen in decades.
Yes, his is a motley crew, but so far they have rallied around the president, no matter the promises he breaks or the harmful policies he jams down all of our throats (policies that could ultimately hit many die-hard Trump supporters who aren’t billionaires as hard or harder than they will hit his opponents). Fortunately, there are at least signs that his ability to thrive politically (even as his policies drive America into a ditch) may be fading. His brutal, illogical, illegal, ill-defined war on Iran—complete with genocidal rhetoric about ending an entire civilization—may be the beginning of the end of his grasp of our politics and our psyche.
Unfortunately, he may be as much a symptom of what’s wrong with America as he is a producer of deep damage to the future prospects of democratic governance and human cooperation in this country and on this planet.
Which Way Out?
Any resistance to such know-nothingism and incipient technofascism must start on a human scale. If we are ever going to build a tolerant, welcoming nation that meets the basic needs of its residents, while leaving ample room for scientific inquiry and creative endeavors of all sorts, we need to get off our machines and start talking to—and crucially, listening to—each other.
This is already happening more widely than you might imagine if you’re a prisoner of your news feed. And it’s happening not just in large gatherings like the No Kings rallies, but in local organizing around schools and housing, voter registration and education efforts, and attempts to help communities survive the double-injury of runaway capitalism and the shredding of the social safety net thanks, at least in part, to Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (which is the ugliest, most inhumane piece of legislation in living memory).
There are no guarantees in life, but in this disastrous Trumpian universe of ours, fighting the power should feel far more fulfilling than bending the knee.
We need to fight on at least three fronts—economically, politically, and culturally. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has shown just how a truly populist economic program could draw support even among diehard MAGA backers, and such a program is a necessity if we are ever to dig our way out of our current predicament.
But economics is hardly the only problem we have. There’s also the reality of racism to contend with, not to speak of a thriving anti-immigrant sensibility, and misogyny, as well as anti-gay and anti-trans discrimination—all deeply embedded in a nation that was founded as a colonial enterprise fueled by slavery and genocide. Such a history has to be transcended by embracing the values and elevating the leadership of the people most impacted by the legacy of America’s repressive past, while building a new culture based on tolerance, respect, and (yes!) love for our fellow human beings.
To be clear (as President Barack Obama would often say), by “transcend” I don’t mean ignore. We must fully acknowledge and seriously commit our society to repairing the crimes embedded in our development as a nation, not to speak of those being committed right now in Donald Trump’s America against so many of us and our planet as well.
And sadly, it’s all too obvious that coming together to save this planet and retain our basic humanity will not be easy. People are messy and, frankly, can be a pain to deal with (yours truly included). We are, however, all we have, and making the effort will matter.
I believe in the saying, attributed to leaders of the Wobblies (the radical union founded in 1905 and known formally as the Industrial Workers of the World), that we must sow the seeds of any new society in the shell of the old one. The way we treat each other in our homes, workplaces, schools, sites of worship, and other public and private spaces will determine whether we can build a better world or are fated to live in a never-endingly Trumpian one. In that context, it’s important not just to speak truth to power, but to begin trying to create alternative sources of power and good ideas aren’t enough for that. (If they were, we would already be living in a far better world.)
Building alternative power and charting a path to such a world will be a distinctly collective undertaking. A handful of charismatic leaders or courageous organizers can’t do it for us. We all need to be leaders since we are all experts (in the sense of knowing our communities and our bits of the world).
There are no guarantees in life, but in this disastrous Trumpian universe of ours, fighting the power should feel far more fulfilling than bending the knee, and if enough of us join that fight, we at least have a shot at building a society and a world worth sustaining for generations to come.
What are we waiting for?
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Big Tech GOP Donor Marc Andreessen Claims AI Better Than Human Workers: 'Never Gets Sick... Never Files HR Complaints'
"Having to hire human workers who might have pesky demands for more pay, better hours, or better working conditions is but a nuisance to them," one software engineer wrote about tech industry bosses.
May 21, 2026
A leading billionaire right-wing donor and tech evangelist raised eyebrows during a podcast appearance this week with a blunt explanation for why he believes artificial intelligence is superior to human workers.
The past few months have seen a wave of tech industry layoffs that companies have acknowledged were driven wholly or in part by AI: From Meta, which slashed 8,000 jobs on Wednesday and reassigned thousands of other workers to AI roles; to Intuit, which announced a cut of about 17% of its workforce the same day to put more focus on the emerging technology.
The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who leads one of Silicon Valley's most powerful venture capital firms, Andreessen Horowitz, declared as recently as last month that despite report after report of mass layoffs, "‘AI job loss’ narratives are all fake,” and the industry would facilitate a "massive jobs boom" because it allows individual workers to be "endlessly more productive."
But during an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience on Tuesday, he seemed to suggest that he viewed the human workforce as not only inferior to AI but also an expendable nuisance that employers would be better off without.
He imagined the programmer of the future "overseeing an org chart of bots" numbering in the thousands, which would go on to exponentially increase productivity.
This, he said, is preferable to the current, inefficient model of hiring human laborers. He used the example of the graphic design work on Rogan's set to illustrate the point.
"You hire somebody... and you tell them you want a screen display and you want it to be an animated version of the thing you got back here," he said. "They spend, you know, two weeks doing it. It's like, 'Okay, that's pretty good, but I actually want the whole thing to be whatever, purple and green.' And they spend a week doing that. And they come back, and you're like, 'I actually prefer the old version.'"
“The guy gets, like, pissed at you because he’s like, ‘I just wasted my time.’ The bot’s like, 'No problem,' you know, no sweat, like whatever you want, and we can try it 12 more times if you want. Or you tell it, you know, this is terrible. Like, I can’t believe you came back to me with this. It has all these bugs. It’s like, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. I’ll go fix these.’"
"By the way, [it] never gets drunk, never gets sick, never gets high," he continued.
"Never gets depressed because his girlfriend broke up with him," Rogan interjected.
"Never files HR complaints," Andreessen added.
Andreessen said this mass adoption of "armies" of AI workers would begin in tech fields like coding, but would quickly expand out to other fields like writing, medicine, and law.
He described artificial intelligence as technology that would grant workers a "universal basic superpower." But while some proponents of AI expansion imagine it as a tool to liberate workers from long hours by automating menial tasks, Andreessen said it was actually doing the opposite for workers in the coding world.
He said one would assume that “if AI coding makes them four times more productive... then maybe they’re working only a fourth the time and now they’ve got a great life,” but “what’s actually happened is virtually to a person, they’re all working more hours than ever to the point where there is a new term of art that’s used in the valley called the ‘AI vampire.’”
“You’re up all night doing AI coding because you are so productive," Andreessen said approvingly. "You’re getting so much done that you can’t turn off. The opportunity cost of going to sleep is too high because if you go to sleep, you won’t be with your 20 AI coding agents, keeping them working on all the projects that you have them working on. And so people stop sleeping.”
"They're clearly, clearly, clearly not taking care of themselves, and they're absolutely ecstatic," Andreessen said, "because they are able to produce five times, 20 times more code per hour than they could in the past."
The comments drew widespread backlash from critics across the political spectrum, who noted Andreessen's cavalier disregard for the fate of human workers in his imagined future scenario.
His mention of "HR complaints" in particular raised red flags for those who noted that the male-dominated worlds of Silicon Valley and venture capitalism have had many high-profile sexual harassment scandals.
But more broadly, it was interpreted as an expression of contempt for workers who demand a modicum of dignity from their jobs.
One software developer, who writes the Substack blog Dialectics of Decline on Substack under the name Scarlet, described Andreessen's comments as an encapsulation of an attitude that she recently said was "destroying the career I once loved."
I noticed that my bosses were getting infected with the mind virus sold to them by the AI hype men. They started to believe we weren’t needed anymore, or, if we were, we were now capable of producing 10x the amount of code in the same amount of time...
Having to hire human workers who might have pesky demands for more pay, better hours, or better working conditions is but a nuisance to them. They want to streamline their businesses by—ideally—not needing to hire humans at all. They are being sold a dream of a 100% agent-operated business where they purchase tokens instead of labor hours, and at a fraction of the cost. After all, agents won’t ever try to unionize. They don’t need weekends off. They don’t get sick or fall pregnant. They can’t strike. They won’t fight back.
It’s a mindset that Andreessen—one of the most prominent fixtures of the so-called “tech right” that spent big to elect Trump in 2024—is apparently seeking to export to the entire country.
Andreessen Horowitz and its billionaire founders have dumped an unprecedented $115 million to influence elections in the 2026 midterm cycle, more than other more prominent donors like Elon Musk and George Soros.
According to a report last week from the New York Times:
Already Andreessen Horowitz has put $47.5 million into the crypto super PAC network, Fairshake, since Election Day 2024. And the firm’s interests have expanded beyond crypto. It helped found Leading the Future, a super PAC network focused on electing pro-artificial intelligence legislators, which is modeled on Fairshake, and donated $50 million to it. Fairshake and Leading the Future both back Republicans and Democrats.
Andreessen Horowitz and its co-founders have also together donated $12 million to MAGA Inc., President Trump’s super PAC, including $6 million in March. A trust linked to Mr. Andreessen donated nearly $900,000 to the Republican National Committee that same month.
Andreessen's comments on Rogan's show inspired calls from progressive legislators, including Silicon Valley's Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who said it was an example of why Washington should "tax agentic AI more than workers" rather than providing tax breaks to companies that invest in AI infrastructure.
But the influence of tech oligarchs like Andreessen is also starting to unnerve some on the right, like the influential conservative pundit James Lindsay, who said he was getting "really sick of anti-human tech weirdos leading anything."
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'The Creep State Is Watching': Guerilla Art Project Takes on Big Tech's Power Grab
“These people and these companies need to continue to be exposed for all of the harm that they're causing and the real power that they have over our government and those governed,” one organizer said.
May 05, 2026
On their way to attend the Met Gala on Monday night, guests might have spotted a different image of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos than the one he tried to project by chairing the annual fundraiser: a poster featuring his bulbous head, looming over them out of the darkness, attached to a muscular spider-shaped body. Above it, a mysterious message: “The Creep State is watching.”
What does it mean?
The Creep State is an anonymous guerilla art and protest project that debuted in Austin, Texas during South by Southwest earlier this year. It is designed to draw people’s attention to the threat posed by Big Tech billionaires and their increasing influence over both the US government and the daily lives of everyone who interacts with their products.
“These individuals are a danger to all of us,” a DC-based organizer said.
What Is the Creep State?
The Creep State image of Jeff Bezos is shown. (Photo via Creep State)
The idea for the Creep State came from the desire to raise awareness about certain Silicon Valley oligarchs and their anti-democratic actions and aspirations. Participants in the project who spoke to Common Dreams asked to remain anonymous in keeping with the guerilla-style tactics of their effort.
“There's what is really a very small group of men who control these algorithms, who control the software, the hardware, and.. they are trying to initially infiltrate our government and eventually replace our government,” a Seattle-based organizer explained. “They've all been pretty clear about, you know, some version of, you know, a company town run by a CEO king.”
The project’s designers wanted to convey that “these specific individuals have very nefarious and creepy goals, and they are personally creeps,"—hence, the “creep state” framing.
“Whatever you do, see, hear, touch, say, feel, believe, dream, the Creep State is watching."
Currently, the project consists of a physical and digital element.
Volunteers wheatpaste posters of seven Silicon Valley kingpins—Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, and Marc Andreessen, drawn in cartoon style as B-movie monsters—in major US cities. To date, the images have been displayed in Austin, Seattle, DC, Palo Alto, the area around the Met Gala in New York, and Los Angeles, with more to come.
The posters include a QR code that leads to a website, including a video highlighting how these moguls' companies and products are already monitoring people’s daily activities, from surveillance pricing to sleep tracking.
“Whatever you do, see, hear, touch, say, feel, believe, dream, the Creep State is watching," the video declares, before concluding: “We’re fighting back.”
“These people and these companies need to continue to be exposed for all of the harm that they're causing and the real power that they have over our government and those governed,” the DC-based organizer said.
‘People Versus the Machines’
The Creep State image of Sam Altman is shown. (Photo via Creep State)
While there have been many different campaigns and critiques calling out Big Tech and the rise of AI in recent years, the creators of the Creep State took an artistic approach partly to grab people’s attention, to make something that “quite literally visually shocked people out of the normal way that they think about and talk about these guys,” as the Seattle-based organizer put it.
They added that they wanted a viewer’s first response upon seeing the art to be, “Woah!”
So far, it seems to be working.
When the art went up in Seattle ahead of the No Kings protest on March 28, “people walking by stopped and took pictures and were like, ‘Whoa, what is this about? Oh my God, is that Jeff Bezos? Whoa, is that Bill Gates?’” the Seattle organizer said.
A member of the team who put the posters up in DC on April 18 similarly recalled: “We had a young woman come up to us and ask us about the Creep State and said she was glad we were exposing these guys. She said she was from [Prince George's] County in Maryland and was part of the movement to stop data centers there.”
"Fundamentally the question that we face is will we allow one or a few of these corporations to literally remake our society?"
The project’s designers see themselves as operating within a tradition of guerilla art against the powerful from Banksy, Favianna Rodriguez, and Shepard Fairey's OBEY posters to student protests against Slobodan Milošević in Serbia in the 1990s and the FeesMustFall campaign in South Africa in the 2010s. However, the project—which made a point of working with actual human creators, including a screenwriter, comic book artist, and graphic designer—takes on extra resonance in an age in which AI slop clogs up social media feeds and threatens to put creative workers out of a job.
“This is very much a people versus the machines kind of thing,” the Seattle-based organizer said. “Are we going to be a society where human creativity and human inspiration and human thinking are valued, or are we going to be a world where.. we're all plugged into a screen?”
Bipartisan Appeal
The Creep State image of Peter Thiel is shown. (Photo via Creep State)
As the project uses an artistic approach to hook people who might otherwise ignore its messaging, it also crafts that messaging in an attempt to appeal to people who might not always agree politically.
The name “Creep State” was chosen in part for its similarity to “deep state,” which is often used on the political right to describe hidden actors undemocratically controlling the federal government. Some of the headlines highlighted in the introductory video were also selected to appeal to right-leaning viewers. (“Prayer apps: is AI playing God?” one reads.)
“Our assessment here is that we may have, and we very much do have, some very deep disagreements in a variety of ways with the right wing. But there is a very real grassroots right-wing opposition to the Silicon Valley takeover of our economy and our democracy. And we want to make sure that this is a campaign that different types of folks can see themselves reflected in,” the Seattle-based organizer said.
"Once they're burrowed in, it's going to be very difficult to root them out.”
Indeed, the rise of AI and the hyperscale data centers it relies on seems to have, at least so far, bypassed the usual culture war divides. As communities across the country have mobilized against the data center buildout, “you've got DSA people linking arms with, you know, like ultra-MAGA folks,” the Seattle organizer added.
The numbers reflect this, with around 50% of both Republicans and Democrats now saying they are more concerned than excited about AI and 55% of the politicians opposing data centers, which are often located in red states, being Republicans.
The embrace of AI and its Silicon Valley pushers may be one wedge between President Donald Trump and some of his supporters, as 75% of 2024 Trump voters think that AI should be regulated while the president himself has thrown his weight behind a plan to prohibit states from regulating AI at all.
Indeed, even as the Creep State’s developers reach out to Trump voters, they are clear that the Trump administration itself has escalated the Big Tech takeover of the US government, upping the urgency of their project.
Even before Trump was elected a second time around, Silicon Valley enabled his rise. Bezos sunk The Washington Post’s endorsement of his rival Kamala Harris, while Musk donated more than a quarter billion to back Trump's campaign. His Vice President JD Vance is a protege of Thiel, who has backed Trump since 2016.
Trump has repaid these Big Tech executives handsomely with access, money, and his deregulatory push. The DC-based organizer said they were partly inspired to get involved with the Creep State project after witnessing the havoc wreaked by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which cut funding for essential grants and may lead to the deaths of over 14 million through the shuttering of the US Agency for International Development. At the same time, tech billionaires have increased their profits by contracting with the government, enabling deportations via Immigration and Customs Enforcement and both surveillance and targeting via the Pentagon.
Yet the Seattle-based organizer said that some Trump supporters “are beginning to realize… that these guys don't care about Trump. Trump is a vehicle for them. And, you know, once they're burrowed in, it's going to be very difficult to root them out.”
‘We’re Fighting Back’
The Creep State image of Mark Zuckerberg is shown. (Photo via Creep State)
Ultimately the goal of the Creep State project is to plug everyone who sees and responds to the art—whatever their politics—into the growing movement to push back against the Big Tech power grab.
“The more we can expose these actors, it can inspire people to… organize against them, demand… oversight and regulations over AI and the influence that these individuals have on their politics,” the DC-based organizer said.
People who scan the QR code can be funneled into future wheatpasting sessions (which are all volunteer efforts) or local fights related to tech policy. One hope the organizers have is that communities across the country who are fighting data center construction or Flock camera expansion could order posters from the site that would have their QR codes adjusted to direct viewers to the local struggle.
“If we can plug people into some of those fights with organizations and for them to get more deeply involved, we'd love to do that,” the DC organizer said.
The Seattle organizer concluded, "Fundamentally the question that we face is will we allow one or a few of these corporations to literally remake our society?"
They continued: "We're all living through this polycrisis. The climate is collapsing, the economy is in tatters, we're at war abroad. There's something new and crazy every day, and it's hard to break through to people. So the hope is that this art specifically, in this way of highlighting both the like political creepiness and the personal creepiness of these guys, can maybe shock some people who otherwise are just trying to get through their day into, 'I need to do something.'"
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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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The Data Lords Are Taxing Our Water and Power to Build Their Castles
Data center dukes and barons appropriate land and resources while indirectly taxing the middle and lower class through higher utility bills.
Feb 22, 2026
Data centers are the modern equivalent of feudal castles. They dominate the landscape, consume resources, and aggregate power. Unlike medieval barons, though, today’s data dukes don’t live in their castles. Their “court” is in Washington and Silicon Valley, but they expect their local vassals to pay tribute through higher utility rates, water, and electricity consumption. A data center complex is being built near my home. I feel like my village is being colonized.
Data Centers have huge moats, which indirectly consume vast quantities of water, electricity, and land. I’d like to know—in addition to utility rate impacts—what their carbon footprint is over time. Yet, like a lot of non-tech-engaged citizens, I have more questions than answers.
“Unmitigated data center growth puts the public at risk of large cost increases, from higher utility bills to public health costs to climate impacts," according to a recent study by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a national nonprofit advocacy group. In Illinois alone, where I live, the UCS estimates that electric utility rates could soar:
- "From 2026 to 2050, data center load growth will increase electricity system costs in Illinois by $24 billion to $37 billion, or 15% to 24%."
- "Based on current trends, data centers will account for up to 72% of electricity demand growth in Illinois by 2030."
- "Overall electricity demand could increase by more than half by 2035. Data centers will still account for up to 65% of that growth by 2035 as electrification of other sectors starts to play a bigger role."
Data Centers typically have voracious electrical and water demands. They need huge amounts of electricity to power their citadel of computer servers and water to cool them. According to an analysis by CLC JAWA, the local water agency for Lake County, the proposed Grayslake data center near my home will use up to 1.6 billion (giga) watts of electricity in its first phase. When completed, the first phase will use about 50,000 gallons of water daily, which is roughly equivalent to an average-sized health and fitness club.
Worse yet, since there are no national or state regulations on data centers, their power consumption could increase the burning of fossil fuels (mostly coal and gas)
Yet the demand for water in the “T5” Grayslake data center around the corner from my home will spike when it pumps water into its “closed-loop” (recirculated) cooling system. Filling up that system—what the operators call a “flush and fill”—will require an estimated 3.2 million gallons over several days. Keep in mind that’s treated Lake Michigan water, which is not billed at a higher rate for industrial use. Will that outsize water consumption raise rates for residential water users? That’s not clear, although the combined water and power usage will be enormous for a 470 acre-complex (approved by the local village board) with up to 10 million total square feet in less than 20 buildings.
Worse yet, since there are no national or state regulations on data centers, their power consumption could increase the burning of fossil fuels (mostly coal and gas). That means more pollutants and greenhouse gases flowing into our atmosphere. At the very least, local residents need more detailed information on utility and environmental impact.
Across the border in Wisconsin, there’s been an outcry over lack of information on data castles. Meta, the holding company that owns Facebook and Instagram, has proposed a complex as big as 12 football fields in a city with a population of 16,000, reports Wisconsin Watch. It’s 1 of 7 major proposed data centers in Wisconsin that are worth more than $57 billion combined. Local governments in the Dairy State, though, which already has 40 data centers, have been reluctant to disclose details.
There’s also been pushback against data centers in New York state, where a tough data center law is being drafted. At least 19 have been cancelled in Michigan. Although action this year is unlikely, a stricter federal data center bill called the “Power for the People Act (S. 3682) was filed in the US Senate. The bill is supported by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Citizen’s Utility Board in Illinois.
Back in Illinois, legislators and environmentalists are mobilized. Gov. JB Pritzker announced a two-year pause on data center tax breaks in his recent budget address. In the Illinois General Assembly, the introduction of the POWER Act would set some guardrails on water use and environmental impact. It’s being sponsored by Prairie Rivers Network and the Clean Jobs Coalition.
The Illinois General Assembly is also considering data center regulation this year. “By requiring data centers to supply new carbon-free electricity resources,” the UCS report notes, “Illinois can protect other electricity consumers and stay consistent with its clean energy goals, while at the same time seeking improved federal policies.”
Data Center operators are concentrating their expansion in Great Lakes states because that’s where the water is: They need fresh water to cool their hot, thirsty servers. According to a new study by the University of Virginia:
At the end of 2024, the Great Lakes region was hosting approximately 20% of all US data centers and had 500+ operational facilities. By 2030, Illinois and Ohio together will account for about 50% of regional sites, and planned and under construction facilities will increase by 42% regionally. More than 95% of data centers are located in large or medium metro counties, anchored by Chicago, Columbus, New York City, and Minneapolis.
Unlike the legendary story of Robin of Locksley, who robbed the rich to give to the poor, data center dukes and barons appropriate land and resources while indirectly taxing the middle and lower class through higher utility bills. Yet these “reverse Robin Hoods” don’t do this on roads winding through dark forests. They do it in plain sight during daylight, although they hate the transparency of sunlight and community activism.
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Khanna Hits Back as Silicon Valley Oligarchs Threaten Primary Challenge Over California Billionaires Tax
"We cannot have a nation with extreme concentration of wealth in a few places, but where... healthcare, childcare, housing, education is unaffordable," the San Francisco lawmaker said.
Dec 28, 2025
US Rep. Ro Khanna defended California's proposed tax on extreme wealth Saturday after a pair of prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists threatened to launch a primary bid for his California House seat.
The proposal, which advocates are gathering signatures to place on the ballot in 2026, would impose a one-time 5% tax on those with net worths over $1 billion to recoup about $90 billion in Medicaid funds stripped from the state by this year’s Republican budget law. The roughly 200 billionaires affected would have five years to pay the tax.
While higher taxes on the superrich are overwhelmingly popular with Americans, the proposal has rankled many of California’s wealthiest residents, as well as California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said earlier this month that he’s “adamantly” against the measure.
On Friday, the New York Times reported that two of the valley's biggest powerbrokers—venture capitalist and top Trump administration ally Peter Thiel and Google co-founder Larry Page—were threatening to reduce their ties to California in response to the tax proposal.
This has been a common refrain from elites faced with proposed tax increases, though data suggests they rarely follow through on their threats to bail on cities and states, even when those hikes are implemented. Meanwhile, the American Prospect has pointed out that the one-time tax would still apply to those who moved out of the Golden State.
Khanna (D-Calif.), who is both a member of the House's progressive faction and a longtime darling of the tech sector, has increasingly sparred with industry leaders in recent years over their reactionary stances on labor rights, regulation, and taxation.
In a post on X, the congressman reacted with derision at the threats of billionaire flight: "Peter Thiel is leaving California if we pass a 1% tax on billionaires for five years to pay for healthcare for the working class facing steep Medicaid cuts. I echo what [former President Franklin D. Roosevelt] said with sarcasm of economic royalists when they threatened to leave, 'I will miss them very much.'"
Casado, who donated to Khanna’s 2024 reelection campaign according to OpenSecrets, complained that “Ro has done a speed run, alienating every moderate I know who has supported him, including myself.”
"Beyond being totally out of touch with [the moderate] faction of his base, he’s devolved into an obnoxious jerk," Casado continued. "At least that makes voting him the fuck out all the more gratifying."
Casado's post received a reply from another former Khanna donor, Garry Tan, the CEO of the tech startup accelerator Y Combinator.
"Time to primary him," Tan said of Khanna.
Tan, a self-described centrist Democrat, has never run for office before. But he is notorious for his social media tirades against local progressives in San Francisco and was one of the top financial backers of the corporate-led push to oust the city's liberal former district attorney, Chesa Boudin, in 2022.
Casado replied: "Count me in. Happy to be involved at any level."
Progressive commentator Krystal Ball marveled that “Tech oligarchs are now openly conspiring against Ro Khanna because he dared to back a modest wealth tax.”
So far, neither Casado nor Tan has hinted at any concrete plans to challenge Khanna in 2026. If they did, defeating him would likely be a tall order—since his sophomore election in 2018, a primary challenger has never come within 30 points of unseating him.
But Khanna still felt the need to respond to the brooding tech royals. He noted that he has "supported a modest wealth tax since the day I ran in 2016," which prompted another angry retort from Casado, who accused the congressman of "antagonizing the people who made your district the amazing place it is" with a tax on billionaires.
Khanna hit back at his critics with a lengthy defense of not just the wealth tax, but his conception of what he calls "pro-innovation progressivism."
"My district is $18 trillion, nearly one-third of the US stock market in a 50-mile radius. We have five companies with a market cap over $1 trillion," Khanna said. "If I can stand up for a billionaire tax, this is not a hard position for 434 other [House] members or 100 senators."
"The seminal innovation in tech is done by thousands, often with public funds," Khanna continued. "Yes, we need entrepreneurs to commercialize disruptive innovation... But the idea that they would not start companies to make billions, or take advantage of an innovation cluster, if there is a 1-2% tax on their staggering wealth defies common sense and economic theory."
"We cannot have a nation with extreme concentration of wealth in a few places, but where 70% of Americans believe the American dream is dead and healthcare, childcare, housing, education is unaffordable," he concluded. "What will stifle American innovation, what will make us fall behind China, is if we see further political dysfunction and social unrest, if we fail to cultivate the talent in every American and in every city and town... So, yes, a billionaire tax is good for American innovation, which depends on a strong and thriving American democracy."
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Billionaire Palantir Co-Founder Pushes Return of Public Hangings as Part of 'Masculine Leadership' Initiative
"Immaturity masquerading as strength is the defining personal characteristic of our age," said one critic in response.
Dec 07, 2025
Venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of data platform company Palantir, is calling for the return of public hangings as part of a broader push to restore what he describes as "masculine leadership" to the US.
In a statement posted on X Friday, Lonsdale said that he supported changing the so-called "three strikes" anti-crime law to ensure that anyone who is convicted of three violent crimes gets publicly executed, rather than simply sent to prison for life.
"If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law," he wrote. "We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others."
Lonsdale then added that "our society needs balance," and said that "it's time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable."
Lonsdale's views on public hangings being necessary to restore "masculine leadership" drew swift criticism.
Gil Durán, a journalist who documents the increasingly authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley in his newsletter "The Nerd Reich," argued in a Saturday post that Lonsdale's call for public hangings showed that US tech elites are "entering a more dangerous and desperate phase of radicalization."
"For months, Peter Thiel guru Curtis Yarvin has been squawking about the need for more severe measures to cement Trump's authoritarian rule," Durán explained. "Peter Thiel is ranting about the Antichrist in a global tour. And now Lonsdale—a Thiel protégé—is fantasizing about a future in which he will have the power to unleash state violence at mass scale."
Taulby Edmondson, an adjunct professor of history, religion, and culture at Virginia Tech, wrote in a post on Bluesky that the rhetoric Lonsdale uses to justify the return of public hangings has even darker intonations than calls for state-backed violence.
"A point of nuance here: 'masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable' is how lynch mobs are described, not state-sanctioned executions," he observed.
Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll argued that Lonsdale's remarks were symbolic of a kind of performative masculinity that has infected US culture.
"Immaturity masquerading as strength is the defining personal characteristic of our age," he wrote.
Tech entrepreneur Anil Dash warned Lonsdale that his call for public hangings could have unintended consequences for members of the Silicon Valley elite.
"Well, Joe, Mark Zuckerberg has sole control over Facebook, which directly enabled the Rohingya genocide," he wrote. "So let’s have the conversation."
And Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin noted that Lonsdale has been a major backer of the University of Austin, an unaccredited liberal arts college that has been pitched as an alternative to left-wing university education with the goal of preparing "thoughtful and ethical innovators, builders, leaders, public servants and citizens through open inquiry and civil discourse."
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Trump's Golden Dome Will Fail at Everything But Enriching Arms Contractors
Job number one in rolling back the Golden Dome boondoggle is simply making it clear that no missile defense system will protect us in the event of a nuclear attack.
Nov 17, 2025
Kathryn Bigelow’s new nuclear thriller, A House of Dynamite, has been criticized by some experts for being unrealistic, most notably because it portrays an unlikely scenario in which an adversary chooses to attack the United States with just a single nuclear-armed missile. Such a move would, of course, leave the vast American nuclear arsenal largely intact and so invite a devastating response that would undoubtedly largely destroy the attacker’s nation. But the film is strikingly on target when it comes to one thing: its portrayal of the way one US missile interceptor after another misses its target, despite the confidence of most American war planners that they would be able to destroy any incoming nuclear warhead and save the day.
At one point in the film, a junior official points out that US interceptors have failed almost half their tests, and the secretary of defense responds by bellowing: “That’s what $50 billion buys us?”
In fact, the situation is far worse than that. We taxpayers, whether we know it or not, are betting on a house of dynamite, gambling on the idea that technology will save us in the event of a nuclear attack. The United States has, in fact, spent more than $350 billion on missile defenses since, more than four decades ago, President Ronald Reagan promised to create a leak-proof defense against incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Believe it or not, the Pentagon has yet to even conduct a realistic test of the system, which would involve attempting to intercept hundreds of warheads traveling at 1,500 miles per hour, surrounded by realistic decoys that would make it hard to even know which objects to target.
Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists has pointed out that the dream of a perfect missile defense—the very thing President Donald Trump has promised that his cherished new “Golden Dome” system will be—is a “fantasy” of the first order, and that “missile defenses are not a useful or long-term strategy for defending the United States from nuclear weapons.”
Trump’s pledge to fund contractors to build a viable Golden Dome system in three years is PR or perhaps PF (presidential fantasy), not realistic planning.
Grego is hardly alone in her assessment. A March 2025 report by the American Physical Society found that “creating a reliable and effective defense against even [a] small number of relatively unsophisticated nuclear-armed ICBMs remains a daunting challenge.” Its report also notes that “few of the main challenges involved in developing and deploying a reliable and effective missile defense have been solved, and… many of the hard problems we identified are likely to remain so during and probably beyond” the 15-year time horizon envisioned in their study.
Despite the evidence that it will do next to nothing to defend us, President Trump remains all in on the Golden Dome project. Perhaps what he really has in mind, however, has little to do with actually defending us. So far, Golden Dome seems like a marketing concept designed to enrich arms contractors and burnish Trump’s image rather than a carefully thought-out defense program.
Contrary to both logic and history, Trump has claimed that his supposedly leak-proof system can be produced in a mere three years for $175 billion. While that’s a serious chunk of change, analysts in the field suggest that the cost is likely to be astronomically higher and that the president’s proposed timeline is, politely put, wildly optimistic. Todd Harrison, a respected Pentagon budget analyst currently based at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, estimates that such a system would cost somewhere between $252 billion and $3.6 trillion over 20 years, depending on its design. Harrison’s high-end estimate is more than 20 times the off-hand price tossed out by President Trump.
As for the president’s proposed timeline of three years, it’s wildly out of line with the Pentagon’s experience with other major systems it’s developed. More than three decades after it was proposed as a possible next-generation fighter jet (under the moniker Joint Strike Fighter, or JSF), for example, the F-35, once touted as a “revolution in military procurement,” is still plagued by hundreds of defects, and the planes spend almost half their time in hangars for repair and maintenance.
Proponents of the Golden Dome project argue that it’s now feasible because of new technologies being developed in Silicon Valley, from artificial intelligence to quantum computing. Those claims are, of course, unproven, and past experience suggests that there is no miracle technological solution to complex security threats. AI-driven weapons may be quicker to locate and destroy targets and capable of coordinating complex responses like swarms of drones. But there is no evidence that AI can help solve the problem of blocking hundreds of fast-flying warheads embedded in a cloud of decoys. Worse yet, a missile defense system needs to work perfectly each and every time if it is to provide leak-proof protection against a nuclear catastrophe, an inconceivable standard in the real world of weaponry and defensive systems.
Of course, the weapons contractors salivating at the prospect of a monstrous payday tied to the development of Golden Dome are well aware that the president’s timeline will be quite literally unmeetable. Lockheed Martin has optimistically suggested that it should be able to perform the first test of a space-based interceptor in 2028, three years from now. And such space-based interceptors have been suggested as a central element of the Golden Dome system. In other words, Trump’s pledge to fund contractors to build a viable Golden Dome system in three years is PR or perhaps PF (presidential fantasy), not realistic planning.
Who Will Benefit from the Golden Dome?
The major contractors for Golden Dome may not be revealed for a few months, but we already know enough to be able to take an educated guess about which companies are likely to play central roles in the program.
The administration has said that Golden Dome will be built on existing hardware and the biggest current producers of missile defense hardware are Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon (a major part of RTX Corporation). So, count on at least two of the three of them. Emerging military tech firms like SpaceX and Anduril have also been mentioned as possible system integrators. In other words, one or more of them would help coordinate development of the Golden Dome and provide detection and targeting software for it. The final choice for such an extremely lucrative role is less than certain, but as of now Anduril seems to have an inside track.
Even after the breakup of the Donald Trump-Elon Musk bromance, the tech industry still has a strong influence over the administration, starting with Vice President JD Vance. He was, after all, employed and mentored by Peter Thiel of Palantir, the godfather of the recent surge of military research and financing in Silicon Valley. Thiel was also a major donor to his successful 2022 Senate campaign, and Vance was charged with fundraising in Silicon Valley during the 2024 presidential campaign. Emerging military tech moguls like Thiel and Palmer Luckey, along with their financiers like Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, view Vance as their man in the White House.
Should the Golden Dome system indeed be launched (at a staggering cost to the American taxpayer), its “gold” would further enrich already well-heeled weapons contractors, give us a false sense of security, and let Donald Trump pose as this country’s greatest defender ever.
Other military tech supporters in the Trump administration include Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg, whose company, Cerberus Capital, has a long history of investing in military contractors and is already pressing to reduce regulations on weapons firms in line with Silicon Valley’s wish list; Michael Obadal, a senior director at the military tech firm Anduril, who is now deputy secretary of the Army; Gregory Barbaccia, the former head of intelligence and investigations at Palantir, who is now the federal government’s chief information officer; Undersecretary of State Jacob Helberg, a former executive at Palantir; and numerous key members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which took a wrecking ball to civilian bodies like the US Agency for International Development while sparing the Pentagon significant cuts.
Some analysts foresee a funding fight in the offing between those Silicon Valley military tech firms and the Big Five firms (Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and RTX) that now dominate Pentagon contracting. But the Golden Dome project will have room for major players from both factions and may prove one area where the old guard and the Silicon Valley military tech crew join hands to lobby for maximum funding.
The nation’s premier defense firms and missile manufacturers will likely enjoy direct access to Golden Dome, since the project is expected to be headquartered in Huntsville, Alabama, the “Pentagon of the South.” That self-described “Rocket City” houses the US Missile Defense Agency and a myriad of defense firms (including Lockheed Martin, RTX, General Dynamics, and Boeing). It will also soon host the new Space Force headquarters.
While Huntsville has been a hub for missile defense since President Ronald Reagan’s failed ICBM defense efforts, what makes this placement particularly likely is the significance of Huntsville’s Republican representatives in Congress, particularly Rep. Dale Strong. “North Alabama has played a key role in every former and current US missile defense program and will undoubtedly be pivotal to the success of Golden Dome,” he explained, having received $337,600 in campaign contributions from the defense sector during the 2023-2024 election cycle and cofounded the House Golden Dome Caucus.
His advocacy for the project dovetails well with the power vested in House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (also from Alabama), who received $535,000 from the defense sector during the 2024 campaign. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Katie Boyd Britt, a member of the Senate Golden Dome Caucus, round out Alabama’s Republican Senate delegation.
Many of the leading boosters of the Golden Dome represent states like Alabama or districts that stand to benefit from the program. The bicameral congressional Golden Dome caucuses include numerous members from states already enmeshed in missile production, including North Dakota and Montana, which house ICBMs built and maintained by Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, among other companies.
Those same weapons companies have long been donating generously to political campaigns. And only recently, to curry favor and prove themselves worthy of Golden Dome’s lucrative contracts, Palantir and Booz Allen Hamilton joined Lockheed Martin in donating millions of dollars to President Trump’s new ballroom that is to replace the White House’s devastated East Wing. And expect further public displays of financial affection from arms companies awaiting the administration’s final verdict on Golden Dome contracts, which will likely be announced in early 2026.
The Gold of the Golden Dome
Golden Dome is already slated to receive nearly $40 billion in the next year when funds from President Trump’s “big beautiful bill” and the administration’s budget request for Fiscal Year 2026 are taken into account. The 2026 request for Golden Dome is more than twice the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and three times the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, essential pillars of any effort to prevent new pandemics or address the challenges of the climate crisis. In addition, Golden Dome will undoubtedly siphon into the military sector significant numbers of scientists and engineers who might otherwise be trying to solve environmental and public health problems, undermining this country’s ability to deal with the greatest threats to our lives and livelihoods to fund a defense system that will never actually be able to defend us.
Worse yet, Golden Dome is likely to be more than just a waste of money. It could also accelerate the nuclear arms race between the US, Russia, and China. If, as is often the case, US adversaries prepare for worst-case scenarios, they are likely to make their plans based on the idea that Golden Dome just might work, which means they’ll increase their offensive forces to ensure that, in a nuclear confrontation, they are able to overwhelm any new missile defense network. It was precisely this sort of offensive-defensive arms race that the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of the era of President Richard Nixon was designed to prevent. That agreement was, however, abandoned by President George W. Bush.
A no less dangerous aspect of any future involving the Golden Dome would be the creation of a new set of space-based interceptors as an integral part of the system. An interceptor in space may not actually be able to block a barrage of nuclear warheads, but it would definitely be capable of taking out civilian and military satellites, which travel in predictable orbits. If the unspoken agreement not to attack such satellites were ever to be lifted, basic functions of the global economy (not to speak of the US military) would be at risk. Not only could attacks on satellites bring the global economy to a grinding halt, but they could also spark a spiral of escalation that might, in the end, lead to the use of nuclear weapons.
Should the Golden Dome system indeed be launched (at a staggering cost to the American taxpayer), its “gold” would further enrich already well-heeled weapons contractors, give us a false sense of security, and let Donald Trump pose as this country’s greatest defender ever. Sadly, fantasies die hard, so job number one in rolling back the Golden Dome boondoggle is simply making it clear that no missile defense system will protect us in the event of a nuclear attack, a point made well by A House of Dynamite. The question is: Can our policymakers be as realistic in their assessment of missile defense as the makers of a major Hollywood movie? Or is that simply too much to ask?
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