CXXX . The Smartest People in the Room Are Discussing America of Tomorrow

Editor’s Note: This week, I spent quite a bit of time reading up and learning some of the AI tools. I’m going to continue to write on this as human progress will be ever more reliant on how well we adapt. It is here to stay.

We are living through the greatest technological invention since the desktop computer under the worst possible federal leadership. In that vaccuum, two companies recently put forward documents about where artificial intelligence should go.

Palantir posted a 22-point manifesto on X last month. It was condensed from CEO Alex Karp's book The Technological Republic. Understanding the background is crucial to understanding their philosophy. The company was founded with CIA seed money in 2004. It currently holds more than $13 billion dollars in government contracts awarded in 2025 alone. That includes a $1.3 billion Pentagon contract for Project Maven, the AI system that autonomously detects, tags, and tracks humans from drone and satellite feeds.

ImmigrationOS is their $30 million no-bid platform that integrates passport data, IRS records, license plates, and cell phone location into a single real-time deportation engine. The Army's entire software infrastructure is now consolidated into one Palantir framework. It is what one analyst called a "generational lock-in." Once an army runs on your platform, switching costs are the ultimate barrier.

Palantir’s manifesto reads like it could’ve been written for a Soviet audience. It argues that Silicon Valley owes a "moral debt" to the country that made its rise possible, and that the engineering elite have spent decades building playtime apps while the West slowly lost its leadership footing. It says some cultures are "harmful" and "middling”, and the atomic age is ending and an era of AI deterrence is beginning.

The tone is urgent and assertive. Karp writes like someone bought in to a get them before they get us philosophy. A moral compass built on the biggest weapons budget and the fastest targeting software.

Then there's OpenAI's thirteen-page industrial policy paper, published in April. This one is entirely different. Where Karp beats a war drum, Sam Altman writes like a policy fellow who genuinely stayed up nights worrying about what happens to the people AI displaces. They are the ideas noticeably missing from the federal level:

These are serious ideas, written in the language of a company that understands, at least on paper, that a technology transforming the entire labor market carries an obligation to the people living inside that market.

The World Economic Forum estimates that 41 percent of employers plan workforce reductions because of AI. Nearly 60 percent of the global workforce will need reskilling by 2030. OpenAI read those numbers and said, correctly, that someone needs to actually govern this transition.

The contrast between these two companies looks clean from the outside. One company is rah rah on Western civilization at the same time it is making incredible wealth from both just and unjust wars. The other is talking about worker retraining and shared prosperity.

This is the discrepancy today in classifying what is patriotic.

While the Trump regime cozied up to Palantir it banned Anthropic from government work for refusing to allow domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. OpenAI and Altman, despite their policy paper, recently signed a Pentagon contract for classified operations. There was no open discussion or press conference about values or impact on Americans.

Here is what both documents are actually telling you, underneath the different tones and the different vocabularies. Palantir has decided that the most important thing AI can do right now is make the government's lethal capabilities faster, more precise, and harder to turn off. That is the reality of thirteen billion dollars in contracts. OpenAI has decided that the most important thing AI can do is transform the economy in a way that doesn't destroy ordinary workers, and has written a serious blueprint for how to manage that transformation. That is not a theory either. But between Palantir's aggressive approach and OpenAI's policy memo, there is a void where the actual governing is supposed to happen, and this administration has handed that void to the companies themselves in exchange for graft and military first dibs.

What does this all mean for you?

The fifty-nine-year-old warehouse manager in Ohio didn't vote on the terms of his approaching displacement. The immigrants who get tracked through ImmigrationOS didn't consent to having their records part of a surveillance system. What’s to stop from adding ours? Or the soldiers who operate AI-assisted weapons. Does it make killing more efficient, more justified, or simply easier?

What this administration has chosen is a particular kind of leadership that is shoot first and ask questions later. Get the lethal applications moving fast and say nothing about the people whose livelihoods are being quietly automated or blown out of existence. Palantir's manifesto doesn't mention any of this. OpenAI's document mentions them on every page, and then hypocritically signed a military contract before the week was out.

Good public policy, supported by people you actually elect, is the only thing that has ever governed a technological transformation at scale. We did it with electricity. We did it with the railroads. At one time, we did it with cable, television, and communications. It took decades and a progressive movement to claw back and preserve what monopolists will readily take.

Read both documents. They are worth your time. And then ask yourself: when Karp invokes Western civilization and Altman talks about keeping people first, who exactly are they picturing? Who are they serving first?

Because it isn't the local manager or warehouse worker or driver or teacher. And they both know it.

I absolutely loved this piece. When you consider how much they spent to build their home and keep the facade intact, this is a labor of love that will follow them for the rest of their lives. It's an addition to the community and a preservation of local culture and history. This is a model of exemplary human conduct.

There's a place nearby us where a neighborhood church was bulldozed to make way for a row of townhomes. Every time I pass it, I feel like it's cursed land; a loss of appreciation on so many levels, sacrificed for a few private dollars. But then I remind myself it's part of urban infill, of conserving land, of weighing highest and best use. Are we better served by an old, empty church or more housing? It's a genuine tension.

Some things are left to the law, but other things must be left to the spirit of wisdom and peaceful co-existence.

Pope Leo XIV will make at least one major public address before the 2026 midterm elections calling on Christians to vote their biblical values: care for the poor, mercy for the stranger, and the pursuit of peace. He will not name candidates. He won't have to. The irony, of course, is almost too thick to swallow. The same movement that spent a decade plastering Jesus on MAGA hats and weaponizing the Sermon on the Mount as a culture war will find itself being quietly corrected by the actual leader of a billion Christians. Leo has already said plainly that the Gospel is "not meant to be abused in the way that some people are doing." Before November, he will say it louder.

Trump's war in the Middle East, and the gas prices that followed, will do what a decade of climate marches could not: put clean energy back at the center of the American kitchen table conversation. When the national average hits $5 a gallon, people stop debating wind turbines and start asking why they're still this dependent on oil. Expect scientists, economists, and consumer advocates to make the case not in polar bear terms but in dollar terms. The moral argument for clean energy hasn't moved mountains, but the economic one might.

Jeff Bezos will become the defining face of a new Gilded Age. His $10 million Met Gala chairmanship, staged while Amazon warehouse workers urinate in bottles and his journalists at the Washington Post are muzzled, will mark a turning point in how ordinary Americans relate to the company. Labor unions staged their own "Ball Without Billionaires" the same night, with Amazon, Whole Foods, and Washington Post workers walking a runway in Manhattan's Meatpacking District. That image, workers building their own gala outside the gates of the one their boss bought, is the new American class portrait. The Porcupine predicts that physical book sales will quietly tick up, that indie booksellers will report a bump, and that "where did you buy that" will become a small but growing political act.

Authorasole (n., pronounced: aw-THOR-ah-sole) One whose followers mistake certainty for wisdom, and whose critics have been right about him from the start.

By the third year, calling him an authorasole wasn't an insult. It was just the diagnosis.

The authorasole's greatest gift is making his failures feel like someone else's fault.

Sweet mother of democracy, that man is a textbook authorasole!

DOVER BEACH REVISITED

The forest morning a quiet place

A cool, crisp air rustles the fallen leaves

An anxious squirrel scampers to safety

The soft humming trees soothe the soul

All creatures are happy there.

Acorns and rich soil portend new growth

Dew moistens the verdant ground

Wildflowers scattered about bring color

And adds to the magical vast garden

A rising sun adds warmth and blue skies.

What is on the surface may not show the underneath

For the depths too oft sound a melancholy tune

A ringing bell, a warning of the past and what will come

A glimpse of truth that will not remain secret

Even a forest’s beauty cannot hide.

So within us, our love and dreams

In the future we so much wish to share

Yet mighty winds shake us awake

And show us a dark place

Where endless wars provide deadly light.

Marc J. Yacht, MD, MPH

And Now….

Within one year, the leadership we enjoyed around the world has evaporated. The question is whether it is recoverable. That will be up to us and our future decisions. Until then, take care of yourself, in body and in mind. Keep moving and keep learning.

Always strive to be a good human.