Everything feels incredibly stupid right now. The mainstream news is more concerned with Hasan Piker than the literal Nazis infesting the country’s governing party. The LessWrong guy is advising Bernie Sanders who is doing events with Steve Bannon. You’re supposed to do these in threes, but I really don’t want to go through all the potential stupid enough third things, so please just pick your own, I’m sure you’ve got one.
In one way, this is all a new level of stupidness. But underneath, a lot of it is familiar: the media panics about anyone daring to criticize the US’ violence abroad, the warnings of existential threats whose vagueness somehow makes them even more urgent, the elites committing massive fraud and crimes with absolutely 0 chance of facing consequences… we already did this! It was called the Iraq War, and it already taught us what we can do about it. We just … didn’t do it.
Right now, we face a series of historic turning points, from how we handle the media’s scandal machine, to the midterm elections, to what we demand from candidates in 2028 and beyond. As we face each one, we will only be saturated with more of this stupidity. So as organizers, it’s our job to remember the lessons we already learned all those years ago, and use our collective power to put the country back on track towards actually following them.
Lesson 1: The US Does A Massive Amount of Horrible Things Around The World And It’s Better For Everyone Be Honest About It
The newest phase of the Hasan Piker media cycle is the stupidest yet. Instead of showing out of context clips of the streamer designed to stoke scandalous outrage, Axios became the first mainstream-ish outlet of this cycle to actually interview him directly. Of course, they then immediately posted out of context clips from their own interview to stoke scandalous outrage. In this one, Piker says the US has caused more damage to the world than al-Qaeda.
You can say, “if you watch more than five seconds it’s clear what he meant.” But I’m not going to say that because we all fucking know what he meant. What I am going to say is: this is an especially stupid thing to act scandalized about because it was the bog standard liberal opinion during the Iraq war. From 2002-2008 it was extremely obvious that the US going around killing a million people was killing more people than al-Qaeda did!
Everyone pretending to not know what this means or acting like it’s some incendiary thing is obviously full of shit, but they’re especially full of shit because they already lived through years and years of this claim being totally normal. Especially given the unbelievable chaos Trump 2.0 has wrought on everyone from Tehran to fucking Canada, do not let anyone get away with pearl clutching about obviously true criticisms of how our country is treating people, whether outside the US or within it. In the last year or so alone, DOGE’s cuts will kill 14 million people and are nearing 1 million already. Al-Qaeda might want to do that, but they haven’t done it and the US has.
The idea that you must treat voters like babies is exactly how you get Kamala Harris talking about the “most lethal military in the world” while voters get more and more angry about her support for genocide in Gaza. Even if all you care about is electoral politics, the Iraq War is a key reason Bush and Republicans became so unpopular by the end of his term. Attempting to retcon once standard callouts of the US’ deadly Global War On Terror foreign policy (which a recent study found caused 4.5-4.7 million deaths across Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen, averaging out to more deaths than the 9/11 attacks per week) at a time when “ground invasion of another country” is one of the few things Trump seems to still not have an appetite for, is sociopathic. Anyone smothering our ability to speak plainly about what US wars do is both running cover for the warmongers’ ability to keep mongering wars, and trying to protect them from consequences electorally.
Lesson 2: WMD Threats Show How Not To Handle AI Doom Threats
Starting a few weeks ago, the entire media and political world and social media became suddenly focused on the possibility of a Sentient Artificial Intelligence destroying humanity. The whole debate has been quite unusual not just due to its sci-fi nature, but because of the amount of unknowns involved.
How is a layperson supposed to gauge the likelihood of AI becoming sentient? How are we supposed to assess the claims of tech billionaires whose entire business hinges on AI, whose stock values are effectively linked to the amount they can hype their product, and who have long documented histories of lying? How are we supposed to assess the main incidents like “Hugging Face” when the accounts are mainly provided by the AI companies themselves? And for all the whistleblowing supposedly happening, why is what they’re blowing the whistle on so vague?
But for all the talk of unprecedentedness around the current AI doom panic, much of the way it’s unfolding is precedented as hell. It’s the same logic of the threat of Weapons Of Mass Destruction in the leadup to the Iraq War:
Very powerful people have saturated the media with a PR campaign designed to warn us of a threat that could kill us all. Virtually all discussion of this threat is led by the same people demanding control of the response to it. Many of them also have long and publicly documented histories of calling for the policies they are now calling for since long before this threat was “imminent.” The likelihood of this threat happening is unclear, with some totally certain, and others saying the likelihood is 10%. The evidence, which is largely marshalled by these same sources, is convoluted and hard to understand, but rather than defuse the panic, that lack of understanding of specifics and probability is treated as even more of a reason to act urgently and at a massive scale.
These aren’t exactly equivalent situations, but a huge portion of the logic, methods, and aims of the key actors involved are. We heard how even if it was only a little likely that Saddam Hussein had or was developing Weapons of Mass Destruction, the threat was so great that we just had to take huge violent action resulting in millions of deaths–just as if there’s even a 1% chance of AGI destroying humanity, we have to dedicate every resource on Earth to stopping that instead of dealing with say, the climate crisis, which is destroying the Earth. (It’s worth noting that the Anthropic resignee who kicked this off appears to be a climate denier.)
And we heard how, as part of the post-9/11 War on Terror strategy, that the threat was so great we just had to keep giving more and more centralized power to spy on and detain and attack ordinary people to the executive branch and military industrial complex–just as the threat of AGI is so great and complicated we have to empower the AI industries to do whatever it takes to deal with it (and not punish them for the crimes they already committed!).
As my difficulty this week finding a store that hasn’t sold out of a book called End Times Fascism attests, the world faces many grave threats. But this makes it even more imperative that we don’t panic and get led around by people whose vague urgency just happens to align with what they already want.
The Iraq War provides so many examples of what happens when we do give in to that panic. Most obviously, the entire US federal government uniting to carry out massive destructive action that killed millions and destabilized dozens of countries in a way they’ve yet to recover from. But also, in what it took to build and maintain that war machine: a mass power grab by the same people who lied us into the war in the first place, and who were fresh off using 9/11 to create the Department of Homeland Security and ICE.
As Muskism, a recent examination of Elon Musk’s rise to power and economic model details, the Department of Defense in this era worked to integrate the rising tech industry into the military industrial complex, and we’re still paying the cost. Because this was what turned Musk and Peter Thiel from mere rich people into the nation-reshaping tech oligarchs they are today. First, the DOD contracted companies like SpaceX and Palantir to provide critical services (satellites and surveillance respectively). But soon, the government became so reliant on the companies for these services, Musk and Thiel were able to become effective monopoly providers to the government. Ultimately, they used this reliance to reverse the power relationship, gaining the ability to actually rewrite government policies and regulations in their field in a feedback loop that gives them more and more money and ultimately state-level sovereign power. In fact, this is a large part of why we even have the AI industry/bubble we’re now dealing with in the first place.
Allowing bad actors to sell us simultaneously on a) an existential threat and b) that only they can understand and solve it risks creating disasters of its own, letting people with known agendas of evil seize even more power over the rest of us. We learned in the leadup to the Iraq War that assessing existential threats requires very concrete evidence, examination by people who do not obviously benefit personally or politically from confirming power’s narrative, much clearer assessments of the potential cost of giving them what they want, and extreme vigilance towards preventing further concentration of power at the top, rather than consolidating it.
And if they are lying…
Lesson 3: If Elites Don’t Face Consequences, You Usher In The Age of Elite Impunity Where They Get Even Worse
Bill Clinton faced a lengthy impeachment trial for something that, however bad, did not kill a million people or usher in a new age of government torture. George W. Bush did do those things, and faced no consequences. The whole Bush era was replete with endless lists of crimes considered far beyond what we could expect from America, a kind of shocking violation of norms and embrace of the trampling of rights and deadly destruction at home and abroad. (It is not a coincidence that the creation of ICE was bound up in this.) But once Bush was out of office, he learned to paint, started palling around with the Obamas, and is now spending his 2026 working to help Donald Trump retain control of Congress.
You could argue that this level of elite impunity has always existed, or that it dates back to Ford’s pardoning Nixon, or that it was more of a steady erosion accompanying the rise of neoliberalism. But the final rubicon was crossed when the Obama administration decided to let the Bush administration get away with it all (along with the fraudsters who caused the 2008 financial crash), and bring the country into the Modern Age of Elite Impunity.
“The bigger the crime you commit, the less you can be held liable for it”
Imagine if the elected officials, bureaucrats, defense contractors, and allies who committed grave crimes and harms through the Iraq War (and financial crash) actually faced consequences. We can’t say for sure it would have stopped a serial liar and lawbreaker like Donald Trump from making it to the White House. But I think we can say it would have made it more likely he would have faced a single consequence by now. And it definitely would have given the rest of his gang pause, making his allies think twice going along with him out of pure self-preservation, and maybe even providing enough precedent to push his centrist enablers in the media to talk a little more clearly about his criminality rather than rationalize it away.
Instead, the country said in 2008 that “you can do whatever you want and face no consequence,” and we’ve paid a higher and higher price since.
While there’s no shortage of elite impunity across Trumpworld, let’s just focus on AI again. This industry is fundamentally based on what at least one executive internally called “the largest theft of human labor in history.” To get to their current stage, AI companies have regularly violated tons of laws and regularly lied about them, from invasions of privacy to worker exploitation to abetting mass shootings and genocide (to say nothing of top AI ringleaders’ unrelated personal crimes), or their systematic facilitation of the crimes of their fellow impunity-holders in the government like DOGE, ICE, bizarre sequel wars on Iran, Venezuela, and bombing fishing boats, among other things.
So even if we take the potential AI safety crises the AI billionaires are drawing our attention to in total good faith, it still draws attention away from the actual crises they are already causing, through actions that also make them billions and billions of dollars. As Lina Kahn points out, there are already many laws against what the AI industry both is doing and is warning of doing, and there is no reason that them being “AI” related means they should no longer apply. After all, if someone builds a bomb in their garage and it explodes and kills people, they’d be held liable. Why isn’t Sam Altman? It’s not just because branding them as “AI” seems to make people think no human involved has any control, it’s also because they’re rich and elite enough to have joined the class of people in the US that never face consequences for anything.
From this to Epstein to Elon, it’s all the manifestation of the informal legal and political principle enshrined by the Bush era and made permanent by the Obama administration: the bigger the crime you commit, the less you can be held liable for it.
Once you start seeing this, you start seeing it everywhere, and it becomes clearer every day that we cannot defeat today’s fascism without overturning it. If instead of holding AI oligarchs (and Trump, and everyone else) accountable for the damage they’ve actually done, we put them in charge of a system designed mainly to address the hypothetical future issues they come up with, there is no way that system will ever protect us from their machinations, let alone punish them for those they’ve already carried out. If they think their product is so dangerous, they must a) stop making it and b) be held liable for its damages the way a normal person would be.
But again, we already know all this! We cannot go along with any plan that further cements the elite power to avoid accountability for their actions, and must actively fight to take the power they have accrued away from them to prevent it from snowballing even further. We must put anyone new in power there with a mandate to make these elites finally face consequences, and provide them with a combination of relentless support and pressure to finally do it.
Lesson 4: If The President Is Historically Unpopular and Then a Financial Bubble Collapses and Causes A Crisis, Don’t Squander The Opening For Change
To denote how historically unpopular Trump is right now, you will often find pollsters comparing him to “2008 George W. Bush.” By then, the country really was sick of the Iraq War and everything its leader represented. So sick it did something thought impossible: elect the first Black president, who ran on a promise of “Change,” in the most resounding Democratic victory since FDR.
Historically hated president and Republican party, possible financial collapse, shifting Overton window… we’ve been here before.
Looking back at the ‘08 Obama campaign, it’s striking how vague it seems in comparison to today’s most exciting campaigns, to a great degree more of “a vibe” than, say, Zohran Mamdani’s handful of policies so foregrounded that crowds chant them back at him. Even so, it was a shock to see the ur-Change Campaign turn into a Larry Summers-led financial recovery that obliterated Black wealth while undermining protections against foreclosures not to mention the total refusal to prosecute anyone from the Bush administration or Wall Street. The clear thrust of the Obama administration’s efforts were not towards the sweeping Change his campaign evoked, but were instead largely focused on keeping the system intact. This was the key factor behind a historic collapse in Americans’ trust in the Federal Government that began in 2008, and unlike previous collapses, has still not recovered. Until it does, it’s hard to imagine an end to the ceaseless “anti-incumbent” wave that has us seesawing in and out of fascism every four years now.
This wasted opportunity is such a historical failure because is hard to imagine a better opening for serious transformational change than post-2008. ….until now that is. Today’s AI bubble is easily comparable to the subprime mortgage bubble of the past. As Cory Doctorow puts it, 35% of the S&P is made up of the “Magnificent Seven” AI companies, six of them lose money on AI, and the seventh, Nvidia, mainly sells hardware to the other six. This is not a recipe for economic stability, and we should certainly be ready for the possibility of a collapse that could echo 2008.
Historically hated president and Republican party, possible financial collapse, shifting Overton window… we’ve been here before. And we saw what happens when you don’t change enough in response. When everyone hates what’s going on, we can’t waste the opening to change what’s going on or else I’ll have to write this article again in 20 years, probably from some kind of well-hidden, self-sustaining, sovereign socialist blimp I live on or something.
Fortunately, this is the one area where we actually have substantial some new advantages we didn’t have back then. There is a rapidly growing and powerful organizational left now. Policies that could actually substantively change and fix things like Medicare For All and the Green New Deal are widely known. The same level of chaos dragging us down has made openings for new ideas.
Which makes it all the more important that we remember this lesson and put it into practice: that when you have a mass revolt against the status quo and the elites responsible for it… change the status quo and get rid of the elites responsible for it. What better way to to change things than to unapologetically visibly push for and enact sweeping reforms of the scale most of us have never really lived through in the US? What better way to create a clear sense of rupture with the people previously in charge than to blacklist and put them on trial for what they did to the people, instead of letting them go back to their mansions and X accounts to build up to the next cycle?
In one way, all this stupidity is frustrating. How many of the lessons that may be required for humanity’s survival are things we already learned almost 20 years ago? But on the other hand, it’s good to know things aren’t so far gone that these basic common sense lessons still don’t apply. The problem isn’t that there’s no way to fix this, it’s that we haven’t done it yet. So, time to keep building a groundswell of demand to make it happen, and create the conditions in which they will.