The Southern Poverty Law Center on Tuesday was indicted by a grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama on multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering over the left-wing group’s alleged informant practices. The indictment alleges that the SPLC “secretly funneled more than $3 million in funds to white supremacist & extremist groups.” It said that $1 million went to an affiliate of the National Alliance, hundreds of thousands went to Aryan Nations, a Unite the Right “member,” as well as thousands to former members of the Ku Klux Klan, along with other leaders of extremist groups. “According to the charges in the indictment, the SPLC is a nonprofit entity that purports to fight white supremacy and racial hatred by reporting on extremist groups and conducting research to inform law enforcement groups with the goal of dismantling these groups,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon. “It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” he added. Prosecutors charged the SPLC with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to conceal money laundering. “They use their donor network to raise money to purportedly dismantle violent extremist groups,” FBI Director Kash Patel said. “However, the SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, used the money they raised from their donor network to actually pay the leadership of these very groups. I just want to say that again.” Blanche said that the wire and bank fraud charges stem from allegations that the SPLC did not properly disclose how donor funds were being used, including payments to controversial figures, whether or not they were acting as informants. The SPLC is a non-profit organization based in Montgomery, Alabama, that describes itself as a “catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond, working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements, and advance the human rights of all people.” Conservatives have described the SPLC as a partisan organization that unfairly labels political opponents as racists and/or extremists, and have also scrutinized the group’s large endowment and financial practices.

A few weeks ago, I briefly talked about a book called “The Camp of the Saints.” It’s a dystopian novel by a French author that was first published in the 1970s. Cover credit: Vauban Books But “The Camp of the Saints” is unlike every dystopian novel that’s taught in schools, because the villain of the story isn’t “the surveillance state” or “fascism” or anything like that. Instead, the primary threat in “The Camp of the Saints” is a massive migrant horde from the third world. It’s a book that was banned and censored relentlessly upon its release, for obvious reasons. You’re not supposed to see foreign invaders as a threat. And you’re certainly not supposed to mock the naive Westerners who want to open the borders, which the book invites you to do. Now that many Western countries have been overwhelmed with foreigners, “The Camp of the Saints” isn’t really even a dystopian novel anymore. It’s more like a lightly-fictionalized version of real life — which makes it even more depressing. “Your universe has no meaning to them,” one passage from the book reads. “They will not try to understand. They will be tired, they will be cold, they will make a fire with your beautiful oak doors.” After I mentioned the book, it moved quickly to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list. The publisher, a small outfit called Vauban Books, was thrilled, as you might expect. They invested a lot of time and money into translating a definitive edition of the book. Their goal was to make it accessible and affordable, after every other publisher dropped it. And indeed, it was catching on. Various conservative commentators were praising the novel on social media. The reviews were almost universally positive, with a 4.8-star rating on Amazon, which controls about 50% of the physical book market. And then, about 24 hours ago, the book simply disappeared from Amazon entirely, without any explanation. If you tried to navigate to the latest edition of “The Camp of the Saints,” here’s what you’d see: Amazon.com There was no indication of what happened — only that the webpage was down, for some unknown reason. It was unavailable for most of the day yesterday. Only the older, out-of-print versions — the ones that cost more than $100 — were available. But the affordable, definitive edition of “The Camp of the Saints” was simply deleted from Amazon. And predictably, none of the Leftists who claim to care about “banned books” — including politicians like Gavin Newsom — said a word about it. According to the publisher Vauban Books, Amazon specifically claimed that the novel violated their “offensive content” policy. Amazon told the publisher that it had reviewed the book’s content and believed it was unacceptable. But again, they didn’t elaborate further than that. Apparently, it’s not enough for every public school to ignore “The Camp of the Saints.” It’s not enough for the media to call you a racist if you read it. Amazon evidently believes that the only solution is to erase the book from its shelves entirely. It’s just too “offensive.” At the same time, if you’re looking to pick up a copy of “Mein Kampf,” that’s no problem on Amazon. Amazon.com screenshot. Here is the store page. Amazon will happily sell you “The Essential Mein Kampf,” a new English translation of the “classic work by Adolf Hitler” — one of the most “consequential leaders in world history.” Amazon.com screenshot. Amazon will also sell you thousands of books like this one, called “My Child is Trans, Now What: A Joy-Centered Approach to Support.” So it’s not “offensive” to encourage parents to mutilate and castrate their children in the name of gender ideology. The red line, apparently, is a fictional book about mass migration from third-world countries like India, in particular, which is what “The Camp of the Saints” is. The Great Replacement is their red line — you can’t talk about that. They’ll tolerate Hitler’s book, probably because it’s a historical document. They’ll tolerate child mutilation. But they definitely won’t tolerate a contemporary, highly accurate portrayal of Western decline (and the people who enable it). That’s simply unacceptable to these people. We reached out to the editor of Vauban Books to see if we might be missing something. We asked him what, if anything, Amazon could’ve possibly been referring to. He told us that, yes, the migrant horde (consisting of a million foreigners) is indeed depicted in unflattering terms. But there are several non-white characters who are depicted as nuanced and cultured individuals or even heroes, including the Indian government minister, as well as a “fully integrated French national of Indian origin who joins the remnants of France’s state and military in putting up a last stand against the invasion at the book’s end.”  So as a factual matter, this isn’t a book that argues that Indians (or people from the third world) are all fundamentally inferior, or anything along those lines. Instead, to quote the editor, the intent of the author was never to slight the Indians; instead, “it was to warn of attitudes common in his era – and our own – that would necessarily lead to demographic submersion should such masses of people ever appear on Western shores.” Of course, if you actually read the book, you’d recognize all of this. So the goal of Amazon, and the Left in general, is to make sure you can’t actually read the book. And that brings us to an issue that’s much larger than this one book. Make no mistake about it: The censorship of “The Camp of the Saints” is a clear signal of the Left’s intent, should they ever take power again. They haven’t undergone a change of heart, even after their campaign of lawfare failed, and Trump won the popular vote and returned to office. They aren’t going to moderate their psychopathic drive for power, and they won’t hesitate to punish their political enemies. They will intimidate, censor, and destroy conservatives at every opportunity. In the case of “The Camp of the Saints,” the hit job was fairly well organized. A few weeks ago, a political operative for the French paper “Le Monde” wrote a lengthy article about the influence of “The Camp of the Saints” in the Trump administration. The article was translated into English. Then shortly afterward — just one day before Amazon pulled the book — New York Magazine ran an article entitled, “Why Orban’s Loss Was So Devastating for the New Right.” It made the same arguments as the Le Monde article. It was clear the author either hadn’t read the book or wasn’t remotely interested in portraying it fairly. The article just regurgitated the same old talking points about the novel, without any context. The point was to give Amazon a pretext to delete the book entirely, and Amazon got the message. But too many people noticed what was happening. So late last night, after sustained outrage from conservatives on social media, Amazon relented. They created a new listing so that people can once again purchase the physical edition of “The Camp of the Saints” from Vauban Books. Then, around midnight, Amazon finally replied to my producers (after delaying their response for several hours). Amazon claimed that some kind of “error” had caused the book to be taken down. They didn’t explain why they told the publisher a completely different story. Nor did they elaborate on the nature of this “error,” and why it only affected this one book. So it’s obvious they didn’t expect the backlash. That’s why they offered no actual explanation for anything they did. And therefore, there’s no doubt they’re going to try this kind of censorship again, and soon. Amazon got ahead of itself here. But they’re absolutely going to continue censoring wrongthink as soon as they feel like the political winds have shifted. This is how Democrats are going to operate, the moment they return to power. We’ve already talked about their “Project 2029,” which has been endorsed by JB Pritzker in Illinois. The idea is to imprison everyone who’s upset the Democrat Party, including ICE officers who are lawfully enforcing immigration law. On top of that, Democrats are now openly floating the idea of granting statehood to D.C. and Puerto Rico for the purpose of gaining more representation in the Senate, so that they can pack the Supreme Court. This is James Carville’s latest rant. Watch: Carville previews what’s in store if Democrats retake power — says they should keep their plans quiet: “If Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, on day one, they should make Puerto Rico and DC a state, and they should expand the Supreme Court to 13.” “F*ck… https://t.co/FrNbVwUTks pic.twitter.com/V4KK8j52AM — Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) April 20, 2026 Source: @WesternLensman/X.com “Don’t run on it, don’t talk about it — just do it.” So he wants them to keep it a secret, as he says the entire plan out loud. Meanwhile, you have Republicans who are refusing to pass the SAVE Act because they wouldn’t want to disrespect the hallowed traditions of the Senate. While Republicans are hiding behind the rules as an excuse for their complete failure to do anything productive, Democrats are planning to simply ignore the rules and remake our entire system of government so that Republicans can never hold power again. It’s worth paying attention to just how flimsy his justification is. Carville says Republicans have “gerrymandered everything.” That’s his rationale for why Democrats should transform the country into a one-party authoritarian state. And he’s making this argument at precisely the same moment that Democrats in Virginia are trying to redraw their congressional maps so that they have a permanent 10-to-1 advantage. There’s a vote on that today. This is a state where 46% of the voters supported Donald Trump in the most recent election. Pretty soon, 90% of the congressional seats will belong to Democrats. And of course, many other Democrat-run states already work like this. California’s congressional delegation is around 18% Republican, even though Trump won nearly 40% of the vote in the last election in the state. Forty-three percent of voters in Illinois supported Trump, but only 17% of the congressional delegation is conservative. And on and on. But James Carville simply doesn’t care about any of this. He also doesn’t care about the rampant anti-white gerrymandering that was mandated under the Voting Rights Act, which has allowed Democrats to effectively steal more than a dozen congressional seats. Instead, Carville’s goal is to manufacture a narrative that sounds persuasive enough to most Democrat voters, which isn’t exactly difficult. And if you’re tempted to dismiss Carville as an irrelevant old hack — which he is — you need to realize that Democrats, at the highest levels, are saying basically the same thing. They’re repeating the same deranged argument about gerrymandering, which they plan to use as a justification to do whatever they want. Watch: Hakeem Jeffries urges YES vote on redistricting scheme that would hand Democrats 90% of congressional seats in Virginia. “It’s about making sure there’s a fair national congressional map.” National Democrats want to hijack Virginia’s electorate. Vote NO. https://t.co/mPHCMCIfqi pic.twitter.com/VHoMrvvQO6 — Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) April 20, 2026 Source: @WesternLensman/X.com The constant hand motions. The canned talking points. The complete lack of charisma. None of it matters to Democrats because they don’t want people who can think. They don’t want intellectual arguments. They want craven, simple-minded leaders who will destroy the Republican Party. That’s what Democrat voters are looking for. As long as you’re advancing their political interests, Democrats simply don’t care about the “logic” you use — or lack thereof. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the Supreme Court. We’ve talked a lot about Ketanji Brown Jackson, but it really needs to be emphasized that, in every single case, she disregards the law and votes based on what Democrats want. The most recent example came down yesterday, in an opinion where Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissent all by herself — no one else joined it. There were no other dissents, either. So here’s a quick rundown of the facts of the case, to set the scene. Let’s all play Supreme Court justice for a moment, to see if we’re as dumb as Ketanji Brown Jackson. The case was about a Washington D.C. police officer who got a dispatch call to check out a suspicious vehicle at a specific address, in the middle of a winter night.  This is from yesterday’s opinion: Officer Vanterpool reached the apartment building at that address around 2:00 a.m. As he turned his marked police vehicle into the parking lot, he saw two people immediately flee from a car, unprovoked, after police had not done anything other than simply pull up. The runners left open at least one of the car doors. The driver then began to back out of the parking space, rear door still open. Officer Vanterpool decided to investigate. He parked directly behind the car, left his own vehicle, ordered the driver to put his hands up, and drew his service weapon. And indeed, it turned out that the car was stolen. Under these circumstances — maybe we have some police officers in the audience — do you believe that the police officer had a “reasonable suspicion” that criminal activity was taking place when he ordered the driver to put his hands up? That’s the standard here, because this wasn’t an arrest, it was just a stop. It’s an extremely low standard. And you might think, well, yeah, of course there’s “reasonable suspicion” that some crime may have occurred here. Running away from the police suggests that you committed a crime. And if you’re in a car, and your friends run away when the police pull up, the appropriate response is to stay in the car. On the other hand, if you start backing out with the door open, then it’s “reasonable” to think you’re involved in criminal activity. By itself, it’s a crime to drive a car with the door open. It’s completely reasonable for an officer to conduct a traffic stop and ask you some questions in those circumstances. He’s not arresting you. He’s just detaining you. Somehow, though, Ketanji Brown Jackson disagreed. She accused her colleagues on the Court of “wordsmithing” — as in, they used words she didn’t like. That’s the level of “legal analysis” this woman is capable of. Democrats aren’t ashamed of this. They aren’t bothered by the fact that they picked a Supreme Court justice on the basis of race and gender, and shockingly enough, she turned out to be a complete moron. All they care about is that they managed to place a “true believer” on the Supreme Court. They have a committed activist on the bench. And given the opportunity, they’ll put 10 more Ketanji Brown Jacksons on the court. Once they have a compliant Supreme Court, there’s nothing stopping Democrats from carrying out the campaign of lawfare and political violence that they’re already planning. Republicans can take action now to prevent this kind of thing from happening. We could have three new, young Supreme Court justices if the oldest Republicans on the bench retired right now. Additionally, we could abolish the filibuster and pass the SAVE Act, which would do more to secure the future of this country than any other piece of legislation. We could abolish D.C. entirely and return it to Maryland, so that Democrats can’t turn it into a separate state. We could cut all ties with Puerto Rico and make them independent, for the same reason. Would this guarantee that Democrats can’t pack the court? No, it won’t. But it would make it much, much harder to do, because they’d have a much more difficult time rigging elections and adding more Senate seats. So it’s worth trying. But the particular policies don’t actually matter. At this point, we just need to see something — anything — from Republicans that suggests they understand what’s coming. Right now, if there’s enough outrage on social media, we can get companies like Amazon to back off. But if these people take control of the government, complaining isn’t going to fix the problem. By that point, no institution in this country — whether it’s Amazon or the U.S. Supreme Court — will even pretend to care what conservatives think. They certainly won’t pretend to care about John Thune’s respect for “traditions of the Senate.” They will care about one thing, and one thing only — power. And they’ll destroy everyone who was too weak to stand in their way.

A transgender-identifying man in Wiconisco Township, Pennsylvania, made a video complaining about being unable to afford “bottom surgery” in the United States. Stephanie Fritsch, an election official who moved from Las Vegas to a small town in Pennsylvania after “transitioning,” was discovered ranting about not having sufficient funds to mutilate his body domestically.  “I have tried for a very long time to get my bottom surgery,” Fritsch said in a video surfaced by Libs of TikTok. “Unfortunately, it’s been out of my affordability level for a very long time.” Stephanie Fritsch is in charge of elections in Wiconisco Township, Pennsylvania. He complains that he might have to travel to Thailand to chop off his d*ck because it’s too expensive in America This elected official oversees elections… pic.twitter.com/0O5ZG9kZMi — Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) April 20, 2026 Bottom surgery generally refers to operations on the genitals intended to bring a person’s physical anatomy in line with their gender identity. He went on to say he’s disabled and on assistance, but still can’t afford the surgery he wants. “I’m grateful to have Medicare, but at the end of the day, it’s not enough,” he went on. “…the bottom line is, it would be cheaper for me to go to Thailand or Canada to get my bottom surgery than in America.”  Fritsch said he’s trying to “raise some money” to travel abroad for the surgery. “It’s kind of hard to unpack the reality that I have to fly halfway around the world to get a medically necessary procedure instead of getting it done in America. Could you imagine having to go to get a procedure in another country?” Fritsch complained. The video circulated widely online, prompting criticism from some commenters who questioned his role as an election official. “This man obviously has some issues. Why has he been elected to oversee anything. He can’t even oversee his own mental health!” one person wrote. “There are so many things wrong with this. First, that he is ‘in charge of elections,’ much less anything. Then, calling this elective surgery a ‘medically necessary surgery.’ We have got to quit going along with these people and their mental illness,” another X commenter agreed. “How does anyone vote for a person like this? Let alone a majority of people. This person needs mental help,” a third commenter said. Fritsch previously told Uncloseted Media that he has experienced hostility in his community, saying, “Being a public transgender woman, my life is in jeopardy all the time.” 

Florida opened a criminal investigation into OpenAI one year after a gunman killed two people at Florida State University in an attack he planned with “significant advice” from OpenAI’s artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, the state’s Attorney General James Uthmeier announced on Tuesday. The gunman, whom The Daily Wire will not name, relied on ChatGPT to get information on firearms and when the most people would be present at Florida State’s student union, where he opened fire on April 17, 2025, The New York Times reported. The attacker also asked ChatGPT if a specific gun would be effective at short range, according to Uthmeier. “If this were a person on the other end of the screen, we would be charging them with murder,” the Florida attorney general said. “We cannot have AI bots that are advising people on how to kill others.” The criminal investigation will now run alongside a civil investigation into ChatGPT that the Florida attorney general opened earlier this month. The 20-year-old gunman killed two people and wounded six others in the shooting. He was also a student at Florida State and is the stepson of a sheriff’s deputy in Leon County, Florida, which includes Tallahassee. The gunman, who survived a serious gunshot wound from responding officers, has been charged with multiple counts of murder and attempted murder. The gunman appeared to be intrigued by whether a mass shooting at Florida State would gain nationwide attention and asked ChatGPT how the country would react to an attack on the campus, according to the Times. OpenAI, which is led by AI entrepreneur Sam Altman, pushed back on Florida’s decision to open a criminal investigation and said the company “proactively shared this information with law enforcement” after it identified the shooter’s account. “Last year’s mass shooting at Florida State University was a tragedy, but ChatGPT is not responsible for this terrible crime,” an OpenAI spokeswoman told The Daily Wire. “We continue to cooperate with authorities. In this case, ChatGPT provided factual responses to questions with information that could be found broadly across public sources on the internet, and it did not encourage or promote illegal or harmful activity,” the spokeswoman added. Uthmeier, a Republican, said at a press conference on Tuesday that he believes government “should only interfere in business activities when you have significant harm to our people,” adding, “This is that.” The criminal investigation will focus on looking into whether OpenAI or any of its employees should face charges over the programming of ChatGPT’s answers. The Florida State shooter is not the only gunman to rely on ChatGPT for information before opening fire on innocent victims. Earlier this year, a trans-identifying shooter in Canada raised warning signs among OpenAI employees for conversations he had with ChatGPT on shooting scenarios months before killing his mother and brother and then going to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia, where he killed another six people, including five children. The trans-identifying gunman’s messages with ChatGPT in June 2025 resulted in his account getting banned, but OpenAI did not report the conversations to law enforcement, The Wall Street Journal reported. OpenAI tells users that it hands over information to law enforcement “if required to do so to comply with a legal obligation, or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to comply with a legal obligation.” Last year, however, Altman said that he wanted a policy passed to allow him to give AI users assurance that their conversations with ChatGPT would never be shared with the government. “If I could get one piece of policy passed right now, relative to AI, the thing I would most like, and this is in tension with some of the other things that we’ve talked about, is I’d like there to be a concept of AI privilege,” Altman told podcast host Tucker Carlson last September. “When you talk to a doctor about your health or a lawyer about your legal problems, the government cannot get that information.” “We have decided that society has an interest in that being privileged and that a subpoena can’t get that, the government can’t come asking your doctor for it, whatever. I think we should have the same concept for AI,” he added.

There is a current tendency to blame free markets and technology for dyspepsia with the economy, as if there is a nefarious group of people destroying your way of life. People are literally trying to attack data centers. As David Friedberg noted on the “All-In Podcast”: Most people in America are starting to really hate rich people. And there’s no physical space that better represents the wealth in America, the wealth creation that’s happened that a lot of people feel left behind from, than the data center. It is the temple of the wealthy. It is the way that the rich, elite, tech, kind of political, connected billionaires that we’re obviously all attached to are taking from the poor, getting themselves ahead, shooting themselves to space, leaving everyone else behind, and the data center, I think, is the representation of their progress. And it is a representation of the progress that others don’t feel. For a consumer’s life to actually be altered in a meaningfully positive way, most people don’t feel that yet. The best thing they see is some medical advice they’re getting on ChatGPT or something, and that’s kind of the end of it for them. So I think there’s a lot of this populism that’s swollen and that’s taken over, not just the US, but probably a good chunk of the West. And the data center is the target. David Friedberg’s explanation is exactly right. This is the way that economic populists have been pushing. Let’s differentiate between moral and economic populism. Moral populism was exemplified by William F. Buckley back in the 1960s when he stated that he would trust the first 100 names in the Harvard phone book on matters of public policy more than he would trust 100 Harvard professors. The idea was that the common man in the United States — shaped as he or she was by the institutions of church and family and community — had a better moral compass, on average, than the elites. I totally agree with that, because elites very often believe that they have been freed from these systems of morality. However, when it comes to the economy, economic populism is virtually the inverse. Economic populism assumes that there should be some sort of centralized control placed into the hands of that central power by “the people,” and centralized control should overwhelm the disseminated knowledge that is implicit in free markets and capital markets. The basic principle of capitalism is that disparate views on things lead to better outcomes, that differential knowledge and the diffusion of knowledge are actually significantly more effective than one guy at the top with a stick beating people into submission. But economic populism says that free markets are bad if the product of the free market is something I don’t like, therefore, we should take power away from the free market to destroy it. Whenever there is economic unease, people tend to attack free market capitalism, or what they see as the symbols of free market capitalism, and they tend to blame people who are wealthy. The great lie is that people in the United States are wealthy because they’re stealing from the poor. It is a full-scale lie. It is not true. The only places in the world where people are rich because they steal from the poor are communist countries and other forms of tyranny. The reason people get rich in a free market economy is because they are providing products and services at a price people are willing to pay. People want that product or service. But if you can somehow recast the economy of the United States as “rigged” on behalf of the wealthy and go after the means of production, you target data centers. What you are going to end up doing, in this view, is overthrow the capitalist system. The outcome of that will be quite dire. There is a grievance-based, horseshoe-theory economic Right that is also wildly upset about artificial intelligence data centers because they’re big and ugly. You know what else is big and ugly? Walmart — but it’s wonderful for the vast majority of consumers. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home was allegedly targeted in the second attack in just two days; a shot was even fired. This is part and parcel of a broader movement that is targeting technology more generally, including technologies that are required for the United States to win wars. City Journal reported there is a campaign against the military contractor Palantir — which generates extraordinary technologies in terms of intelligence gathering, capacity to target, and much of the actual technology that goes into the machines that we use. This crosses paths with all of America’s enemies. America’s enemies are delighted to watch us destroy ourselves by taking down the technologies that allow us to win. If you buy into this entire shtick — the idea that AI as a technology must be destroyed — it won’t be destroyed. We’ll just lose. If you think that China is going to forgo AI, you’re a fool. They won’t. If the United States were to heavily restrict AI, not just in terms of preventing its gravest harms, but restricting the development of AI, or if there were to be a political party that attempts to prevent the building of data centers, not for any sort of understandable economic reason — like, for example, make the data centers pay their fair share of electricity production, which I think is a fair argument — if there’s a broad scale movement to destroy the AI industry out of either misplaced agrarianism or a deep and abiding hatred for capitalism or the generalized belief that capitalism rots the human soul, we will lose. If the United States heavily restricts AI, not just by preventing its gravest harms but by restricting its development, we will lose. If a political party tries to stop the construction of data centers, we will lose. That is different from making data centers pay their fair share for electricity production, which I think is a fair argument. But if there is a broad-based movement to destroy the AI industry out of misplaced agrarianism, a deep and abiding hatred of capitalism, or a generalized belief that capitalism rots the human soul, we will lose. China wins. This is not a vacuum. It is not as though if the United States forgoes AI magically, we would continue to have a burgeoning, wealthy economy, and China goes weapons down. When it comes to AI, indeed, there are problems, there are dangers — and we should all recognize those dangers, not whistling past the graveyard — but at the same time, it is a tremendous opportunity. A China in a dominant AI position means a China in a dominant military position. The amount of AI that is being used right now by the United States military in the conflict in Iran and in the operation in Venezuela is tremendous and growing. If China outpaces us in AI development, that means their military is now superior to ours. If their military is superior to ours, that means they can not only effectuate change in their region, it means they can also spread that technology throughout the world and make other countries dependent on the receipt of that technology. It means that many, many other countries all over planet Earth would suddenly become dependent on China. That is a huge problem, and it also leaves China in a dominant economic position, because AI means more productivity. If productivity goes up for China but remains stagnant for the United States, they will outcompete us. If they outcompete us, one of two things happens: Either we block off our economy and become backward and protectionist — meaning we don’t have any of the best goods and products and services at the best price, we’re all poorer and we slide into poverty and stagnation — or we have to be dependent on Chinese products, our kids work for Chinese companies, and China is able to spread its influence. When it comes to the game of economics, you must win. When it comes to the game of military dominance, you must win. And when it comes to the technological game, you must win. The economic populism that’s been rising says that we ought to tariff our way out of all our problems, that we ought to attack technological development, that it would be great to have an economy based on t-shirts — none of this is going to solve the bigger problem. Attacking tech CEOs or healthcare CEOs or burning up Teslas and attacking Tesla showrooms or shooting Charlie Kirk or attempting to shoot President Trump — all of these are the most extreme manifestations of an ideology. That ideology says that you are a victim of American society and therefore you get to do bad things. On a broader political level, you are a victim of American society, and therefore you ought to get together with the other victims, take over the government, and use centralized, tyrannical power r to cram down your view of the world.