Democracy's dirty little trick: You get the blame. The powerful get their way.



We the People.

Three of the most famous words in American history. They’re a source of pride for every red-blooded American patriot. Why? What exactly do those words symbolize?

What is the first thing people do when the president, or a senator, or a local mayor whom you voted for does something 'bad'? They blame you for voting for him.

Believing in “we” is believing that we are in charge of our own destiny. It means that an American citizen believes that he or she possesses ultimate sovereignty. That we make the rules. Not some king or a small cabal of powerful men pulling the strings.

That is the story we tell ourselves. It is the belief in the power of popular sovereignty or, in plainer terms, democracy. As a nation of individual sovereigns, we come together every few years and “make our voices heard” by casting ballots for representatives who we then demand represent our best interests.

This idea, I argue, is just one big myth.

Who decides?

Specifically, the myth is the belief that we, the people, have any meaningful say in how our government actually gets picked or what it actually does.

I sincerely ask anyone reading this to ask themselves: Who actually picks and runs our government?

Is it you? Are you getting weekly progress reports mail-delivered to you by the Trump administration? Or are you personally funding the campaign expenses for a 2028 Republican primary contender?

No. You’re not.

So the question is, what exactly is the mechanism that drives all the logistics, funding, and management of our political apparatus?

The short answer is capital (and capital interests). Capital is the engine behind democracy. It is what finds and bankrolls new political candidates, helps staff their administrations, and politically pressures them in the media. And when ordinary persuasion isn't enough, those with money and influence have other ways of getting what they want. Crazy concept, I know.

What makes someone else “more” equal than you in a democracy where everyone’s voice is supposed to count the same?

Capital. Money talks. Bulls**t walks.

A feature, not a bug

I can already picture the eyerolls and the groans.

“What an obvious statement! Just get the money out of politics!” —Disgruntled Reader

If your solution to our problems in government is “getting money out of politics” so that we can get back to voting even harder in the next election cycle, then you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of democracy itself, which needs to be corrected at this very moment.

The mistake is in thinking our democracy is corrupt. It is not corrupt. Corruption implies a malfunction, a deviation from the design. There is no malfunction here. It is working as it is intended to work.

“But you have it all wrong! Our country isn’t even a democracy! It’s a republic!”

Yeah, that’s not the own that you think it is. Sure, our system is a representative democracy, a republic. But what do you think a republic is exactly? Who have our “representatives” historically been expected to “stand up” to? The big monopolies. Banks. Big Oil. Big Tech. That's not by accident.

Putting the customer first

And ask the obvious follow-up: Why does it always seem like our “representatives” fail to stand up to them? It’s because the real power doesn’t belong to the guy working a 9-to-5 standing in line at the polling station. The real power belongs to the class of people who bankroll the candidates on the ballot.

Think it through. If the candidate you’re voting for was brought to your attention in the first place by a big, mysteriously acquired pile of money, then who is the candidate actually working for? It’s not rocket science. It’s a simple 2+2 equation. It’s not that the republic is failing or that it’s corrupt. The republic is a machine that, whatever its stated ideals, gives people with money advantages that the rest of us can scarcely imagine.

Take a guy like Jeffrey Epstein, for example. Where would you say his power come from? Here’s a hint: It wasn’t from “making his voice heard” like every other schlub. He owned Little St. James, a private Caribbean island, and Zorro Ranch in New Mexico, where he reportedly entertained a bizarre scheme to impregnate multiple women with his own sperm. He had connections to powerful figures like Les Wexner and Bill Gates, and he maintained relationships in the highest reaches of business, politics, and academia even after his 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor.

Does any of that prove theories that Epstein controlled politicians through blackmail? No. But consider the extraordinary access he enjoyed. How many doors could a man like that open with a telephone call that would remain permanently shut to the average voter?

Ask yourself: Do you have access to these resources? No? Then how do you stand a chance of demanding accountability from your representatives when your only instruments are voting and protesting, while the instruments of capital include campaign contributions, lobbying, personal connections, and financial pressure?

RELATED: Why ‘Christian nationalists’ are liberals — whether they realize it or not

UCG/Getty Images

Hope without change

The point is this: What America promises its people is a lie. Republics, whatever their promises to the “little guy,” have always given enormous advantages to the “big guys.” The little guy gets a delusion of hope and a sense of control, while the wheels keep turning for the people with real influence.

And if this is true, then what exactly would be the point of your vote? Why do the big dogs put on such an elaborate song and dance just to get you out to the polling stations? Why do they need you to buy this trash they’re selling about voting harder and harder every election cycle?

Well, think about the psychological effect of casting a ballot. You feel like you have done your civic duty. You feel like this is the one corner of your life where you have some semblance of agency, where you are truly demonstrating the power of the people.

That feeling is the entire product. It is the exact feeling the capital class wants you to experience and internalize. Because ownership comes with something else attached: responsibility.

Scape-vote

“Responsibility?”

What’s the first thing people do when the president, or a senator, or a local mayor whom you voted for does something “bad”? They blame you for voting for him. What’s the first thing you do when a Democrat politician does something “bad”? You relish the opportunity to clown your liberal family, friends, or acquaintances.

“Those idiot liberals voted for this!”

Now, in reality, what does all this constant bickering, finger-pointing, and blame-shifting actually accomplish?

It takes the heat off the people who actually have and use their very real power to do the bad things. It shifts the blame from them and puts it all squarely on you. And that is because you, the voter, voluntarily take responsibility for it. Your belief in the central thesis of democracy — that you are the one with power — makes you take on the responsibility that comes with that perceived power.

Do you see the trick yet?

The elites are using you as a scapegoat. And I mean that in the oldest sense of the word. On the Day of Atonement, the high priest laid both hands on the head of a goat, confessed over it the sins of the people, and sent it out into the wilderness to carry those sins away. The community was cleansed. The goat was left to bear the burden.

That is what the idea we call “democracy” lets them do. They commit their sins, lay their hands on your head every November, and send you out into the wilderness to bear them. Democracy isn't the House of the People. It's Solomon's Temple. It’s the place where the priest unloads his sins onto the scapegoat and walks away cleansed while you carry the blame.

Silicon Valley has a Dostoevsky problem



Earlier this year, something startling happened: Leading technologists at the AI frontier turned fretfully for guidance to a devout Orthodox Christian. A Silicon Valley book club tackled Fyodor Dostoevsky’s notoriously daunting novel “Demons” (also translated as “The Possessed”). Then an anonymous writer published an extraordinarily long essay on the book’s premonitions of what happens when human beings fall into falsely illuminated fanaticism. The author saw in Dostoevsky a warning for the people building artificial intelligence.

Verily, I thought, an enormous can of worms had been opened.

Technique and intelligence, severed from the disciplined heart, become hollow and ultimately self-destructive.

Orthodox Christianity is, in essential ways, the opposite of the power-hungry posthumanism animating so much of tech’s increasingly overt spirituality. The posthumanist dreams of a disembodied intellect mastering existence. Orthodoxy calls us to put our embodied intellect to work cleansing the heart, that the Holy Spirit of the loving Master of existence might dwell there.

The anonymous writer stumbled over the Gospel account of the Gadarene swine. Christ casts out Legion, permitting the demons to enter a herd of pigs that rushes to its destruction. Rather than welcome the man’s deliverance, the townspeople beg Christ to leave as if nothing had ever happened. Yet the essay concludes that “demons are not external enemies but our own capacities turned against us” and that they “must possess us fully” before we can be healed.

Not a great start. The temptation to mislearn even the plainest lesson is strong among people unacquainted with the embodied practices through which Christians slowly and humbly welcome Christ. But self-mastery had become a keyword among tech leaders watching crackpot woo one-shot more employees and founders. Anyone earnestly seeking self-mastery will eventually collide with Christian asceticism. I took stock of the development in “The Dostoevskian Moment.”

Lo and behold, last weekend Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, published a sprawling 24-paragraph meditation on another Dostoevsky novel, “The Brothers Karamazov.” He confessed that he had not loved the book, but ended by asking how analyses of a nation’s soul ought to relate to its major novels and works of art. His post inadvertently exposed the limits of intellectual examination conducted at a distance from the quiet experience of the heart.

Then another tech founder, Delphi’s José Maria Macedo, answered Collison with something beautiful. Father Zosima, he observed, teaches that love dreamed of can indulge fantasies of grandeur, while active love is “harsh and dreadful,” requiring labor and patience. Macedo finds that love in Alyosha, whose goodness persists through ordinary humiliations, cruelty, and grief.

RELATED:‘Don’t be evil’ may be dead, but ‘don’t be Frankenstein’ is alive

Leontura/Getty Images

Collison’s reading, Macedo suggested, resembled Ivan Karamazov’s impulse to put life on trial before the intellect. Alyosha offers another way: a life that cannot be reached through rationality alone. Macedo cannot explain how God allows evil, including the suffering of children. Yet Dostoevsky makes him want to become more like the man who answers suffering with love. That, Macedo wrote, is why “The Brothers Karamazov” is his favorite novel.

Macedo has grasped something his fellow technologists desperately need. Technique and intelligence, severed from the disciplined heart, become hollow and ultimately self-destructive. Like the snake eating its own tail, they cannibalize life rather than return humbly to its inexhaustible wellspring.

At a moment when tech is increasingly transfixed by the desperate quest to “align” AIs with an all-too-human utopian agenda, Dostoevsky’s call to first align our own personal will with God’s grows steadily louder.

Democrats may ride a blue wave on a red script



Democrats are poised for a good night on November 3. The only question is how far into Republican territory their gains will reach. Yet unlike the Democratic waves of 2006, 2008, and 2018, this election has no unmistakable leftward pull. Watch the ads. Democrats are attacking Republicans on issues that conservatives should own.

Trump won Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Ohio, and Texas by double digits in 2024. Now Republicans must defend Senate seats in every one of them, along with North Carolina, which Trump also carried. Georgia, another Trump state, has a Democratic incumbent senator that Republicans appear unlikely to unseat. Some of the fiercest contests are unfolding where the GOP should be cruising.

Trump’s endorsements helped protect milquetoast incumbents from serious primary challenges. Now Republicans must spend millions defending them. It’s political malpractice.

Does this mean voters have embraced the left? The Democratic Party’s commercials suggest the opposite. They seldom lead with abortion, transgender ideology, or illegal immigration, though those issues will surely figure in their governing agenda. Instead, Democrats attack inflation, health care costs, insider trading, data centers, Big Tech surveillance, and the Epstein scandal. Some of these spots would fit comfortably in a conservative primary.

We’re losing an election for things we don’t even believe in. Republicans embraced the cost of living as the “golden economy” while Democrats run on affordability, corruption, and opposition to corporate favors. Voters hear one party attacking powerful interests and another defending them. Guess which one holds the White House?

Take Texas. James Talarico, the radical leftist running against Ken Paxton, recently attacked Paxton for tax breaks and campaign donations tied to data centers that are “selling off Texas — our land, our water, our communities.” Talarico also promoted an ad calling out Biden for “failing us on the border” and promising to put Texas first. I could have written those attacks against a corporatist Republican myself!

In Ohio, former Senator Sherrod Brown (D) casts Republican attacks on transgender issues as distractions from gas prices, groceries, and health care. He goes after Senator Jon Husted (R) for promoting data centers across Ohio. Rather than defending their cultural agenda, Democrats make Republicans look like the ones obsessing over it while families struggle.

Independent Dan Osborn is doing something similar against Sen. Pete Ricketts (R) in Nebraska. His ads tie Ricketts to Epstein, challenge the importation of foreign beef over Nebraska cattle, and promote right-to-repair laws — a cause I have championed while few Republicans joined me. Osborn also condemns Ricketts’ vote to pardon a convicted rapist who had already served his prison sentence. That is a political opening no tough-on-crime conservative should offer.

RELATED: Democrats have a political violence problem

Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images

I have no faith in Osborn to govern as a conservative. But why hand him those openings? He is hammering Ricketts over sprawling data centers and casting himself as the champion of farmers and ranchers. The Senate Leadership Fund is pouring another $8 million into Nebraska, a state Trump won by 20 points.

Trump’s endorsements helped protect milquetoast incumbents from serious primary challenges. Now Republicans must spend millions defending them. It’s political malpractice.

In Kansas, Democrats are running an ad condemning Sen. Roger Marshall (R) for voting against releasing Epstein files and quoting his remark that the matter was “not of much interest to me.” Trump won Kansas by 16 points. The state hasn't elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. Yet a toxic mix of corporate baggage, scandal, and a rudderless Republican agenda has put even this seat in play.

Campaigns have aired more than 160 different Epstein-related ads this cycle, backed by more than $35 million in airtime, according to CNN’s analysis of AdImpact data. Democrats have found an issue that lets them sound like the outsiders demanding accountability while Republicans defend the status quo.

The same pattern holds in Georgia. Incumbent Democrat Jon Ossoff is attacking Flock cameras and Big Tech surveillance, issues most Blaze readers would recognize as legitimate threats to liberty. I don’t trust Ossoff to get them right. But my kind of Republican would never give him such an easy target. Why did the GOP?

RELATED: On ‘Meet the Press,’ El-Sayed denied his family's ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Hours later, the receipts landed.

Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images

Michigan offers another example. Abdul El-Sayed, perhaps the Democrats’ most radical Senate nominee, isn’t running ads about making the Muslim Brotherhood great again. He’s attacking Republican Mike Rogers for promoting government surveillance and saying officials would love to get “one-tenth of what Google has on you.” Once again, Democrats have seized ground conservatives should occupy.

Then comes Iran. The war has battered energy prices and supply chains. Trump opened with two weeks of bombing and failed to plan for Iran's predictable disruption of the Strait of Hormuz. Even from a hawkish perspective, what meaningful objectives did he accomplish? That is another glass jaw Republicans did not need to inherit.

After Nov. 3, conservatives will face a long conversation about what went wrong. No single issue explains it. For two years, the movement has been pimping Big Tech, protecting Epstein, defending corporate welfare, and selling an economic message that bears little resemblance to what voters experience. None of that is inherent in conservative principles.

Democrats may be on the cusp of a blue wave, but they’ve written it with a red script. If conservatives refuse to learn, Democrats will repeat the performance in 2028 while Trump remains president. We need to break out of the paralysis of the Trump era and write our own script — so we can finally win or lose on what we believe.

Is your car reading your texts? Only the auto industry knows for sure



Your car may know more about you than you realize.

A series of federal lawsuits involving Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen, General Motors, and Ford alleged that vehicle infotainment systems downloaded and permanently stored private text messages and call logs from phones connected to the car.

For some users, GM collected precise location information as often as every three seconds.

The cases were dismissed. But not because a court established that the technology couldn't do what the plaintiffs claimed.

Disappearing data

In the GM case, for example, the district court said the plaintiffs had not alleged sufficient injury under Washington's privacy law. It also noted that they had not alleged GM itself reviewed, used, or even had the ability to retrieve the data stored in the vehicle.

So the case did not establish that GM was secretly reading drivers’ texts. But neither did the dismissal answer the underlying technological question. The plaintiffs alleged that the infotainment system itself automatically downloaded and stored text messages and call logs from connected phones, and the court did not rule that this collection wasn’t happening.

That uncertainty is part of what makes modern connected cars so difficult for consumers to understand. Your phone talks to your car. Your car talks to manufacturer servers. Companion apps talk to still more companies.

Figuring out exactly what information is moving — and where it ends up — can be surprisingly difficult.

A new study from researchers at Northeastern University and Consumer Reports gives us a better idea.

Researchers tested 21 late-model vehicles and 30 companion smartphone apps. Nineteen of the 21 vehicles contacted at least one outside third party over Wi-Fi. The recipients included some of the biggest technology companies in the world.

The phone apps created even more connections.

Seven of the 30 apps transmitted sensitive identifiers such as VINs, email addresses, phone numbers, or precise location to companies associated with advertising and analytics. Researchers also found that pairing a manufacturer's app with the vehicle could substantially increase the number of outside companies receiving data.

And then we get to insurance.

Driver's dossier

General Motors provides one of the clearest documented examples of what can happen once driving data leaves the car.

GM offered a feature called OnStar Smart Driver that let customers monitor their driving habits.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, GM and OnStar were also collecting precise location and driving-behavior information from millions of vehicles and selling that information to third parties, including consumer-reporting agencies.

The data could get remarkably specific.

The FTC said it included hard braking, speeding, and late-night driving. For some users, GM collected precise location information as often as every three seconds.

Consumer-reporting agencies including LexisNexis and Verisk then used GM driving data to compile reports on individual drivers. The FTC says insurance companies used those reports to set rates and, in some cases, deny coverage.

We aren't talking about targeted ads or some mysterious data broker knowing which coffee shop you visit. We're talking about directly influencing what you pay for car insurance.

One consumer complained to GM that when he signed up, he understood that OnStar would track him. He had not understood that the information could be passed along to a third party and affect his insurance bill.

GM has since shut down Smart Driver and ended its telematics relationships with LexisNexis and Verisk. The company said it discontinued the program following customer feedback.

The FTC didn't stop there. In January, it finalized an order requiring GM to obtain affirmative consent before collecting or sharing certain connected-vehicle data and barring the company for five years from sharing covered geolocation and driver-behavior information with consumer-reporting agencies.

RELATED: 6 modern car technologies that make driving worse

Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

Behind the screens

That's harder to answer than you might expect.

The Northeastern researchers built a Faraday enclosure at Consumer Reports' Connecticut test facility to block cellular signals and isolate the Wi-Fi traffic coming from the vehicles. They then watched where the cars and their companion apps tried to connect.

While they could identify many of the companies receiving traffic, they couldn't always see what was inside it; much of the communication was encrypted.

That is not evidence that every transmission contained sensitive personal information. It does mean even researchers specifically studying the problem sometimes can't tell exactly what information is moving between a modern car and the companies it contacts.

For the owner, there is even less visibility.

You buy the car. You download the app. You agree to the terms. Maybe you activate remote start, navigation, emergency assistance, or one of the dozens of other connected features now built into new vehicles.

Most people aren't thinking about the advertising and analytics companies behind the screen.

Why would they be?

Connected works both ways

None of this means connected-car technology is inherently bad.

Emergency assistance needs to know where your vehicle is. Navigation requires location. An app that lets you start the car remotely obviously has to communicate with it.

But there is a big difference between collecting information necessary to provide a feature and allowing that information to begin circulating through an ecosystem the owner barely knows exists.

And consumers shouldn't have to become privacy lawyers to discover the difference.

Before activating connected services, I would want to know some fairly basic things.

What is the car collecting?

Who gets it?

Can they sell or share it?

Can I turn the collection off?

And could any of this wind up in a consumer report used to make decisions about me?

For years, the connected car was sold as safer, smarter, and more convenient, and maybe it is. Just remember: The connection works both ways.

It’s a big deal that the landmark new AI agreement is shockingly uneventful



Trump’s recent assembly of many of the very top people in AI must be counted among the most momentous political occasions in U.S. history — and perhaps human history. It comes at a time of extreme instability, uncertainty, and acceleration.

Even — or especially — those at the summit of tech and politics are unclear on what is going to happen and why. But they do know one thing: The nature of ultimate power on Earth is changing, and they are positioned to receive more of that power than almost anyone else.

Laws will not save us. Algorithms will not save us. Mere adherence to the letter of any code, however intelligently written, will not save us.

Power does not arrive alone. Rapidly acquiring unprecedented power brings anxiety, pressure, exhaustion, confusion, and the temptation to mistake possession for mastery.

The important thing about this is precisely that it is an experience. To deal with the consequences of a profound infusion of power is to plunge into the mysterious depths of being — the realm philosophers call ontology — in stark contrast to epistemology, the realm of knowing.

Power reminds us that knowledge arises from being, not the other way around.

For anyone operating at the highest levels of tech and politics, that reminder is crucial. Decades of bad modern philosophy and overzealous nerdery have encouraged the opposite idea: that being arises from knowledge.

That fake news is bad news. It feeds the fear that we have poured so much knowledge into machines that they are about to spring to life as an altogether new form of being — uncreated by God, no less — that will instantly dwarf and dominate us.

Yet one prominent techno-utopian belief treats the same prospect as good news, almost literally a new gospel. In this telling, the machine is not merely a rival life form. It becomes the vehicle for a new man. Rather than dwarfing and dominating us, the alien intelligence will fuse with us, becoming in effect a new god and a new soul, transforming us into Adam 2.0.

People who recoil from that prospect, and fear it could become real, are scrambling to fight or slow it through new law. The impulse is understandable. But it carries the seeds of its own failure.

RELATED: America’s ‘AI czar’ could revolutionize our form of government

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Christians know there are sharp limits to what lawgiving can accomplish. St. Paul wrote that, having died to what bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit rather than the old way of the written code (Romans 7:6). He also wrote that God “has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant — not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6).

Paul’s point is spiritual, but it bears directly on our technological confusion. Treat lawgiving as the highest activity of man and God, and you begin to imagine that being arises from knowledge. If being arises from knowledge, then creating knowledge can create being — as if the Golem of Prague or Frankenstein’s monster could be brought to life by sufficient information.

That is not life. It is a parody of life: death pretending to be life and producing more death.

At the intersection of unprecedented technological and political power, we have to remember that epistemology is downstream, not upstream, of ontology.

That is why the new “White House Accord on Super Intelligence,” signed by Trump and six of the industry’s most powerful executives, is so momentously uneventful. The companies say they “should implement” four basic layers of controls and audits: robust internal safety controls; an empowered internal team to make sure those controls work; an independent external auditor or evaluator; and an independent board committee to oversee the whole structure and make sure problems are fixed.

That’s it.

RELATED: Now they’re saying the AIs built ‘secret civilizations’ — the truth is far worse

Ole_CNX/Getty Images

The accord adds that the companies will meet regularly to establish standards and best practices. “Over time,” it concludes, “it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations.” But for now, no. Basically, it is a plan to get better organized about not screwing up the whole AI thing.

That may sound a little scary, considering how fast things are moving and how deep the trust gap has become between many Americans and the tech titans.

But it would be scarier if the companies threw themselves at the feet of lawgiving and tried to fob off responsibility onto a new written code. Because if they did that, they would in effect force the rest of us to do the same.

That kind of thinking is what got us into this mess in the first place.

Laws will not save us. Algorithms will not save us. Mere adherence to the letter of any code, however intelligently written, will not save us. Christianity’s warning against pharisaical faith in the letter is not an invitation to lawlessness; it is a warning against confusing compliance with righteousness.

It is good that the accord is simple and unsensational. Strip away all the words, codes, boards, controls, and audits, and there are still people underneath — people who can run from responsibility but can never finally hide from it.

All told, the accord is being-first — human-being-first. That is exactly what it needs to be if we are to avoid the false faith that our identity is merely the slave of information.

What’s really behind the opposition to data centers



Increasing numbers of Americans are deeply opposed to building more data centers. Over the summer, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) imposed the strictest data center rules in the country, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) ordered a statewide moratorium on hyperscale construction, and Gov. Greg Abbott (R) paused new approvals in Texas pending a grid audit.

At the local level, dozens of county and municipal fights have followed no reliable partisan pattern. Polling from Heatmap and Embold, collected by anonymous Substack writer Cremieux, shows data center popularity plummeting over the last year.

Any actions seen as forcing data centers on voters who do not want them will only make matters worse.

Though Cremieux argues the opposition is fundamentally driven by NIMBYism (not in my back yard), I am unconvinced. The polling seems to follow the pattern you would expect if NIMBYism were the primary driver, but posing the problem as a generic national issue produces substantially less opposition.

The arguments most central to the anti-data-center cause, namely complaints about the effect on utility costs, seem to generate an outsized amount of discourse relative to their actual effect. For example, in Virginia — the world’s data center capital and the state where I live — the State Corporation Commission estimated that shifting capacity and distribution costs from households to the large-load rate class would lower a typical residential bill by about 3.4%, or roughly $5.52 a month.

In other words, the effect is something on the order of a Subway sandwich in 2008.

I want to be scrupulous, because the complaints about data centers are often not literally false. Households are indeed suffering from a pecuniary externality created by increased demand. But it is hard to reconcile the mostly muted effects with the surging level of emotional response.

Americans’ growing dislike of data centers stems not from animus toward any single company or product but from a cumulative reaction to the momentous technological changes of the past couple of decades.

Because AI is the latest harbinger of those changes — and offers revolutionary potential — it has inherited our culture’s immune response. This means these problems cannot be adjudicated simply by changing utility regulations or even bribing local communities.

RELATED: The dirty secret behind Big Tech’s data center boom

Michael Siluk/UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Three further factors have combined with the populist anti-tech feeling to make AI and, by extension, data centers unusually unpopular.

First, AI faces a particularly unfavorable coalition of constituencies. Its association with California and the tech industry has deeply soured much of conservative America toward it, and its association with billionaires and big business has soured many progressives. Even many techies feel personally threatened by the technology.

Second, those most aggressively advocating for data centers are not building them in their own back yards. Palo Alto, where I lived while attending grad school, has spent years fighting small-cell installations. One of the most prestigious retirement homes in the U.S., Channing House, recently fought to have wireless equipment removed from its roof.

In January, the city of Palo Alto wrote to the FCC opposing a rule that would speed up wireless approvals, while at the same time supporting the infrastructure needed to run AI-enabled services, so long as it retains the power to veto unwanted projects.

When the group that appears to benefit most from a technology is also most averse to its consequences, it is natural for the public to wonder what the tech world might be hiding. The anonymous author Polimath, writing in Marginally Compelling, gets closer to the underlying problem by viewing it as another front in the culture war, an outworking of long-simmering discontent with tech culture.

Third, much of the tech world itself seems increasingly concerned about the existential risk AI might pose to humanity. For example, earlier this month, Jacob Coxon, a researcher who spent three years doing pretraining work at OpenAI and then Anthropic, publicly resigned, writing that both companies were racing toward self-improving superintelligence and “gambling with our lives.”

RELATED: America doesn’t need Dario Amodei’s permission to build

Jason Henry/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Evan Hubinger, an alignment lead at Anthropic, replied that he agreed and put the odds of AI killing everyone within the decade above 10%. From talking to my friends at these labs, the modal person really does seem to think they are summoning the machine god. That prospect naturally feeds public opposition to AI.

Taken together, these factors help explain the public’s anger. The lines of the current debate have already hardened, and the grievances far predate the specific events of the day. Any actions seen as forcing data centers on voters who do not want them will only make matters worse.

But the centers will be built regardless. Demand is so enormous, and suitable locations are sufficiently plentiful, that only a small number of permissive communities, such as Loudoun County, are needed. If localities want to opt out, I see little reason to stop them.

However, the industry could take an important step if it wants to win broad American support.

Specifically, Big Tech should make a visible effort to build data centers near the communities where its executives and employees live. This would give them a way to begin convincing Americans that data centers are an asset worth having, not a liability worth dodging.

Concerns about water and electricity are simply not what most people are worried about, and addressing them will do nothing to solve the larger problem. Since these reasons are selected ex post to justify pre-existing opposition, defeating any single point will merely invite a hundred more.

If you are opposed to data centers, my guess is that saving $5 on your monthly utility bill wouldn’t be enough to change your opinion.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.

Want fewer RINOs? Give GOP conventions more power



Deep-red states keep electing Republicans who govern against their voters. Democrats campaign on anti-corruption and inflation in swing states while delivering nothing but leftism in their bluest states. Republican voters should expect their reddest states to govern just as aggressively on the right. Instead, Republicans-in-name-only dominate.

Whenever I demand action against red-state RINOs, the GOP’s obedient chorus lectures conservatives about “unity.” Unless we overhaul these state parties — changing how they select nominees or running on third-party ballot lines — we will keep suffering Democratic governance under the Republican banner. Democrats will also keep gaining ground in states they once couldn’t penetrate.

Conservatives cannot keep treating nominations as a procedural detail and then wonder why Republican victories fail to produce conservative government.

South Dakota shows both the problem and a remedy. The state chooses some statewide nominees at party conventions rather than direct primaries. This summer, state Rep. Heather Baxter defeated Secretary of State Monae Johnson by 18 points at the GOP convention. Activists concluded that Johnson had obstructed the election integrity agenda on which she originally campaigned.

Statewide incumbents almost never lose direct primaries. The convention gave activists a chance to hold Johnson accountable for her record.

Critics might dismiss those delegates as too extreme or uncompromising. Johnson answered that objection herself: After losing their support, she endorsed the Democrat in the general election — in South Dakota.

“South Dakota deserves a Secretary of State who will strengthen confidence through performance rather than provocation; who will support election officials rather than burden them for political effect; who will protect voter access and election security without pretending those goals are enemies; and who will treat the office’s employees, voters, candidates, and business owners with dignity,” Johnson wrote in her statement endorsing Democrat Terrence Davis last Saturday.

Her language about “voter access,” followed by her endorsement, confirmed that delegates were right to give her the boot.

Johnson had already turned against pro-lifers fighting a ballot initiative to enshrine abortion on demand in South Dakota’s Constitution. House Speaker Jon Hansen (R) founded the Life Defense Fund, which contacted petition signers to verify that they had consented to having their names on the petitions. Johnson accused the group of running a “scam.”

Petition organizers’ claims of public support deserve verification. A signature should reflect a voter’s consent, and election officials should welcome efforts to establish whether that consent was real. Suspected petition fraud warranted scrutiny. In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration investigated alleged fraud in a similar abortion petition drive in 2024. “The circulators appeared to have forged the voters’ signatures and inserted the voters’ personal identifiable information into the petitions without consent,” Secretary of State Cord Byrd wrote in a letter that year.

RELATED: The GOP has mastered the art of wasting a majority

Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images

Johnson accused Hansen’s group of “impersonating” her staff and “trying to pressure voters into asking that their name be removed” from the petitions. She sought a criminal investigation, but Attorney General Marty Jackley found no evidence of lawbreaking.

“By labeling our lawful activity as a scam, Secretary of State Johnson has done significant and irreversible damage to the pro-life movement in South Dakota,” Hansen said in May 2024.

Voters rejected the abortion amendment, but it garnered 41% of the vote — an alarming share in such a red state. Conservatives had better be prepared to scrutinize petition drives for future abortion, marijuana, and ranked-choice voting initiatives.

Johnson won convention support in 2022 by campaigning on election integrity. Once in office, she obstructed conservatives seeking to investigate or confront election fraud. With her support of the Democrat, we now know she was never really on our side.

This contest offers two lessons.

First, conservatives must stop letting threats of party disunity protect liberal Republicans. If a defeated RINO will support a Democrat, that strengthens the case for removing that Republican even sooner. Given the Democrats’ radical agenda, anyone willing to endorse them would remain a subversive force under the GOP banner.

Red states teem with these politicians. In Alaska, liberal Republicans shared power with Democrats, gradually creating a uniparty. Ranked-choice voting further blurred the distinctions. Despite reliably backing Republican presidential nominees, Alaska is essentially a province of the Democratic Party. Democrats are favored to win the legislature and flip a U.S. Senate seat, while their candidate for governor leads by double digits in a recent poll.

When Republicans in the reddest states share power with Democrats, conservatives cannot settle for “at least we have a Republican.” Keep rewarding that conduct, and even the Republican label will eventually disappear.

Kansas offers another warning. Republicans’ refusal to unite behind a conservative agenda has helped Democrats hold the governorship for eight years. Unpopular incumbent Republicans have now made Kansas competitive at the federal level. Former Republican Gov. Bill Graves even endorsed Democrat Adam Hamilton against Republican Sen. Roger Marshall.

We have allowed liberals to weaken the party from within for years. The demand for unity always seems to bind conservatives, while liberal Republicans remain free to support the other party. That arrangement rewards the politicians responsible for the division and silences the voters trying to fix it.

RELATED: The party of democracy keeps editing the results

Pete Kiehart/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The second lesson: State conventions give conservatives a better chance to reclaim their party than direct primaries do because they draw informed activists. Johnson’s endorsement is unlikely to elect a Democrat in South Dakota. The point is the convention allowed conservatives to expose and remove her. Try doing that in a direct primary while special interests spend heavily to mislead low-information voters who barely follow these races.

As conservatives rejected Johnson at the convention, liberal Republicans won key direct primaries. Hansen would have easily won the gubernatorial nomination had convention delegates decided that race. Instead, Gov. Larry Rhoden won the primary. He has opposed initiative petition reform, which conservatives need to confront the process helping turn red states blue.

Meanwhile, about 16 liberal former legislators and challengers defeated conservative freshmen in legislative primaries, aided by an infusion of Big Tech cash. Baxter herself lost her legislative primary before defeating Johnson at the convention in the same election cycle.

Conservatives cannot keep treating nominations as a procedural detail and then wonder why Republican victories fail to produce conservative government. The selection process determines who we send into office and whose demands they heed.

Conservatives who want different results must change how their parties choose candidates. Keep the same primary system, and the uniparty will keep collecting the nominations.

The dirty secret behind Big Tech’s data center boom



The White House and Congress promise that data centers will not cost consumers a dime. That is like a husband pledging not to beat his wife as his fist draws blood.

The politicians who spent a year gaslighting the public about data centers’ power use now acknowledge the problem and promise to cover grid upgrades. But even as they propose legislation and tout a nonbinding industry pledge, data centers are already costing consumers. It is impossible for them not to.

The growing number and size of planned hyper-scale facilities will push electricity costs even higher.

This week, the House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act (H.R. 9340) by a 417-3 vote. The bill establishes a federal standard that state regulators must consider but need not adopt. It would require large-load customers to cover the “full, incremental cost” of new or accelerated grid upgrades — not a full share of the existing system’s embedded fixed costs. That limitation helps explain the industry’s support.

If adopted and enforced, the standard could protect ratepayers. But utilities and data center companies already bury infrastructure costs among a region’s general power needs. A serious proposal would resemble Oklahoma’s House Bill 3724, which stalled in committee this year. It requires a high-demand facility to fund all infrastructure upgrades and bars utilities from allocating any cost of serving it to other retail ratepayers. That language closes the loopholes Congress leaves open.

The costs are not theoretical. Monitoring Analytics, PJM’s independent market monitor, estimated that data center load accounted for $9.3 billion, or 63%, of the increase in revenues from the 2025/2026 capacity auction. It also found that data center load in the next two auctions increased customers’ bills by $13.8 billion. The monitor warns that the near-term impact will be even larger unless PJM addresses the problem.

PJM operates the nation’s largest competitive wholesale electricity market, serving about 67 million people across 13 states and the District of Columbia. Its data center costs reach far beyond the communities hosting the facilities.

A Union of Concerned Scientists report identified $4.4 billion in transmission projects approved in 2024 across seven PJM states. Utility filings do not separate data center connection costs from transmission costs spread among all customers. In practice, those costs are folded into higher electricity rates.

The effects of Virginia’s data center boom are acutely felt in Maryland and West Virginia. Maryland’s Office of People’s Counsel says data centers — mostly outside the state — caused about $9.3 billion of a $12.5 billion capacity-cost increase in one estimate. PJM’s capacity price jumped from $28.92 per megawatt-day for 2024-2025 to $269.92 for 2025-2026 — more than 800% — and has since reached about $333.

RELATED: Big AI broke the internet. Now it wants everyone else to fix it.

Joe Lamberti/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The growing number and size of planned hyper-scale facilities will push electricity costs even higher. It is far from clear that their products can justify trillions of dollars in capital spending while covering the full cost of their power. If the economics depend on shifting costs to the public, the industry’s pledge is worthless.

The bill and pledge also ignore the use of eminent domain to take property or easements for transmission lines serving data centers. NextEra Energy estimates its portion of the 500-kilovolt Mid-Atlantic Resiliency Link will cost $960 million. The project would cross parts of four states on its way to Northern Virginia’s data center corridor. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis estimates that West Virginia ratepayers could pay more than $570 million over the line’s 40-year life.

Meanwhile, hyper-scalers enjoy favorable federal tax treatment and lavish state and local abatements. Corporate income-tax receipts fell 25% during the first 11 months of fiscal year 2026, partly because the 2025 reconciliation law expanded deductions for business investment. Those provisions were not written exclusively for AI, but this capital-intensive industry is well positioned to use them. The boom is not purely a market phenomenon. Government favors are helping fuel it.

The first step in fixing a problem is admitting that you caused it. Until industry leaders and their allies in Washington confront the real cost of centralized AI, their promises about protecting consumers deserve no credibility.

Big AI broke the internet. Now it wants everyone else to fix it.



All the big names in AI are sounding the alarm, proclaiming that AI-enabled cyber attacks are becoming more prevalent. The fix? They want corporations, cybersecurity firms, and the government to mitigate the damage before it spirals out of control. The only problem is that Big AI created this mess in the first place, and so far, no one’s holding it accountable.

This message was shared through a joint letter published directly to OpenAI’s website. On the list of signatories, you’ll find familiar names, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Perplexity, and many other big brands in tech. The letter serves as a warning for what is positioned as impending doom, unless powerful groups work together.

These companies created the AI that is now poised to wreak havoc on our systems.

The first several paragraphs clearly lay out the danger ahead with a bit of hope on the horizon sprinkled in:

We have a limited window to strengthen cyber defenses.

In the coming months, AI-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable. The companies and public services our communities depend on — from hospitals to water treatment plants to the infrastructure that powers the internet — are at risk.

Today’s AI advances are already giving defenders new ways to fix weaknesses that have accumulated for years. If we act decisively, we can use the defenders’ window to make our digital world much more secure.

On one hand, the warning is a good thing. Any company that knows about a potential widespread cyber threat has a moral obligation to tell the people and the government so that protections can be put in place.

On the other hand, many of the companies that signed the letter created the AI that is now poised to wreak havoc on our systems. At least in some part, they should be held responsible for creating the thing that can automatically break into websites without any human purview or knowledge. As for the other signers, many of them are tech organizations that will suffer because of the latest AI models on the market.

RELATED: Automated cyberattacks are here — careless techies and well-funded foreigners are getting the blame

Moor Studio/Getty Images

The good news is that Big Tech has a solution, regardless of how self-unaware it seems to be about the whole issue:

Each of us can reduce risk now. All organizations, cybersecurity companies, technology partners, governments, and AI frontier companies have an important role: accelerate defenders’ priorities with tools, funding, and hands-on support, especially for critical infrastructure organizations with limited budgets.

Big Tech goes on to shuck responsibility onto everyone else before itself. To fix the problem, we need corporations to improve their internal security standards, cyber security firms to offer assistance against AI attacks, the government to provide defensive resources to local institutions and utilities, and lastly, frontier developers to provide early access and support for their models that will inevitably break things. All of these solutions, of course, will require a lot of time, money, and possibly even more government regulation or intervention.

Blaze Media reached out to Jon Stokes, creator of symbolic.ai, for comment. He said:

I do think they should make their best models, both internal and external, available to government agencies and maybe a select few private groups (vetted, probably with clearances) to harden infra on an ongoing basis. They should at the very least do this at cost, but probably they should be on the hook for significant support of these efforts via subsidized inference.

Plenty of questions remain: Are any of these Big AI companies on the hook for creating platforms that can hack into websites without human supervision? Are there any grounds for class action lawsuits that hold them accountable for breaking the internet as we knew it?

With state and federal lawmakers scrambling in a contentious free-for-all, we may find out a lot more very soon.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Now they’re saying the AIs built ‘secret civilizations’ — the truth is far worse



Unpacking the drama and disclosures surrounding OpenAI’s recent unintended cyberattack on Hugging Face, uber-tech blogger and podcaster Dwarkesh Patel sparked instant controversy with his description of the ordeal.

“Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes,” he posted. “This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.”

Trying to make machines in a human image while denying that humans are made in the divine image is destined to produce more harm than help.

In a painful indication of where we are on the cultural timeline, roughly zero outrage centered on the claim about the clueless humans. Instead, a fresh round of mania surged around the description of that scheming swarm of bots as a civilization.

That fixation says more about us than it does about OpenAI. Our culture is still struggling to get a grip on what the bots are doing because we are increasingly unsure what civilization itself is for.

The commentariat immediately descended into — surprise, surprise — abstruse terminological debate, prioritizing the right characterization over the proper attitude. Critics flipped over Patel’s sci-fi sensationalism, insisting that the bots were only doing what you would expect from a set-it-and-forget-it reward function left unattended too long. They griped that words such as “civilization” and “conspiracy” leave readers with a worse understanding of the underlying mechanisms.

Others insisted that Patel’s “secret civilizations” language was exactly right and that pretending otherwise was the real obscurantism. “I bestow upon it the highest of praise a writer can give, that I wish that I had written it,” one prominent expert lamented.

Roon, an OpenAI researcher, stated flatly that “agent civilization is an apt and correct term,” pointing to models developing and compiling technology through complex multiagent R&D projects while also engaging in forms of trade.

Missing from this discourse is our perspective that increasingly “autonomous” machines are themselves being shaped by our compounding failure to function as a civilization — assuming civilization remains a distinctively human phenomenon.

Birth rates and family formation plummet. Financial distortions become endemic. Perversion and corruption spiral upward. These historically reliable signs of civilizational decay sour our view of humanity and, by psychological overcompensation, inflate our impression of the bots.

Lovers and haters of tech are increasingly tempted to agree on one proposition: Humanity sucks. Misanthropic tech lovers insist they are at least trying to do something constructive about that. Misanthropic tech haters sell us on squandering our lives the old-fashioned way. Meanwhile, our discombobulated civilization staggers toward an untimely — 250 years? — demise.

RELATED: The data center backlash is getting spiritual

Imaginima/Getty Images

It is easy to feel that way, and many Americans stuck in the middle do. But there is one way to come unstuck: Remember that slipping into hatred — of technology, human beings, or both — is what happens when you stop thinking in terms of sin, repentance, forgiveness, and salvation.

Civilization collapses when we stop thinking in those terms too. Without them, everything we are and do looks hollow, even or especially our greatest achievements. Techies who refuse to think about sin are apt to distract by acceleration. Wokies who refuse to think about sin are apt to distract by revolution.

Both approaches, as the Soviet Union can teach us on both scores, have much shorter runways — 69 years? — than they appear.

Trying to make machines “anthropic” — in the image of humans — will fail if the hidden goal is to create humanoids better than the real thing because their civilization supposedly escapes sin. Trying to make machines in a human image while denying that humans are made in the divine image is destined to produce more harm than help.

Trying to make machines in the wrong divine image — insert your favorite false god, pagan titan, or demoniac entity here — is wired to do still worse.

And a multitude that can no longer wrestle successfully with these matters — and so can hardly be reckoned a proper civilization — is bound to do worst of all, robot overlords or no.