The livestream is off, but the firing squad isn’t. Nidal Hasan, the Army soldier who killed 13 fellow troops at Fort Hood in 2009, will still be shot to death by Army riflemen on December 3.

“Death penalty through firing squad, and he deserves it,” Donald Trump said of Hasan earlier this month.

He doesn’t deserve it — but not for the reasons you might expect.

Execution by firing squad is regarded as a “soldier’s death,” long considered an honorable end and part of a military tradition that separates those who served from mere criminals. That’s why leaders from Nazi Germany to Saddam Hussein sought to die by firing squad, and why they were always denied.

That Pete Hegseth, a former Army Major obsessed with restoring the military’s “warrior ethos,” does not know this is outrageous. It is also a gift to Nidal Hasan, who has been remarkably clear about his desire to be seen as and treated like a soldier. That is, a soldier for Allah (as he refers to himself).

Hasan during his court-martial said that he had “switched sides” in “America’s war on Islam.” He later wrote a letter to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, asking the then-leader of ISIS to make him a citizen of the Islamic State. “It would be an honor for any believer to be an obedient citizen soldier,” he said, signing his name with the acronym “SoA” for “Soldier of Allah.”

“Fighters,” Hasan said in a separate letter he wrote to the Pope, “have a greater rank in the eyes of Allah than believers who don’t fight.” (This letter was also signed “SoA.”) Hasan has formally argued in court that the shooting was a lawful act of combatant defense to protect Taliban leader Mullah Omar and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan from “imminent harm at the hands of U.S. soldiers.” That is, when he himself was serving in the United States Army.

Soldier. Fighter. Combatant. Hasan clearly wants to be seen as a legitimate warrior.

Oblivious to military tradition and Hasan’s desire to be treated like a soldier, Hegseth is actually rewarding him.

On July 26, 2006, Saddam Hussein told the judge presiding during his trial:

“I ask you, being an Iraqi person, that if you reach a verdict of death, execution, remember that I am a military man and should be killed by firing squad and not by hanging as a common criminal.”

Saddam’s request was denied. He was executed by hanging on December 30, 2006.

The U.S. Army has drawn the same line with its own soldiers. In 1917, after a race riot in Houston, the Army sentenced 13 Black soldiers to death. They asked for the firing squad. Why? “It’s more dignified,” a relative of one of the condemned men, Sgt. William Nesbit, told CBS News in 2024. Instead, they were hanged at dawn, with no chance to appeal. (In 2023, the Army threw out their convictions, with Army Secretary Christine Wormuth saying they “were wrongly treated because of their race and were not given fair trials.”)

Hermann Göring, Hitler’s chosen successor, asked for a firing squad too. When the Allies refused, he swallowed cyanide in his cell hours before his hanging. His suicide note, in a translation by biographer Werner Maser, explained why: “Would that I might be shot! However, executing the German Reichsmarschall by hanging cannot be countenanced.”

For centuries, and across societies, militaries have wrestled with how to execute a soldier for desertion, treason or even murder. The firing squad came to be seen as the honorable end, death at the hands of fellow soldiers. Hanging was the degrading alternative, reserved for those who didn’t deserve that honor.

The U.S. Army even made the distinction official. Its 1943 Manual for Courts-Martial provided for both methods but spelled out the ranking: “Hanging is considered more ignominious than shooting.” It associated hanging with murder, mutiny, spying and rape.

The officers who actually had to make this choice understood it. In 1944, a court-martial sentenced Pvt. Eddie Slovik to death for desertion. He became the only American soldier executed for desertion since the Civil War. Behind closed doors, his judges briefly argued over whether to hang him or shoot him. One of them, Capt. Benedict Kimmelman, later recalled how it ended: “consensus was quickly reached on the firing squad, as the less dishonorable means.”

So why is Hegseth honoring a terrorist mass shooter with a soldier’s preferred ceremonial punishment — one that was denied to literal Nazi leaders?

Because full metal jackass, as I call him, is more cable news buffoon than a former officer who knows anything. Military sources tell me Hegseth didn’t even realize Hasan was paralyzed from the chest down and confined to a wheelchair when he announced the firing squad. And one military JAG tells me Hegseth didn’t know that Nazi military leaders at Nuremberg had insisted on a firing squad, only to suffer the indignity of hanging instead.

But if the significance of the firing squad is so widely understood in the military, why aren’t soldiers saying so? Put simply, they’re scared. Here you’ve got to give Hegseth his due: few defense secretaries have so thoroughly cowed the ranks into keeping their mouths shut.

“People have gotten the memo that it’s career suicide to speak up in this environment,” one retired officer who still works for the military told me on condition of anonymity. He continued:

“It’s not just Hegseth, but the entire leadership in Washington. Whether it’s something controversial like this execution or even a probing analysis of what went right and wrong in the Iran war, everyone knows to keep their counsel to themselves.”

Hegseth, in an interview with commentator Jack Posobiec, provided his rationale for the firing squad execution of Hasan.

“It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers — as it should be,” Hegseth said, adding: “No-brainer.”

No brain indeed.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

The news media is framing Trump’s decision to cancel the livestream of Nidal Hasan’s execution as a Washington story of pure palace intrigue — Trump versus Hegseth. This ignores the real story, one that’s extraordinary for several reasons.

First, the decision was never Hegseth’s to make; it was the president’s alone, as I reported. Second, he initially supported it, saying so to a reporter on October 9. Third and most significantly, Trump’s reversal is the result of people power, with an overwhelming majority of Americans — including his own supporters — opposed to the grotesque spectacle worthy of ancient Rome.

Yet instead of a story about ordinary Americans standing up to the most powerful leader on earth and winning, headline after headline frames it as a Washington drama, as shown below. Consciously or not, they turn what is basically a story about people power into just another Trump fuck-up.

See for yourself:

• NYT: Hegseth’s Plan to Livestream Execution Drew Opposition From Many

• Washington Post: Trump cancels Hegseth’s plan to live-stream Fort Hood shooter’s execution

• Bloomberg: Trump rejects Hegseth’s bid to stream firing squad execution

• NBC News: White House overrules Pete Hegseth again, this time on livestreaming execution

The New York Times’ report is the most striking example. It is organized around the power players it credits with getting the decision reversed. There’s a section on “The General,” Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, Fort Hood’s commander at the time. Another covers Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio (“The Archbishop”). There’s even a nod to the “dozens of retired admirals and generals and other officers” who “published an open letter opposing Mr. Hegseth’s plan to broadcast the execution” — as if anyone gives a shit about a bunch of military brass’s strongly worded letter. And if that weren’t comical enough, there’s a section on “Congress,” the living embodiment of a strongly worded letter that is the quintessential return to sender.

What the Times story never mentions is that Americans are united in their hatred of the idea, as new polling makes clear. They are the real protagonist of this story — not Trump, Hegseth, the military brass, or any other big shots.

An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll released Thursday morning — hours before Trump announced the reversal, according to ABC — found 80 percent of Americans oppose livestreaming Hasan’s execution. Just 18 percent support it. Ninety-one percent of Democrats oppose the livestream, along with 83 percent of independents and 64 percent of Republicans. Even MAGA Republicans are against it, by a 55 percent majority. So are 65 percent of Trump’s 2024 voters.

A separate YouGov poll asked about broadcasting executions in general. About 7 in 10 Americans opposed it, including Republicans by 52 to 31.

It’s not squeamishness about the death penalty. Fifty-three percent of Americans want Hasan executed by firing squad. But 69 percent of those people still didn’t want it broadcast. The public clearly draws a clear line between punishment and spectacle.

The Trump-versus-Hegseth framing also ignores that Trump was on board until the whole country turned on him. Asked on October 9 whether he’d approved the livestream, he said: “Did I approve? Absolutely.” The next day he argued for it himself: “By showing it, maybe other people won’t be doing what he did.”

Far from reining in a rogue defense secretary, this is a story of a president abandoning a position he personally endorsed just days ago.

Trump all but admits it. His Truth Social post announcing his reversal never mentions Hegseth. He doesn’t mention Congress, the brass or the archbishop either. The only people he acknowledges are the public: “many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die.”

The White House would clearly prefer another explanation. An official told NBC News that Trump hadn’t known Hasan was paralyzed, and that this factored into the decision. Hasan has used a wheelchair since he was shot during his capture in 2009. That detail has appeared in coverage of the case all week.

Crediting generals, bishops and senators lets Washington credit Washington, the perpetual source base of reporting. The 80 percent of Americans who agreed on something get no section in the Times. And the Washington Post, which co-sponsored the poll, still put Hegseth in its headline.

Philip K. Dick put it best in a 1978 speech, describing a decency in everyday people that never makes headlines but holds firm nonetheless:

“The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people. They say ‘no’ to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals.”

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

Pete Hegseth may have finally found a publicity stunt that even Donald Trump is uneasy with.

Despite the president’s tough talk about the execution by military firing squad of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, Hegseth’s desire to livestream it is something that even Trump can’t stomach. Since Trump cast doubt on the livestream, reports have claimed he had a change of heart upon realizing Hasan is wheelchair-bound.

If true, how reassuring that neither he nor Hegseth had the foresight to consult Wikipedia beforehand! (His change of heart also came after everyone from the Catholic Church to the National Association of Evangelicals condemned it.)

But there’s another reason Trump might’ve gotten cold feet, one that’s hardly gotten any attention: the grim fact that military protocols assign the president a creepily intimate role in military executions. They all but make Trump the executioner — an image that he may not want associated with the grotesquerie of a livestreamed snuff film.

That’s right: there are laws and military regulations on this. They virtually give the president his own livestream into the process.

A military court can sentence someone to death, and military appellate courts can uphold that sentence. But the death sentence “may not be executed until approved by the President,” according to federal law. In other words, the president can’t wash his hands of this and pawn off the decision on military courts, the Pentagon or Pete Hegseth. Trump alone must approve it, affirmatively and explicitly.

But that’s just the beginning. Under Army Regulation 190-55, § 2-1, the Army’s Judge Advocate General prepares a package for presidential consideration after military appellate review. The package includes the trial record, decisions of the military appellate courts and the Supreme Court, any clemency petition, and the Judge Advocate General’s recommendation.

Once the president decides, the Army formally transmits that decision through its chain of command. The “condemned prisoner” (literally the legal term) must then be personally informed of the president’s decision by the commandant of the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.

Next, Army Regulation 190-55, § 2-6 requires a dedicated communications network be established between the White House Situation Room and the military personnel responsible for executing the prisoner. The connections run through the Secretary of the Army and the Execution Watch Team, which is responsible for the condemned prisoner’s custody.

The regulation lays out an exact countdown. At least 72 hours before the execution, the Army must test its communications systems. Four hours out, hourly tests with the Execution Watch Team begin. No later than an hour before, the line must be up and running: from the White House Situation Room to the Army secretary to the team guarding the prisoner. It stays manned without interruption throughout, and it isn’t closed until the prisoner is pronounced dead.

So crucial is the president’s role that under military policy, should both redundant communications systems fail during the 30 minutes immediately preceding the execution, the proceedings must be delayed until communications are restored.

Even after the condemned is pronounced dead, the president’s role still has not ended.

Army Regulation 190-55, § 2-6(f) requires the Execution Watch Team officer in charge to make an announcement after designated personnel pronounce death. The prescribed language reads:

“The sentence of death has been executed; time of death was XXX. Communications may now be closed.”

Only then are the dedicated communications terminated.

I can see why the president might have lost his nerve.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

Secreted away inside a windowless building at 7700 Potranco Road in San Antonio, Texas, is a darkened room that serves as the hub of Task Force Raider. This military task force is secretly at work as part of a government-wide “election security group,” guarding against “interference” in the upcoming midterm elections.

Interference, however, is a loaded word. While it connotes the Kremlin hacking into polling places or changing the election count, Task Force Raider is actually more focused on the broader category of “influence”, specifically Russian or Chinese attempts to change minds rather than to change votes.

But the real target is the American people, whom the federal government sees as vectors for foreign influence.

“The entire election security scare is to indulge President Trump and assuage Democrats, all of whom fear interference and shenanigans, but not from foreign shores,” says a senior military intelligence officer, who spoke to me about the secret effort.

He and other military officers expressed unease with the sprawling mission. It encompasses everything from sending millions of anonymous text and voice messages abroad, to outright deleting social media posts or taking down entire websites, as documents I obtained reveal.

All of this is in violation of longstanding prohibitions against any military involvement in elections whatsoever, yet enjoys the support of both major political parties.

What’s more, for all the handwringing about election interference, the Trump administration hasn’t substantiated that any country (or any other foreigners) are planning to interfere or have any chance of meaningfully altering an outcome. But that hasn’t stopped the federal government from designating election security the number one “operational priority” — a mission that insiders are calling “no fail.”

That is the mission directive that Pete Hegseth issued to the San Antonio cyber establishment last week, as I reported on recently. Yet because Hegseth’s war is highly classified, takes place in cyberspace and entails a healthy dose of covert actions that would shut down potential attacks as well as cut off normal influencers and common citizens who seek to sway voters (what some might call ‘democracy’), nothing has been written about Hegseth’s actual election interference.

“These are not merely Keystone Cops battling against pimple-faced amateurs and anarchists,” says a retired senior military officer who has been involved in election security since the 2016 presidential year. “Every capability that the US possesses, in Cyber Command, the CIA, NSA, and other agencies, the Russian and Chinese governments also have,” he says. “We are literally involved in a daily battle in cyberspace.”

Despite this underground war, the officer questions the growing military involvement in safeguarding voting. “Influencing the influencers? That’s creating a precedent that I’m not comfortable with,” he said. As he sees it, this is not just a slippery slope to boots on the ground at polling places but of building and having federal government capabilities that will eventually be able to control public speech and assembly.

The officer, who describes himself as a nonpartisan believer that the Constitution always comes first, points out that the hundred-plus-year prohibition against posting federal soldiers at polling places had good reason behind it then and good reason now.

“Granted, those in uniform are subordinate to an interagency civilian effort,” he says, “but the construct of only fearing boots on the ground is obsolete. We need to update our thinking, and the law, to include the cyber world. And we need to counter the idea that a robust, even foreign-based debate, requires federal intervention.”

To understand how close we are to abridging the First Amendment, consider that earlier this month, Senators Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla of California wrote to the heads of half a dozen social media companies to warn that they — YouTube, Twitter (X), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Google — weren’t doing enough to “combat misinformation and disinformation … during the 2026 midterm elections.” It was a wholly partisan letter with a predictable dose of Donald Trump this and Donald Trump that. But there it was: two prominent Democrats and liberals threatening that Congress must “consider investigations and legislation to remedy” election mis- and disinformation.

“Congress shall make no law,” the military officer says, when asked about the proposed legislation. “It’s the first sentence of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Period.”

Now, however, a law, and control, is the norm. And Hegseth, for whatever reason, wants the Pentagon in on the action, that is, under the misleading guise that it is only working against “foreign” actors.

The military has been quietly involved in protecting federal elections against cyber attack since Donald Trump appeared on the national stage in 2016, in the context of WikiLeaks, Kremlin influence operations and their hacking of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Whether any of what happened was important enough to have the slightest impact on the American vote or not, the Obama White House was spooked enough that it gave the CIA covert action authorities to shut down websites and social media accounts — including taking a Russian military-created website called “DCleaks” offline — that might release additional materials. Whatever you think about Obama’s motivations or Trump’s, the essence of the government action then, as it is now, is that it restricts free speech.

Task Force Raider (or its predecessor) was mobilized to assist Homeland Security and the FBI in “defending” the United States. To pull together the right people with the greatest talent, the Task Force operates under a “best athlete” approach, picking the most qualified individual regardless of military service, civilian agency or defense contractors. Eventually, over 350 people got to work on the task force.

A $10 million Rewards for Justice program was unveiled, and over 56,000 “psychological operations” (PSYOPS) messages were posted over the internet. The influence warriors of Task Force Raider sent over three million (!) text and voice messages to people in “countries of interest,” according to documents I’ve obtained. All of this took place in secret.

Some of the work and preparations were focused purely on defense. One unit, the “Demon Chasers” of the “91st Cyber Operations Squadron,” the military’s premier offensive cyberspace squadron, contributes its expertise to the mix. Working from their 42,600-square-foot “multi-domain” secure facility that contracting documents say is authorized to handle Top Secret “sensitive activities” (SA), “sensitive compartmented information” (SCI), “special access program” (SAP) level information, offensive cyber operations (OCO), and “special technical operations” (STO), the 91st specializes in freezing out communications.

One document says that the squadron, and its Special Program Office, has the mission to “degrade, disrupt, deceive and exploit adversary telephony and information system.” It cut its teeth in Afghanistan, where it perfected “cellular coverage blackouts,” that is, the ability to shut down cellphone communications in a limited area.

Another unit operates a “malware lab” that collects together software and data from all sorts of adversary hacks and cyber operations, conducting analysis of “malicious artifacts,” and writing counter-software to thwart incoming attacks and implants.

An enormous part of the overall effort is “persona operations” — where soldiers and other literal keyboard warriors create false identities and fake internet addresses to operate in cyberspace without government attribution, to scout the web and surf social media, to engage individual users, and to do some influencing of their own.

My sources who are privy to this Top Secret effort all agree: the military is not just thwarting foreign actors from sowing discontent. They are also regulating what appears in social media, regulating legitimate debate.

Cyber Command’s (CYBERCOM’s) Joint Force Headquarters – Cyber, operating from its war room inside the National Security Agency-Texas facility in San Antonio, oversees Task Force Raider and other military election security efforts. On the million-square-foot “security hill,” not far from the NSA facility at the former Kelly Air Force Base, another unit has built a “state-of-the-art weapons system to mimic the collection efforts of foreign intelligence services,” according to documents I’ve obtained.

After the 2020 elections, the Joint Force Headquarters activated an election security “enclave” to support “the most sensitive activities.” The Pentagon defines such activities as “activities that, if compromised, could cause enduring adverse effects on U.S. foreign policy or military operations, or lead to significant embarrassment for the U.S. government, its allies, or the military.”

In other words, actions that might damage the federal government and the military, not actions that might damage democracy.

Online support for Palestinians and opposition to Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war; vitriol against Donald Trump, or ICE, or the CIA and the FBI; or “disinformation” in general? None of these are a serious threat to our democracy. Yet somehow the federal government and the Pentagon have convinced us that they need to take extreme action, including controlling speech, to counter it.

What Americans see of military involvement in the election, they pretty clearly don’t like. When video circulated of DC National Guardsmen appearing in front of a ballot drop box, it quickly went viral, stoking outrage.

What people don’t see is that the military is also eyeing the vote in a much more systematic way in cyberspace. Why isn’t anyone asking what they are actually doing? And who is the actual target? And what is it that they have in mind to do on or before election day to carry out their own influence campaign?

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has formally decided to bar some on the political “left” from visiting America, according to a diplomatic cable he sent to embassies this week.

When I obtained a copy of the internal cable banning those in vaguely “aligned groups” of “far-left terrorists,” I couldn’t help but laugh at the timing. The next day, Rubio was in Greece where, with the Acropolis behind him, he celebrated “free debate and public discussion, the contest of mind with mind.”

Rubio even praised Socrates, whom Athens executed on charges of “impiety” and “corrupting the youth.” In the same speech, Rubio leveled basically the same charge, saying that “in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit.”

Under the pretext that certain forms of speech can lead to violence, or even more vaguely, can pose some kind of threat to America’s economy, Rubio has laid out all of the ways that the federal government can decide which ideas are too dangerous and thus can be the basis for denying a visa.

Rubio’s cable reminds consular officers worldwide that Donald Trump’s national security directive NSPM-7 identifies things like “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” views as so-called indicators of political violence. Trump’s directive also singles out views on immigration, race, gender, and traditional morality as relevant to determine threats to America.

Leaked Cable

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Rubio now implements NSPM-7 for the State Department, formally bringing ideological scrutiny to the visa process. He targets groups and individuals who are driven by “an overriding hostility towards the U.S. legal, economic, and political systems” as being inadmissible to the U.S., particularly if these groups and individuals consider the United States as “fundamentally illegitimate and oppressive.”

The cable unfortunately affirms the fears of my European friends — including many who sincerely love America — that they are no longer welcome in this country.

Rubio’s cable directs embassies to identify and nominate members of “Far-Left Terrorist” and “other aligned groups” for visa restrictions. It covers people who have engaged in, supported, or incited terrorism, supported violent criminal activity, or participated in what the department calls “economic sabotage.” Terms like “supported” and “aligned” make the line between expression, association, and participation consequential. The cable does little to explain where officials should draw it.

The memo also makes clear that the groups “do not need to be designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations” or Specially Designated Global Terrorists, to be linked to the mythical “Antifa” organization. In other words, you do not even have to be on the administration’s list of officially designated terror groups to be barred from the country.

The broad policy was announced in July. As I reported before that announcement, the State Department was preparing to target alleged far-left terrorists and their allies for activities including economic sabotage against property. This cable provides the instructions for putting that policy into practice.

The cable defines “economic sabotage” as destruction or vandalism of public or private property, cyberattacks, swatting, and certain forms of “doxing” — a term elastic enough to apply to simply publishing the name and other identifying information of, say, ICE officials. Coordinating, facilitating, or materially supporting those activities also qualifies as threats of economic sabotage.

Such vandalism or cyberattacks come with no stated minimum damage threshold. “Aligned groups” comes with no clear definition. And the nomination form does not require a criminal conviction of any kind.

What the cable does do is ask for information from sources including foreign governments, law enforcement, and “media articles.” Washington officials review the nominations and control the resulting visa flags and revocations. The cable contains no list of people who are actually banned.

In Rubio’s speech in Athens, he praised the ancient Greeks’ appetite for argument and their refusal to accept limits. He celebrated Socrates, who “refused to abandon the inquiry into truth even at the cost of his own life.”

Rubio clearly appreciates an inconvenient thinker once he has been dead long enough. Living ones, though? Those are threats to national security.

They have opinions about capitalism, policing, and American foreign policy. They belong to groups. They might even regard some of our institutions as oppressive.

That’s the thing about controversial speech: it only seems obvious in retrospect. At the time, it always seems dangerous. That is the category of speech most worth protecting. Safe ideas don’t need any protection. Even Stalin supported speech he liked.

Later in his address, Rubio lamented that so many people yearn for “a world of perfect safety, a world devoid of risk or failure.” As a result, he said, “we build downwards.”

I sincerely agreed with that part. Too bad Rubio doesn’t.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

The biggest lie about the 2026 election is that the military won’t be involved.

In August, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine assured Congress of the military’s “steadfast commitment to constitutional principles,” writing that “the Joint Force has no plans to send Federal military personnel or Federalized members of the National Guard to polling places during the 2026 elections.”

Reassuring as that may sound, it is deeply misleading. For as Pete Hegseth made clear last week, the military is undertaking an unprecedented role in the election — one that happens to violate the Constitution.

While there probably won’t be the soldier boots-at-voting-booths nightmare feared by some, the military is mobilizing a secret cyber force as well as “every authorized asset, capability, and partnership” of its intelligence apparatus to counter purported “threats” to the election, to quote Hegseth.

The administration is cultivating the idea that this is just the military protecting against the most extreme cases like foreign governments hacking into voting machines to alter results. However, military sources tell me that the real focus is something far broader: the possibility of Americans’ political beliefs being shaped by foreign governments.

“Foreign malign influence” is the U.S. government’s official euphemism for censoring tweets, Facebook posts, TikTok videos and myriad other online speech thought to imperil Americans’ ability to think correctly. This is part of what the military will be doing with growing intensity as election day nears.

As the national security system sees it, foreign powers like Russia, China and Iran are busy eating through the foundations of American democracy like termites, one social media post at a time. (Consider, for example, their belief that American skepticism of AI data centers is the result of Chinese influence, as I reported last month.) But the trouble with fumigating for termites is that people live in the house. Since most Americans now live online, foreign propaganda doesn’t stay foreign: the moment an American likes or shares a post, it also becomes an American’s speech.

Yet Congress hasn’t said anything about the obvious threat to Americans’ freedom of expression. And the hypocrisy at play here is mind-bending. Think about it. Trump is still promoting his fanciful belief that the 2020 election was stolen by foreign interference — something half of Congress is happy to condemn — but when his administration directs the military to go after foreign influence, none of them say a peep.

Both major parties, whatever their disagreements, share a consensus view that Americans’ beliefs and even voting decisions are not their own, but rather the result of shadowy foreign influence campaigns. So much so, in fact, that Congress has codified in law a definition of “foreign malign influence” that of course focuses on “public opinion within the United States.”

Even if there’s the best of intentions, the government using “public opinion” and “malign” in the same sentence is dangerous.

The almost Greek tragedy level irony here is that involving the military in elections is a greater threat to our democracy than all foreign influence operations combined. Both the Constitution and federal law make plenty clear that the military has no role here, and for good reason.

Not only are elections primarily a state and local responsibility under the Constitution, but the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibits the use of the military to execute civilian law. An additional federal prohibition, literally titled “Troops at polls,” traces its origins to the Civil War. In 1865, during Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and in the final weeks of the war, Congress made it a crime for federal officers to bring troops anywhere near where votes were being cast. This was based on the common sense understanding that the presence of armed soldiers is inherently intimidating to voters, or at the very least is corrosive to democratic culture. But Lincoln couldn’t have imagined cyberspace, so the law forbids bayonets rather than military botnets.

Oblivious to all this, Pete Hegseth announced in a recent memo that “the Department of War (DoW) will effectively wield its capabilities to protect and uphold the reliability of America’s voting mechanisms against external manipulation and disruption from foreign actors,” before hinting at the broader foreign influence focus.

To Hegseth, that means employing U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM) and the “Defense Intelligence Enterprise (DIE)” in order to “ensure that every lawful voter can cast their ballot free from foreign intimidation, coercion, or fear.”

And what is the most hallowed civilian law of them all, one that the military plays no role in “enforcing”? It is the inalienable right under the First Amendment to the Constitution: Freedom of speech and the right of the people peaceably to assemble. The military is not allowed to do anything to enforce or otherwise intervene in that. And yet that’s what Hegseth is doing here.

It might not be troops guarding voting booths. But the head of the Pentagon is explicitly directing the military to guard voters in cyberspace — it’s not that far off.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

The Pentagon is “increasing [nuclear] options available to the President for purposes of deterring or responding effectively to a nuclear contingency,” undersecretary of war Elbridge Colby says.

Unless you’re a member of the nuclear priesthood, this is probably the first you’re hearing about it. The Senate knows, having been briefed earlier this month in a closed hearing. But neither Congress nor the media have said a word about the disclosure I quoted (which this humble newsletter is providing you in its entirety below).

Colby testimony

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Colby has been making this case for a long time. In 2011, fresh off a Pentagon stint working on Obama’s New START treaty, he wrote about what he thought America’s nuclear war plans should be able to do.

“The United States should maintain the assured ability to conduct a devastating, effectively annihilating strike against any opponent even after an attempt by that opponent to disarm the United States through a first strike of its own,” Colby said. The forces held back for retaliation, he added, should be able to “destroy the attacking country as a functioning society.”

Sounds like he’s got World Wars III-IV covered.

But the same post went on to argue for what he wants now: a limited nuclear strike capability. The thinking is that this provides the president a goldilocks-style intermediate option, between the too-cold porridge of doing nothing and the too-hot porridge of, well, Armageddon.

Here’s how we got here. In April, Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary of war for nuclear deterrence, told Congress that the U.S. now has to deter Russia and China at the same time, plus a growing roster of regional nuclear threats. Think: Iran.

Kadlec’s wishlist included a nuclear sea-launched cruise missile, which the first Bush administration eliminated and the Navy doesn’t even want. He also said the U.S. needs new tools to counter nuclear blackmail.

A month later, Colby spelled out the thinking. “We once again find ourselves grappling with major power rivalry under the nuclear shadow,” he told senior military officers at the National War College. The defining challenge of our era, he said, is “how to defend important — indeed potentially very important — but nevertheless not existential interests against nuclear-armed major powers.”

Translation: how to fight Russia or China over something short of national survival, like an ally’s territory.

None of this is hypothetical, not for an administration that went to war with Iran this year for the stated reason of keeping Tehran from ever getting a nuclear weapon. In this environment, handing Trump more nuclear options isn't some wonky policy tweak. This is a question of national survival.

That’s not to say that nuclear war is imminent or even likely. But isn’t nuclear policy the kind of thing the public should have some or literally any say in? Washington of course has zero interest in that. But why does the news media? It’s baffling that they haven’t done a single story on this. Meanwhile, there’s wall-to-wall coverage of the hack of FBI data and its supposed threat to Bureau personnel. That’s of interest to the FBI, but why would any ordinary person give a shit? (The FBI can sign up for the $45 class action settlement like the rest of us!)

Now compare those headlines with what Colby told the National War College, foreshadowing what Trump’s new nuclear options will mean:

“I want to underline that the centrality of the political object[ive] does not mean simply a brake on military force. To the contrary, in some circumstances it may require aggressiveness and an acceptance of great risk.”

A bit more alarming than some cyber hack, no?

Here’s where we’re heading:

• Even lower yield and flexible bomber and aircraft-carried nuclear bombs and air-to-surface missiles to provide more options to Donald Trump in Europe and on the Korean Peninsula.

• A sea-launched nuclear weapon, so the U.S. can go nuclear without asking allies for permission or for help

• "Credible, rational nuclear options," as if "rational" and "nuclear" belong in the same sentence, including limited strikes a president could "plausibly authorize."

Senator Jack Reed, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, has been briefed on everything I’ve told you in this story and more. It’s not clear why he hasn’t said anything. Perhaps the 76-year-old was busy with his reelection campaign?

Speaking of which, guess who Pete Hegseth just announced would lead his creepy new Project Meridian future-of-warfare study? 83-year-old Newt Gingrich!

From Cold War-era nuclear brinksmanship to Newt Gingrich, talk about a blast from the past.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

The Pentagon, if we let them, will buy a million drones over the next few years.

You read that right. One million.

This spending spree is premised on the Pentagon’s frankly dumbass belief that the next war will look like the one Ukraine is fighting (a trench-warfare style slog), rather than the kind the U.S. has spent decades and billions preparing to fight with airpower and long-range precision weapons.

Before I explain why that’s (very) wrong, here’s how the military came to that view. As drones shrink in size and AI promises to make them autonomous, the Pentagon is convinced they won't just shape the future of war but usher in a completely new way of waging it.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration envisions a Marshall Plan-style program to pump out millions of American-made drones. As they see it, this will revitalize the American defense industry and end reliance on foreign suppliers.

“Do you want to be the victor in the game of drones?” White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka said at a Small Business Administration event last week, touting the million-drone vision to a bunch of American entrepreneurs.

The future, Gorka explained, “has to be American — otherwise, we are at the mercy of others, and we cannot permit that.”

Gorka isn’t the only administration official hawking drones. In his own theatrical display, Secretary of whatever he is Pete Hegseth released a video (see below) last year of himself signing a directive delivered directly to him by a drone emblazoned with American flags.

“ We will deliver tens of thousands of small drones to our force in 2026,” Hegseth said, adding: “and hundreds of thousands of them by 2027.”

He accompanied the stunt with an official memorandum titled “Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance.” While the signed two-page cover memo stuck to broad rhetoric about cutting red tape and learning lessons from Ukraine, the Pentagon’s accompanying implementation guidance laid out the explicit mandate: “By the end of 2026, every squad [the lowest echelon of the Army and Marine Corps] will have low-cost, expendable drones.”

Then-Army Secretary Dan Driscoll took it even further. He announced that the Army would buy “at least a million drones within the next two to three years” — twenty times the roughly 50,000 it buys annually — suggesting that it could buy millions more every year after that.

Then, Hegseth unveiled his $1 billion “Drone Dominance” program: 340,000 small attack drones over two years, at a price per drone that’s supposed to fall from $5,000 to $2,300 at full production.

By that thinking, the U.S. can buy a million drones even cheaper; hell, buy enough and the price can be reduced to zero. Before we get to billions (or trillions, because why not?), it’s worth pointing out what a scam this all is.

As long as the Pentagon is throwing around big numbers, let’s review: In the entirety of the Ukraine war, that is, over four-plus years, some 10 million drones have been used by both sides, which is where the one million (per year!) is roughly extrapolated. The vast majority of those drones have been the small “first-person view” (FPV) drones that the Army is referring to.

These are a lot of drones, but this isn’t necessarily the future of warfare. Russia has been resorting to the use of so many drones because it has been unable to conquer its smaller and weaker neighbor and because it is afraid to fly its airplanes over Ukraine (or when it does so, it can’t coordinate or carry out a sustained attack). Ukraine, by contrast, has been the model of self defense. Yet despite the use of these millions of drones, neither side has been able to shift the stalemate. And the cost in human lives from World War I-style warfare has been staggering, more than half a million soldiers killed.

There is no part of this war that we should want to emulate, so the question has to be asked of the U.S. military: Are they crazy? Do they foresee any kind of trench warfare with American “squads” shooting a million drones? When their maximum distance is only three miles? Putting soldiers intentionally in harm’s way just because that’s the range of their weapons? Do they forget that the U.S. has already spent billions upon billions to buy precision artillery and longer range ground attack missiles specifically so we don’t have to put our soldiers in harm’s way? Do they forget that we have airpower, that THAT is the American way of war? Do we really want to indulge Hegseth and his big-dumb-lug Army boots on the ground view of the world (or its price tag)?

“The days of $35,000 drones,” CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee in May, “those days are behind us.”

Cooper was talking about the cheap drones U.S. forces faced from the Houthis in Yemen. The real threat, Cooper said, comes from Iranian drones that are jet-powered and packed with high-end sensors.

In the current Iran war, Tehran has fired just over 7,000 “one-way attack” drones at Israel and the Gulf states, and more than 90 percent were intercepted. Tellingly, when Cooper talked up American drones, he didn’t mention the cheap, short-range quadcopters Hegseth wants a million of. Cooper singled out LUCAS, which debuted in the Iran war. A long-range knockoff of Iran’s own Shahed-136, the LUCAS gives the military another way to strike beyond artillery and missiles. At upwards of $35,000 apiece, each one costs seven to ten times more than Hegseth’s “Drone Dominance” models.

In other words, one can buy a flock of cheap small drones — but what would they be for, other than to satisfy some obsolete image of warfare of the future where airpower, space power, and cyber power are absent? Who in their right mind thinks that? Where is it likely that such a three-mile range American swarm would even be needed?

Dozens of companies — small and big alike — smell Washington’s latest obsession and are only too happy to take our tax dollars to provide the military with something it wants to buy.

All of this is particularly grotesque amid an affordability crisis, as well as a war with Iran that in many ways already is the war of the future: a demonstration that we can hit this target and that one, with little regard for the fallout or what comes next. That’s what you get when the technology is better than the thinking.

Drone Dominance? How about budget dominance. And some — literally any — thinking.

Subscribe so you don’t miss our followup story on the government’s plans to deploy drones domestically.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

While the media fixates on AI extinction scenarios, government and industry are fighting over something far more concrete: who gets to control America’s response to AI.

“I am forming the AI Force, much like I did [the] Space Force,” Donald Trump said last Saturday.

Almost immediately, the AI shark tank started circling, eager to shape the president’s musings into something concrete, something that would benefit — them.

It’s a Washington playbook and a kind of Rorschach test: the movers and shakers, the experts and the moguls telling you what the president “meant,” what an AI Force should be, whether it’s needed, and if it’s not, what’s needed instead. It’s a trillion-dollar Christmas wishlist you’re paying for but have no say in the contents, which will dictate the future of AI.

A seventh military branch, alongside the Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marine Corps, Navy, and Space? Another military command alongside Cyber Command or Strategic Command? Another powerful agency like NSA?

Trump’s Space Force comparison is “the shape of an answer, but without the substance,” Philip Reiner, CEO and co-founder of the Institute for Security and Technology, told Defense One. Everyone is rushing in to fill that empty vessel.

“Space Force works because Congress can give it a doctrine, a budget, a personnel system, but there’s no equivalent for AI,” Reiner said, adding: “this is more of an actual [Defense Department] lane…”

Then there’s Leah Siskind of the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who said that she sees Trump’s AI Force as “a key vehicle for bolstering artificial intelligence expertise across the Defense Department and the rest of the federal government.”

Of course the naysayers point to impediments like the need for new laws, a budget, and an act of Congress, yadda yadda, but that’s not how things congeal. Quickly the consensus has formed that some kind of military entity needs to take over.

Congressman Rich McCormick (R-GA), a member of the Armed Services Committee and former Navy commander, embraced Trump’s idea.

“President Trump’s proposal for an AI Force Czar puts a needed focus on accelerating American innovation and cutting through barriers that slow us down,” McCormick said. “China is moving fast. America needs to move faster.”

Okay, he says Czar, which suggests civilian rather than military, but the national security red card has been flashed: that because of China, we need to do something big. Before you know it, Washington has declared an AI war.

At least one tech industry figure expressed misgivings, noting that the Space Force comparison portends a military takeover of the tech sector.

“Rather than use civilian agencies to regulate it, use the Pentagon to try and dominate it,” an industry representative told Politico.

One person who has called for civilian coordination is White House Office of Science and Technology director Michael Kratsios. “These implications of AI spread across so many different agencies,” he told Fox News, adding that “to have someone at the White House to be able to work on all those issues across the agencies is really critical.”

No surprise that a White House official wants Trump’s AI Force to reside in the White House; but when it comes to big money and calls of national security, the military is the colossus, even if the organizational design is yet unclear.

So, as is often the case with the military, secrecy comes to the rescue. Some tech leaders are actively asking for their work to be absorbed into the military’s black budget. Guillaume Verdon — founder and CEO of AI hardware startup Extropic and a former Google researcher — argues for locking AI development safely behind classified doors.

“Any sort of AI Cyberdefense or AI Biodefense work should be a contract from the US AI Force and under strict clearance/export control, just like any sensitive defense work,” Verdon said.

Trump muses, and everyone from Silicon Valley tech execs to the Pentagon brass smells fresh meat, ready to make an AI Force follow their design and their interests. Concerns about AI itself, the coming AI war, or the future of humanity are subsumed into an organizational turf war. Meanwhile, secretly, everyone is eager to siphon off billions and develop secret weapons while the legislators and the bureaucrats are busy fussing with org charts.

I’m a skeptic of the AI apocalypse narrative (see: “Is The AI Apocalypse For Real?”). However, I do see the dynamic shaping up where some 50-year debate ahead of us (like the nuclear debate) generates dinners and seminars and conferences and proposals and guardrails and agreements and treaties. Through all of it, an AI Force will form and the weapons of our destruction will emerge, with the people shut out both because it has become a matter of “national security” — which is to say, none of our business.

Then we’ll be asked to enter the contest to design the new AI Force uniform.

Suggestions anyone?

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

Anxiety over AI and data centers is widely held, but somehow the Trump administration has convinced itself the public concern was manufactured in China.

This week, in little-noticed remarks by President Trump and Justice Department warning, the administration declared war on protestors and opponents of AI, threatening “criminal liability” if they “further the propaganda or other goals of a foreign power.”

While that sounds like some modern day Tokyo Rose shilling for Beijing, with orders coming in over shortwave radio, the actual targets are just normal people who have no idea they are part of the government’s latest national security mirage.

Last week, the Justice Department instructed “citizens and noncitizens” that anyone furthering the “goals” of a foreign power in “any public activity” — including even “public demonstrations” — must formally notify the government to avoid arrest and prosecution.

DOJ warning

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Though they don’t identify any specific protests, it’s not hard to surmise who they’re talking about. Two days prior, President Trump began a spate of social posts declaring that opposition to AI is a traitorous, treasonous conspiracy theory tracing back to China.

“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” Trump posted on September 14. “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”

“The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood,” Trump also posted, “are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause.”

In a third post, he blamed the skepticism of AI on an unnamed foreign country. “The only reason the AI/Data Center outburst is happening is because the United States is leading, by a lot, every other country,” he said

Most recently, on September 10, Trump alluded to using the criminal justice system to go after “BAD” actors in the AI space. “[W]e will also be looking for BAD, and we can do that, very easily, with our already existing Criminal and Civil Justice System,” Trump warned on September 19.

In other words, the president is playing the national security card. And Congress got there first.

In June, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Tom Cotton (R-AR) asked then-acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to investigate “foreign influence efforts targeting the buildout of American AI infrastructure.” “Alarming reports indicate that a network of foreign actors, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is attempting to manipulate U.S. policy and public opinion on data centers,” Cotton wrote.

Cotton’s chief exhibit was Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based American tech mogul whose network of left-wing U.S. nonprofits, Cotton claimed, has spent years producing content opposing American AI infrastructure, with the Chinese government as its “ultimate paymaster.” (Readers of this newsletter will recall my report last year in which a homeland security official told me that Singham was being scrutinized under the president’s national security order NSPM-7, explained here.)

"We can't allow any effort by foreign adversaries to extort … and undermine our technological development," Cotton wrote. Complaining that "no entity in the network has been charged under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA)," he asked the Justice Department to "launch a full investigation into these matters."

Cotton letter

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Days before Cotton's letter, top Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, led by Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-KY), raised nearly identical concerns. They asked FBI Director Kash Patel and the White House for a briefing on what they called foreign influence campaigns aimed at blocking American data centers.

“It is critical that this Administration takes any effort to undermine [winning the AI race] — particularly from foreign adversaries — with a great deal of seriousness,” they wrote.

Guthrie said in his own statement: “The fact that Chinese Communist Party-backed entities and other foreign adversaries may be attempting to influence decisions related to American data center infrastructure puts into perspective how serious of a fight we are in.”

House letter

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And well before Trump weighed in, a chorus of private figures in his orbit were pushing the same line.

Start with David Sacks, the venture capitalist who served as Trump’s AI czar before stepping down to become co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Sacks has been casting domestic resistance to AI as a gift to Beijing. After a Chinese model topped a coding leaderboard in July, he complained that “America is tying itself in knots: politicians and bureaucrats are banning new data centers … This is how you lose the AI race.” More recently, Sacks warned on Fox News against moves that would “just hand the whole ball game to China.”

Then there’s Kevin O’Leary, the “Shark Tank” investor behind a planned $100 billion data center in Utah. O’Leary, a vocal Trump supporter, has spent the past two years cozying up to the administration. That includes a January 2025 Mar-a-Lago sit-down with the president-elect, and a stretch lobbying Trump officials there in a bid to buy TikTok.

This Spring, O’Leary claimed that hundreds of millions of dollars from China were paying protesters to oppose data centers like his. One group he targeted, the Alliance for a Better Utah, shot back: “The only foreign interest in this data center is Kevin from Canada.”

It gets funnier.

In a June 25 post on X, O’Leary conceded he had “no evidence” that the groups and people he’d named were funded by China, and Fox News aired apologies. Two of the groups have since sued O’Leary and Fox for defamation.

Whoops!

Then there are the industry groups, too numerous to list. A representative example: a spokesperson for the pro-AI Innovation Council told the Daily Caller that the anti-data center campaign was "a manufactured op by dark anti-American forces and foreign governments."

All of this rests on the premise that ordinary Americans wouldn’t oppose data centers unless someone in Beijing was pulling the strings. The polling says otherwise.

A Gallup poll conducted in March found that 71 percent of Americans oppose building an AI data center in their area. That’s more than the 53 percent who oppose a local nuclear plant. Nearly half, 48 percent, are strongly opposed, and the opposition crosses party lines, including 63 percent of Republicans. That’s not a fringe. It’s close to a consensus.

Nor is it technophobia. Nearly half of Americans now use AI chatbots, according to a February Pew surveyof more than 5,000 adults. Yet 40 percent said AI will hurt society over the next 20 years, compared with 16 percent who said it will help. What people distrust is how it’s being rolled out: 63 percent said AI is advancing too quickly, 71 percent said it will make their personal information less secure, and 67 percent had little or no confidence in the federal government to regulate it. Pew research last year found that 61 percent want more control over how AI is used in their lives, and about six in ten worry government regulation will be too lax.

In other words, the public wants a say, and it wants at least some controls in place.

The Trump administration’s response: treat opposition to AI and data centers as a counterintelligence matter. It’s not the first time the administration has played the national security card to clear the way for AI.

In June, the Justice Department intervened in an NAACP lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI over dozens of gas turbines the company was running without air permits to power a data center it maintained in Tennessee. The department asked a federal judge to throw the case out, arguing that the NAACP “threatens American national, economic, and energy security.”

To make the point, the government filed a sworn declaration from Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer. Stanley swore to the court that Grok was “a matter of paramount national security.”

The irony of the China puppetry gambit is that the approach is likely to backfire. Well, one of the ironies. Another is Trump warning about “Conspiracy Theorists” while alleging a vast Chinese plot for which his allies have produced virtually no evidence. (Though Kevin O'Leary will have plenty of time to find some during the discovery portion of his defamation suit.)

When people who distrust the government’s handling of AI are told their distrust is traitorous foreign propaganda punishable by jail time, it’s hard to imagine them trusting the government more. It’s easy to imagine them trusting it less, and wondering what the government is so eager to keep them from asking. That’s the downside of playing national security card, and it’s one that Washington never seems to think about.

Subscribe to make sure you see my next article, revealing how all of this will be formalized under a new government entity modeled off the military.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

Logan Paul’s recent appearance at the Pentagon was fitting — neither can seem to win a fight.

Paul, the YouTuber-turned-failed-fighter, is emblematic of the influencer washouts with which the Trump administration is enamored.

The trend caught my eye in a new document leaked to me: U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz sent out a diplomatic cable today on how the Trump administration is “Making the United Nations Great Again,” as it’s titled.

The cable is a lot of self-congratulation that bafflingly claims credit for a world that is clearly on fire. It touts the administration’s work with rapper Nicki Minaj and former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow, both Trump fans. In particular, the cable touts Minaj’s work “to combat the persecution of Christians” and Tebow’s efforts “to end child trafficking” (yes, really).

Diplomatic Cable

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Welcome to the Coalition of the Washouts.

What Minaj, Paul, and Tebow all have in common is that their stars are fading, their sole value being “influencers” — that is, people known primarily for their access to audiences rather than their work.

They are all hawking the Trump product, in theory increasing their brand value while otherwise doing nothing but appearing.

The administration has discovered the direct-to-consumer celebrity, and it may mark a new era in government PR. That says as much about influencers as it does about the administration: their entire business model is building an audience and renting it out to whoever pays most.

Jake Paul — Logan Paul’s brother who accompanied him in the Pentagon appearance — addressed the backlash, saying on X/Twitter today: “I’d rather be in the room asking questions, learning, challenging ideas, building relationships, and figuring out how I can help than sitting behind a screen telling everyone else what they should be doing.”

It is laughable, the equivalent of King Kong being a Housing and Urban Development ambassador. And it goes without saying that figures like Paul never “challenge” these officials. That’s the whole point of being an influencer! They cultivate audiences like livestock to be sold to the highest bidder — or maybe slaughtered is a better word, since so many are pushed into things like crypto scams and gambling apps.

So, Logan Paul teaching the Pentagon leadership how to fight better? Nicki Minaj brandishing her Trump Gold Card to fight for Christianity? Tim Tebow’s influence network combating human trafficking and slavery, which the U.N. itself admits is getting worse every year?

Per the diplomatic cable sent by Ambassador Waltz:

“We used the UN as a global platform to convene leading Americans, civil society, and UN partners in high-visibility events that championed new initiatives to build a coalition on technology and education with the First Lady, to combat the persecution of Christians with rapper/influencer Nicki Minaj, to end child trafficking with athlete Tim Tebow.”

I thought these types hated the U.N. and wanted to shut it down? Now it’s a “global platform” — a phrase that sounds like something right out of the mouth of Hillary Clinton.

The memo goes on to tout the achievements of Trump and company:

“Following successful negotiations on multiple Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) resolutions concerning the human rights situation in Cuba, DPRK, Iran, Ukraine, and Myanmar, USUN championed human rights through high-visibility events featuring American celebrities and civil society. Surrounded by major media and over 30 UN ambassadors, American rapper/influencer Nicki Minaj called the attention of millions to the religious persecution of Christians in Nigeria, leading to advancements in counter-extremism coordination. Together with INL, USUN leadership and American all-star quarterback Tim Tebow then united dozens of UN ambassadors to condemn and combat the transnational sexual extortion of children.”

One detail that stood out to me is how the cable calls Nicki Minaj an “influencer.” That’s how the administration sees messaging these days. The classic era of U.N. celebrity diplomacy — the Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, or Bono circuit of establishment human rights advocacy — is entirely unavailable to this administration. Mainstream Hollywood talent agencies and prestige celebrities treat association with Trump as toxic to their commercial brand.

I’m hardly a fan of the Hollywood celeb archetype, but one thing you could say about Clooney that you can’t say about most influencers is he crossed the White House when he publicly called for Joe Biden to drop his reelection bid. Imagine Logan Paul doing something like that — questioning U.S. policy in Iran, or Ukraine, or anywhere. It’s funny to even think about.

As a result, the administration recruits from a distinct ecosystem: influencers who are commercially unbothered by legacy media pushback. Usually that means has-beens like Kid Rock.

And yet, the taxpayer-financed payback is obscene. Army Apache helicopters hovered near Kid Rock’s Nashville-area home, where he filmed himself waving and saluting them. The crews were initially suspended, but Hegseth intervened publicly — saying “No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots” — and the matter was closed. The Secretary of Whores then joined Mr. Rock on an Apache flight around Washington.

What’s next, MrBeast helping with Pentagon recruitment?

(After writing that sentence, I realized that the Pentagon literally explored such a partnership — not under Trump, but Biden.)

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

Mitch McConnell decided to show up to work this week, ending a 92-day absence that was one of the biggest middle fingers to Americans from an elected official that I can remember. Now God is responding in kind, casting McConnell as the villain in a sad sequel to The Mummy.

The wheelchair-bound McConnell was hospitalized on June 14. His office said only that he was "receiving excellent care," and for the next two weeks that’s all we were told. Then on June 30 came the publication of a 911 call from his Washington home, in which a dispatcher reported a cardiac arrest and a medic radioed that CPR was in progress. Twelve days and a wave of public backlash later, McConnell’s office finally put out a statement. He'd only suffered a fall, they claimed, releasing the below proof-of-life photo.

It took all of two days for the embarrassing display that Capitol Hill was surely dreading. At Wednesday's Senate Agriculture Committee markup of the Farm Bill, the clerk called McConnell's name and nobody could hear his answer. Sen. John Hoeven, seated beside him, leaned over and told him to vote "no." A staffer leaned in from behind. Chairman John Boozman, on his other side, told him "aye." The clerk had to call his name a second time before McConnell produced a hoarse but audible “aye.”

It was also the only word he’d said on camera since his disappearance.

Here’s the video (subscribe to my channel if you’d like to see it grow):

The 84-year-old Kentucky Senator is in many ways the Godfather and final boss of the gerontocracy. Though many older members of Congress have finally decided to retire after enormous public pressure, as I’ve written about, McConnell holds on, clearly unable to fulfill his duties but also unwilling to resign. And not just him: I can’t remember the last member of Congress who resigned mid-term due to health reasons — despite the fact that six have died in office this term alone.

If you want to know how he’s getting away with this — amid an eye-popping 71 percent disapproval rate from Kentuckians in March, before his hospitalization — one big reason is that major media have been doing him a solid.

Here’s how The New York Times reported his first public appearance to the press.

“After two years—” McConnell began, correcting himself, the Times wrote: “two decades — of dodging your questions, I wasn’t sure how many of you would be here today.”

Ha-ha. Get it? He hates addressing the public. Yeah, we picked up on that, Mitch.

What the Times story didn’t mention was that McConnell’s staff barred media from recording video of McConnell’s remarks. Nor that McConnell spoke “slowly and with some difficulty,” according to The Guardian.

The funniest part of the Times article is where they recount how McConnell “seemed to freeze while speaking in public” — episodes that were caught on camera in which he clearly froze. Imagine the headline: “Twin Towers Seemed to Fall.”

The Mitch is back. The Office of the Attending Physician, Congress’s concierge medical service, paid McConnell’s office a visit yesterday, according to video posted by independent journalist Desirée Townsend (who broke news of the 911 cardiac arrest call in the first place, forcing Washington media to address the scandal).

Why was a doctor needed? Who knows. McConnell’s office won’t say.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the ambiguity of what McConnell said when casting his initial voice vote on the farm bill.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

The Air Force’s announcement that it has “on-orbit space control weapons” generated a flurry of identical articles, nearly all about potential war with China and Russia. The coverage was bristling with Cold War-era defense-speak: deterrence, stability, signaling.

The real reason for the announcement came a few sentences later in Air Force Secretary Troy Meink’s keynote at the Air, Space & Cyber Conference. It had little to do with space weapons, which were never actually identified (but I’ll reveal them in a moment). It was about drumming up money.

“In today’s rapidly changing threat environment, we cannot expect a world-class military if we choose not to invest in it,” Meink said. “Many of the weapons, components, or systems we have to buy have outrun the cost curve. They perform extremely well, but the costs are growing faster than the rate of inflation.”

He then lamented: “Today, we face a mix of rapidly changing technologies … and a budget process for a different pace of warfare.”

Chief of Space Operations Gen. Douglas Schiess was even more blunt this week.

“In the coming years,” he said, “we will make disciplined and responsible choices about how we build and sustain our combat advantage, which means scaling our ability to respond to threats.” Then he threw in: “We need your help, Congress.”

Translation: money, money, money. Your money.

Today, by complete coincidence I’m sure, Space Force posted a new “Space Threat Fact Sheet.” The Space Force wants you to know that what you’ve already given (over $100 billion) is not enough. So now they’re asking for another $71.3 billion — the biggest one-year jump any military branch has gotten since 1952, according to the Aerospace Center for Space Policy and Strategy.

Space Force has some spaceballs!

If you think I’m being too cynical, Secretary Meink all but says it himself in explaining why he announced the “new” space weapon at all.

“... at this point, we are trying to say that we also need capabilities to not only defend the joint force from space-enabled attack, but defend our assets. And so, I think it was time that within the Department of War we talked about it, and it’s time to talk about that we have the capabilities to make sure that we can do what the joint force needs,” Meink told Defense One (which, to its credit, also pointed out the enormity of Space Force’s budget request).

In other words: show me the money!

Down the hall from the keynote, STARCOM commander Maj. Gen. James E. Smith hammered home the same message: “Predictable budget resources will remain vital as we scale operations to maintain our FY27 momentum.”

Don’t you just love how they’ve now decided to say “scale” instead of increase?

If you’re wondering how the Pentagon managed to get what is essentially an infomercial for more money into every major media outlet, take a look at the Air Force’s own write-up.

“Meink also acknowledged for the first time that Space Force has deployed weapons in space,” it says.

“For the first time” is irresistible to a journalism 1.0 reporter. Mainstream media defines newsworthy as simply that which is “new” (I guess they just dropped the “worthy” part).

The irony is that it was already pretty widely known that the U.S. military has weapons in space.

“On-orbit space control weapons” sounds ominous, like the United States has some photon torpedo of the future. The reality is a little more pedestrian and a lot more routine than a screaming “news” story would suggest.

Every 90 minutes, a super-secret X-37B mini-space shuttle orbits the earth, a “weapon” in space that has been doing so for the last 16 years. The one up there right now — spaceplane 8 — has been orbiting since August 21 of last year. Round and round it goes, part of a Top Secret “special access program” that’s an open secret, but one where the security goons have managed to keep the true purpose secret for more than a decade.

When the spaceplane was first sent into orbit in 2010, it was decidedly pointed downward, “testing” new hardware in real space environments, the military said. It also harbored an even deeper secret: a “Rods from God” weapon that would be able to attack any point on earth, literally a bundle of steel penetrators that could arrive in seconds and from who knows where.

Rods from God is now an obsolete idea. Despite fake reports of the U.S. running out of weapons because of the Iran war, it has more than enough rods to destroy anything and everything on the planet.

In 16 years, though, the world has changed. China and Russia have developed their own robust space capabilities and have deployed a variety of satellites and payloads that can engage in “orbital warfare,” as the military calls it. War in space is now indeed in space — the focus being up there, where the U.S. and allies have become ever more dependent on our own satellites. (Did you know that the U.S. has more than 10,500 satellites in active orbit, more than 90 percent of which are part of the SpaceX Starlink mega-constellation?)

The X-37B is not the only “on orbit” weapon, either, as satellites themselves are now part of the space arsenal. Earlier this month, the military conducted Apollo Maneuvers 26, an exercise practicing on-orbit maneuvers of satellites to position them to conduct offensive operations to destroy enemy communications, navigation, and spying capabilities. The military openly talks about these “Rendezvous Proximity Operations.” It is decidedly quiet about the “weapons” themselves, whether they be electronic warfare jamming and spoofing or other forms of cyberattack.

Meink also said that a U.S. space-based interceptor program had moved “from initial contract to flight-ready hardware in less than one year,” indicating that something new was recently developed. It could be as simple as a ramming satellite, but that is much too simple for the gold-plated developers. Instead, military sources and documents tell me, it is more likely a “directed energy” weapon, either a laser or high-power microwave, or something even more exotic.

According to one contracting document I’ve obtained, the military laboratories are still working on developing a “space-based neutral particle beam weapon,” a Reagan-era Star Wars dream that manages to still suck tax dollars out of us despite nothing to show for it. Again, directed energy is an open secret, but the specifics of whatever space weapons exist are not only under “special access programs,” they are also part of “special technical operations” that demand a different security clearance.

One military document describes the world of orbital warfare as “deception, disruption, denial, degradation, and destruction.” Many of those five D’s take place from earth. Space systems with code names like Bounty Hunter, Silent Sentry, Falcons, Browns and Meadowlands have been generally described in budget and other documents. Others, like the space-related Red Cloud electronic warfare system, or the Red Dragon and Kraken cyberspace warfare systems, have not been publicly acknowledged or explained.

The bottom line? The United States has a new space weapon, but the definition of “weapon” is unclear — and what’s new is questionable. That’s another important distinction the media coverage missed. What is a weapon these days often defies description. But the imperfect word still connotes a bomb or missile, that is, launched from an airplane, ship or tank. Space indeed might be the final frontier, but one reason the Spaceballs think they need more is that so much already goes to old-fashioned hardware, built around a now obsolete image of war.

Let’s hope we don’t end up shoveling an extra half-a-trillion dollars into the Pentagon money pit next year alone, as they’ve requested.

May the Schwartz be with you, Congress.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

In the debate about what threats artificial intelligence poses, everyone is trying to sell you something. If you follow the corporate press, artificial intelligence is a looming mass extinction event waiting to happen. If you listen to Trump, it’s part of the next Cold War with China, meaning we can’t afford to slow down.

For the appistocracy, there’s profit in all of the attention — literally. We have a new generation of technologists who generate publicity warning of everything from bioterrorism to the machines taking over. Thus AI is turned into a “national security” issue; and as such, it is elevated to the same status as nuclear weapons, deemed too important for interference from a meddlesome public.

The reality though? Listen to the spy agencies. Though they’re far from immune to threat inflation, these agencies echo none of the hysterics dominating the news. As the U.S. intelligence community sees it, AI simply magnifies threats that are already there. And that’s basically right. (More on this in a moment.)

We’ve all seen the sensational headlines. And it’s not just the old school media. Social media influencers credulously amplify this coverage to their millions of followers, going viral with talk of human extinction. Thus dire warnings about a looming AI apocalypse (called things like catastrophic risk, existential risk or X-risk) dominate Americans’ collective imagination.

Then there are the anti-doomers, who run a racket of their own. The most prominent are Yann LeCun, until the end of last year Meta’s chief AI scientist, and Andrew Ng, who co-founded Google Brain and now runs the venture studio AI Fund.

In October 2023, LeCun accused Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis and Dario Amodei — the heads of OpenAI (ChatGPT’s developer), Google DeepMind (Gemini) and Anthropic (Claude) — of “massive corporate lobbying” aimed at regulatory capture, warning that if their fearmongering succeeded, a small number of companies would end up controlling AI. Ng, in an interview the same week, called the idea that AI could drive humans to extinction a “massively, colossally dumb idea,” and said large tech companies were manufacturing extinction fear because they would rather not compete with open source.

They may well be right about the motives of the companies they’re criticizing; but they have conflicts of their own.

LeCun and Ng are two of the most high-profile advocates of what’s called “open-weight” AI — meaning AI whose code is made publicly available in order to facilitate adoption. Anthropic and OpenAI, by contrast, opted for proprietary code that they rent to users. The latter would likely benefit from federal licensing requirements that only the big proprietary players could afford to comply with, whereas the open-weight businesses would be harmed by it.

What every faction has in common —from the proponents of some AI apocalypse to the anti-regulation types — is their disinterest in responding to the realistic risks AI poses.

The U.S. intelligence community provides the most reasonable account of the actual dangers. The Annual Threat Assessment is the U.S. intelligence community’s official list of national security threats: covering things like China’s military, Russian influence operations, drug cartels, etc.

In this year’s report, artificial intelligence is described as a threat in three different ways:

1. “[I]t is essential to make sure that humans maintain control of the machines and how AI is used.”

2. “These applications, however, also carry risks that require careful human engineering to appropriately mitigate risk of AI autonomy before they are broadly deployed.”

3. “[E]merging technologies such as AI and quantum computing are expected to have a significant impact on national security.”

That’s the sum total of what the eighteen agencies of the U.S. intelligence community have to say about the dangers of AI. No human extinction, no superintelligence, no machine uprising.

As the most recent Department of Homeland Security Threat Assessment puts it AI is merely “adding layers of complexity to the threats we face.” It identifies the following five problems:

• Disinformation, deepfakes, and election interference,

• Cyber operations and financial crime,

• Violent extremist exploitation and radicalization,

• Proliferation of chemical and biological knowledge, and

• Breaking AI's safety controls, and poisoning the data it trains on.

Virtually all of these threats existed before AI. For instance, AI-fueled disinformation is the same old propaganda but in greater quantity and speed. Same with cyber operations and financial crimes (plus maybe some stealth benefits). As for “extremists” radicalizing people, anyone who’s used social media for the past decade or two knows that is nothing new, either. The chemical and biological concern goes back to at least the Clinton administration, biotechnology being the last apocalyptic threat. And the fifth pertains to situations in which humans have tampered with AI’s safety controls.

I’m not saying any of this isn’t worthy of concern. Just that it’s not the end of the world.

The RAND Corporation’s Global Catastrophic Risk Assessment analyzed civilizational threats and concluded that AI is merely an “entropy” engine.

“One can think of AI as adding entropy and chaos to already-wicked problems that humans face,” the RAND report says. “Chaos does not require the development of superintelligent or supercapable AI and is possible with existing and near-future AI capabilities.”

RAND, I’ll remind anyone not familiar, is no dovish institution. The Pentagon-funded think tank was built to think about thermonuclear war and is hardly shy about civilizational threats.

RAND’s companion study, On the Extinction Risk from Artificial Intelligence, explored similar questions specific to AI. The study identifies three plausible paths to human extinction, including engineered pathogens, geo-engineering, and nuclear war.

But there are major constraints preventing AI from precipitating any of these three events, both physical and operational.

RAND expanded on these constraints in a subsequent report exploring whether large language could make it easier for people to plan a large-scale biological attack. The authors found no statistically significant improvement in plans produced with the assistance of AI versus withoug them.

The National Academies of Sciences, meanwhile, finds that the bottleneck to bioterrorism is not access to information. It’s things like DNA synthesis screening, tacit laboratory skill, culturing, formulation, aerosolization — all of which require human intervention, are expensive and infamously prone to failure.

The government’s own analysts, who have no consumer product to move and no valuation to defend, have been telling us the answer for years in language so measured that nobody has bothered to read it. AI merely increases the magnitude and speed of threats we already have, ones that can be solved and will exist regardless of AI.

Is hyperbole the only register we’re able to communicate in?

It currently is, and none of this is going to change on the supply side. Businesses are going to cast their products in the most favorable light. Media is going to go with the headlines that draw attention.

I know, because I sometimes do it. When I published a piece last week headlined “Fuck 9/11,” I also knew the headline would generate pearl-clutching outrage, and that the outrage would carry the story a lot further than the argument would have on its own.

In a debate centered on whether a chatbot is going to become God, every major faction is cashing in — at the expense of us all.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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Twenty-five years later, 9/11 anniversaries have devolved into a grotesque fundraising orgy for the security state.

The families commemorate their loved ones while the very security institutions that failed to prevent the attack in the first place tell triumphant war stories and warn that if we (the American people) let down our guard — by which they mean close our wallets to them — it will happen again.

“The 9/11 attack took place without warning,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio writes to his employees today, per a memo leaked to me. After opening with chest-beating (“We have hunted down the architects of the attack…”), practically all he can say is: don’t let your guard down.

Rubio memo

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When it comes to the 9/11 anniversary, fundraising has become more and more dominant. But it used to have a heart as well. In the days after the attacks, Union Square in New York disappeared under candles and handwritten notes. Flowers piled up outside firehouses that had lost entire crews. People waited in line for hours to give blood, even though, as it turned out, there would be almost no one to give it to.

The outpouring of sympathy was international, too. In Paris, Le Monde ran a front page declaring “Nous sommes tous Américains.” At Buckingham Palace, the band played the Star-Spangled Banner at the changing of the guard.

Now it’s just a naked cash grab by the national security world, who congratulate themselves for a job well done while angling for more money.

If this is all 9/11 remembrance is going to be, then I say: fuck 9/11.

Having no anniversary would be less offensive than what they’ve turned this day into.

The whole thing reminds me of those money booths on game shows, where a contestant stands inside a glass box while cash blows around them, grabbing at as many bills as they can before time runs out.

Then there’s the total lack of accountability from the security elite for what was the most catastrophic intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor.

“Whether you like Dick Cheney or not, he was incredible on that day,” Matthew Waxman, a Bush National Security Council official at the time, said at a discussion panel about 9/11 at Columbia University this week.

Let’s assume that’s true. His job is to prevent attacks like these from happening in the first place!

“I think there were some things that we got wrong, but many things that we actually got quite right,” Waxman added.

Notice something about all these panels, interviews and anniversary addresses: The story always starts after the first plane hit. Never before. Nobody wants to talk about the August 6, 2001 President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” Or the FBI agent in Phoenix who warned about extremists training at American flight schools. Or the CIA knowing two of the future hijackers were in the country and not telling the FBI.

At that Columbia panel, Hillary Clinton recalled going to the Oval Office with Chuck Schumer two days after the attacks.

“I looked at President Bush, and I thought, you know, my gosh, my heart went out to him. I mean, just looking at his face, looking at his eyes, I thought, you know, he is now at a totally different level of responsibility for this country.”

Our political elites have turned 9/11 into an episode of The West Wing, starring themselves: the protagonists up on Mount Olympus, hitting their big cinematic moment. The families seldom figure into these stories. The nation, which has paid the greatest price in lost liberties, is not thanked or even addressed much at all.

Then she got to the money. By her account, she told Bush the first bill his team sent up had no money for New York. He asked what they needed. She said $20 billion. Bush’s answer: “You got it.”

What happened next is the part she seems to relish.

“As I was getting up to leave the Oval Office, John Warner, one of my absolutely favorite colleagues, a long-serving Republican senator who had chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee forever, he touched me on the shoulder, and he goes, ‘Hillary, get him to say that in front of everybody again.’”

Here’s what didn’t make it into her story: Bush’s promise kicked off a fight in Washington, because the White House’s original $20 billion request was supposed to cover the entire federal response. Congress settled it by doubling the emergency package to $40 billion, with half set aside for recovery — and much of the rest flowing to the national security apparatus.

In other words, within days of the attacks, 9/11 was already a fundraising event.

These days, 9/11 anniversaries have about as much to do with the nearly 3,000 people who died as Christmas has to do with Christ.

Consider an anecdote from retired Navy Capt. Brian Cullen, who had just been posted to U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, when the planes hit.

As U.S. bases across Europe went into lockdown, Germany rallied behind America in a way that’s hard to imagine today. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder pledged “unlimited solidarity.” Huge crowds filled the streets of Berlin. NATO invoked Article 5, its mutual-defense clause, for the first time in its history.

But what stuck with Cullen was closer to home: German neighbors, kids included, holding candlelight vigils outside the base gates — the same gates that usually drew anti-nuclear and anti-base protesters.

Then Washington pivoted to “you’re either with us or against us,” and the goodwill evaporated. The candles disappeared. The base walled itself off from the community around it. The alliance started to crack as the U.S. went it alone.

“Our base became a reflection of our nation: security at any cost,” Cullen writes.

That’s the real legacy of 9/11. It was the beginning of the national security state’s soft coup over American politics, as my editor Bill Arkin laid out in his profound book American Coup.

We’ll know that coup has ended when we see flowers again.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

Twenty-five years and trillions of tax dollars since 9/11, and now the national security big brains want us to believe that today’s terrorism threat is as bad as it was when the planes slammed into the Twin Towers.

Ridiculous as the claim is, it’s being echoed by everyone from the White House to the Mamdani administration, with language so similar it’s eerie.

Start with White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, who warned in an interview this week of a “new alliance between the jihadists and the Marxists like Antifa and the transgender killers.” The way Gorka tells it, the terror threat embodied by 9/11 hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just evolved.

“Do enough Americans understand what’s happened, the evolution of the threat in the last 25 years?” he asked. “It’s this devilish concoction, this admixture of the jihadis and the communists — what we call in the White House the red-green alliance.”

Gorka is mad as a hatter, but he sits atop the national counterterrorism food chain, as I’ve written. And yet compare that with how NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch put it earlier this year: “In fact, in my 18 years in government, I have not seen a threat environment quite like this one in terms of the multitude of vectors that are all active at the same time. These threats are real. They are deadly serious, and we must be prepared.”

Rebecca Ulam Weiner, NYPD’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, was no less alarmist, saying this week: “It’s an everything, everywhere all at once terrorist threat environment.”

Weiner went even further in a security briefing on Wednesday, channeling Gorka in alluding to a “far-left” threat among others like “conspiracy theories, grievances [and] nihilistic violence,” whatever that means. Again, Weiner's remarks rest on the same premise as Gorka's: Al-Qaeda and ISIS may be in decline, but the terror threat is evolving to encompass Americans at home. What good fortune for the counterterrorism industry!

Weiner said:

“The threat is quite different from where it was 25 years ago. It’s decentralized geographically with the rise of al-Qaeda and ISIS affiliates globally. It’s diversified tremendously ideologically. Now we’re not primarily dealing with al-Qaeda or even al-Qaeda-ISIS, but a proliferation of threats coming from conspiracy theories, grievances, nihilistic violence, far-left, far-right, anti-government [and] all of those things.

It’s a much more individualized and idiosyncratic threat, which means that we have to be on our toes. … We have to be forward-leaning and very much everywhere, all over the place, to confront this new, modern 2026 threat, which is exactly what we’ve been doing.”

Ken Dilanian, a longtime national security correspondent at liberal MSNOW (who many are calling “CIA Ken” due to his infamous coziness with the agencies he covers) adds his own warning, that somehow, in this era of record national security budgets, these agencies need ever more money, personnel and other resources. Never mind that Trump’s official budget request seeks an eye-watering 40 percent increase to the Pentagon budget ($1.5 trillion), or an 18 percent increase to the FBI’s budget ($2 billion).

“There are many veterans of the war on terror who say Americans are unknowingly living in a uniquely dangerous time when it comes to terrorism,” Dilanian writes. Listen to his experts who think that the situation is even worse, that “the United States is more vulnerable to a horrific reprise [of 9/11] today than it has been in years.”

I’d like to challenge CIA Ken to a bet that terrorism won’t claim 3,000 American lives this year, or next, or the year after that. And in the unlikely event an attack of that magnitude does occur, I promise you the national security “experts” won’t see it coming or detect it, regardless of how much funding they have.

If there's a real threat, it's the Washington consensus that we're living through some unprecedented moment of mortal danger. That claim is what keeps the national security money flowing (and by extension the money for its adjuncts in the corporate media). It's how you get a White House official fretting about communism (in 2026!) and a Mamdani administration official warning of "far-left" terrorism. What connects them isn't a rise in actual terrorism or anything resembling a 9/11-scale threat. It's social media, which in their telling means too much liberty and too much free speech.

The supposed experts who think they understand America better than the rest of us, along with the domestic threats to liberty and to the United States itself, all share some version of the same argument: that the internet is an unprecedented, extremism-generating "chaos machine," to borrow the title of former New York Times journalist Max Fisher's book. The chaos machine exposes public displeasure with Donald Trump, the innate contempt for government tyranny symbolized as everyone from the NYPD to ICE to the FBI and CIA, dissatisfaction with the elite, the opinion shapers, the priorities of the country, the inequities of society, and in general, for the dated old ways.

The national security types call that terrorism.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

The Department of Homeland Security has decided that the agency needs a new official seal. Where the ubiquitous American eagle faced the direction of the olive branches in its right talon, now the eagle will face the opposite direction — towards the arrows it clasps in its other talon.

“We’re actually changing our seal to make it look towards the arrows because … when it looks towards the arrows is when it means we’re at war,” Secretary Markwayne Mullin revealed in a Fox News interview this weekend. “Homeland Security is at war every single day against bad actors trying to hurt our backyards, and we’re not gonna allow that to happen.”

So in other words, the United States is at war here at home — but Iran somehow isn’t a war. What?

On October 25, 1945—seven and a half weeks after Japan’s formal surrender—President Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9646, formally defining the presidential coat of arms, seal, and flag. The redesign turned the presidential eagle’s head toward the olive branch rather than the arrows, aligning it with the Great Seal’s traditional symbolism of peace over war. Truman said the change reflected a turn “toward peace.”

Winston Churchill is said to have quipped: “Why not put the eagle’s neck on a swivel so that it could turn to the right or left as the occasion presented itself?”

Nearly a century later, Churchill’s vision won out.

“ If you look at most of our seals throughout all the agencies, the eagle looks to the palm leaf because that’s in a time of peace,” Mullin said in the interview.

If anything, Mullin is underselling the significance. All federal agencies’ seals depict the peacetime eagle facing the palm leaf, not just “most.” And not only has Homeland never before depicted the wartime posture (not even after 9/11) — no U.S. agency has since World War II. Not even the “Department of War”!

There’s something very creepy about our government seeing America as a battlefield in ways it doesn’t even see overseas.

“The Department of Homeland Security seal was created in June 2003 and is symbolic of the Department’s mission — to prevent attacks and protect Americans — on the land, in the sea and in the air,” DHS officially says of the now obsolete eagle. The meaning was pretty straightforward: protect America from external threats.

Which raises the question of who, exactly, DHS believes itself to be at war with. Mullin’s public answer is the standard list — Islamic terrorists, cartels, weapons of mass destruction, etc. — but he keeps returning to the war being against Americans domestically.

“Free speech is something we all protect, but there’s a line that you can cross that goes from free speech to inciting dangerous behavior; and we have to attack that dangerous behavior at every turning point,” Mullin told Fox News.

This war against free speech is not just rhetoric. The federal government is increasingly monitoring what Americans say, particularly on social media, and it is increasingly building AI tools to monitor everything and flag what it considers threatening or offensive for further investigation.

FBI Deputy Director Christopher Raia recently revealed key details of the machinery behind this in a little-noticed interview this weekend.

Of dangerous speech, he says: “Obviously, huge uptick the last year, 18 months, in political violence, political rhetoric, government violence, crime against the government — you name it, whether it’s FBI agents, ICE agents, congressmen on both sides of the aisle.”

The FBI is combatting this, Raia says, with National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which I’ve explained here.

NSPM-7, signed by Trump last September, directs the federal government to disrupt “organized political violence” — and lists, among the indicators that someone might be inclined toward it, “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” and “extremism on migration, race, and gender.” In other words, speech.

If you have any doubts about whether it’s really war, listen to Raia compare the methodology of NSPM-7 and its newly created “Joint Mission Center” to external (non) war:

“You’re familiar with the way that we worked the Iranian threat. We kinda did the same thing the way we worked the Iranian threat, and we applied it to this threat.”

Think about that for a sec. The bureau’s response to Iran’s domestic pot-stirring has entailed network mapping, informant recruitment, financial tracing, FISA collection, and pretextual interviews designed to rattle a target and see what falls out. It was built to counter the clandestine operations of a foreign adversary.

Now, this apparatus is being pointed at Americans.

And it has been staffed accordingly. Raia describes pulling personnel out of the divisions that normally have nothing to do with one another:

“There are pieces of this threat that encompasses our criminal division. There are pieces of this threat that encompasses the cyber division. There’s pieces that encompass CT [counterterrorism], even CI [counterintelligence], believe it or not. So we took bodies from all these different divisions. We put them under one roof, so to speak. … And then we’ve added, of course, our partners at HSI [homeland security investigations, which I detailed here], Department of Treasury, IRS, and we have them all sitting in the same space.”

NSPM-7 directs the government to go after funders of Antifa, the left, and general protest on the part of the American people. This in practice means nonprofits and their donors.

Raia says that the Joint Mission Center is finding its footing:

“So we’ve seen that mature over the last seven or eight months that I’ve been here from a concept to really starting to hit their stride and really starting to attack these entities that wanna do violence against the government, wanna do violence to the politicians.”

The Center, Raia says, is ramping up its activity to investigate and bring criminal charges against those engaged in “cyberstalking” and “interstate” threats, known in the FBI as an “875” investigation because of a federal criminal statute that prohibits transmitting threats, extortion, or ransom demands. Applauding the willingness of U.S. Attorneys to bring charges against social media posters, Raia says, “I gotta give kudos where kudos is due,” remarking that it was impossible to get such a charge five years ago.

Here’s how Raia put it:

 “Good luck trying to get an 875 charge from a US attorney, you know, five, 10 years ago. We're really getting a lot of support from our partners in DOJ and the US Attorney's Office in going after these folks. And whether it's a cyberstalking charge, whether it's 875 interstate threat charge — really getting a lot of buy-in from the US Attorney's Office and putting a lot of these folks behind bars.”

Anecdotally, I’ve heard of a lot of cases of people getting door-knocks for spicy social media posts.

None of them have been charged with anything. Yet. Now that the Eagle is armed though, the American symbol of freedom is getting its own thought-seeking missile. We all know who is standing downrange.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

I am baffled that White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka gets so little attention from the media.

It isn’t for lack of material, which is a rare blend of both cry-laugh funny and substantively alarming. Gorka is like a theater kid version of Henry Kissinger, the same inflated ego but with a flair for the flamboyant: bragging he’s stacking terrorist corpses “like cordwood” after they’d received "eternal justice" from the Trump admin’s "hammers of hell”; his convertible with a vanity plate “ART WAR” (in reference to Sun Tzu); the Hercule Poirot pocket squares and mustachios; the Bond villain monologues delivered in a faint British accent.

Amusing as it all is, the theatrics are in service of a worldview that regards just about anyone who looks or thinks differently from him as some kind of threat to Western civilization. You’d think he was auditioning to be the Oberführer of something that has nothing to do with America.

The Trump administration has already sought to stigmatize transgender people as a hotbed of violent extremism, as I reported on last year. The U.S. government’s official national counterterrorism strategy, authored by Gorka earlier this year, explicitly mentions “extreme gender ideologies” as an example of a “violent secular political groups” that will be prioritized for “identification and neutralization,” as shown below.

Gorka’s fingerprints are also on Trump’s national security order NSPM-7, which directed federal agencies to root out extremism on “gender,” among other things deemed hostile to “traditional American views on family, religion and morality.” But the document does not explain how exactly it defines extremism on gender, leading some to think it was just a war on trans people.

Gorka recently suggested that the government’s war on “gender extremism” encompasses more than just trans people.

In a little-noticed interview on Rabbi Michael Barclay’s podcast last month, Gorka warned of the “internal threat” to America, listing “mentally imbalanced transgender, nonbinary extremists” among them. (Nonbinary refers to people who identify as neither male nor female.)

That is the first ever reference to non-binary extremism by a national security official, as far as I can tell.

Here’s Gorka’s full remark in context:

“Whether it’s jihadists, whether it’s cartels bringing in fentanyl, killing, you know, hundreds of thousands of Americans, whether it’s members of the DSA who wish to get rid of the presidency, the Senate, the Supreme Court. You know, whether it’s the external threat or the internal threat, whether it’s the mentally imbalanced transgender, non-binary extremists who literally walk into a Catholic church and murder little children at the Annunciation Church.”

Gorka is referring to the August 27, 2025 attack on Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. Robin Westman, 23, fired more than a hundred rifle rounds through the church’s windows during an all-school Mass held to mark the first week of classes, killing two young children — before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The FBI investigated it as an act of domestic terrorism.

But the shooter was transgender, not non-binary. Westman, who had legally changed names in 2019, left behind videos and writings that prosecutors said expressed hatred toward nearly every group imaginable. The acting U.S. attorney put it more bluntly: the shooter “appeared to hate all of us.” I’m hard pressed to see how Westman’s gender identity had anything to do with it.

In fact, I tried to find any evidence of a record of non-binary violence, and the only case I could come up with is the Zizians.

The Zizians are a small offshoot of the Bay Area “rationalist” cult that formed around the writings of Jack “Ziz” LaSota, and they have been linked by prosecutors to six killings across California, Pennsylvania and Vermont — among them a Border Patrol Agent shot during a Vermont traffic stop in January 2025. Maryland prosecutors last year described LaSota as the leader of an extremist group. Many of the group’s members are transgender or other nonconforming genders.

The group is definitely dangerous and extreme in their views; but those views are fixated on things like veganism, artificial intelligence and theory of mind stuff — not gender.

The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates roughly 2.1 million American adults as transgender — about 0.8 percent of the country — and puts nonbinary adults at around 1.2 million. This is the population Gorka has folded into a category alongside cartels and jihadists.

Gorka and company are obsessed with any sexual (and political) identities that don’t embrace guns, God (his God), and a Czarist love of the old world.

He put this bluntly in his appearance on Barclay’s podcast, saying:

“The question of our age is very simple: Does the West have the will to fight and defeat those who wish to destroy our civilization?”

The “West” that he’s referring to is threatened, Gorka says, not just by those who believe things he doesn’t agree with, but also by those who don’t believe in anything. That’s Gorka’s definition of groups like sexual predators, not as criminals, but as another extremist group invented under Trump: the “nihilist violent extremist,” which I reported on last year.

Just this week, the FBI announced the first-ever minor to be federally charged for “nihilistic violent extremism” — a 17-year-old from Maine, found to have committed acts of juvenile delinquency including conspiring to sexually exploit a child, distributing child sexual abuse material, cyberstalking and interstate threats. The Bureau says it is now investigating more than 500 “NVE” operatives nationwide, a number it says is on the rise, up from 350 investigations last December.

While the teenager’s crimes obviously merit criminal prosecution, does this really rise to the level of a terroristic threat to national security?

Gorka thinks so. What is bizarre about this official with President Trump’s ear is that this extremist can chatter on without anyone in the press noticing. He’s a high-level government official!

Society, Gorka says, is in “a war to the death where only one side can win: the forces of light and goodness, or those who really are working for the destruction of our civilization.”

It’s pretty obvious who the real extremist is here.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

The war against Hasan Piker, now in full force, isn’t about antisemitism or Israel, and it is not even about the 35-year-old streamer. Litigating Piker’s comments about Israel not representing all Jews is, in fact, a fool’s errand.

Understand the media frenzy for what it is: a DEFCON 1-level war against Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, by a Party establishment frantically hitting the panic button to reestablish its control. But since El-Sayed is the nominee for Senate — a chamber the Party also wants to control — it has to go after him indirectly, through proxies like Piker.

I could go into Hasan’s comments and the context being withheld in the mainstream depictions (see his comments in their entirety here), but what’s the point?

If you want to know why Piker is a diversionary skirmish compared to the full war, just listen to former Biden White House spokesperson turned MS NOW host Jen Psaki lament the real issue here: that the Party leadership is losing the ability to select its own candidates. Here’s what she said to a Democratic strategist on her show recently:

“ I think we both remember well when party leadership really selected the nominees. Now, you would never say it that way exactly, but they would …  they would put money behind it; they would endorse. And now it looks very much like party leaders are not picking the nominees. In fact, party leaders pushing nominees is a negative — it is a negative in many of these races.”

El-Sayed, a political outsider, had the audacity to run against the party’s chosen candidate, Haley Stevens; and then, despite his unsanctioned campaign and unsanctioned backers like Piker, he won.

Stevens is the candidate of the past. She worked her way up in the Party apparatus, coming out of the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008, to assume a life of public service based upon nothing more than being a Party hack.

El-Sayed, on the other hand, spent that time working as an epidemiologist after getting an advanced degree in public health. Informed by this expertise, he advocates universal healthcare and advancing affordability — things like reducing housing and utility costs and fighting predatory landlords — by taxing billionaire wealth. As Zohran Mamdani proved in New York, it is exactly what the voters want.

So why the frenzied attack? It happens virtually every time a candidate that didn’t come up through the usual party pipeline of internships and staff positions gets close to power. Washington reaches for the same playbook: declare a national security emergency (enter Piker) or find some remark to argue that the insurgent candidate isn’t “qualified,” polished, or — if all else fails — claim they represent a threat to America.

The message is clear: no groomed-for-higher-office candidate would ever say such things, so you better stick with the Party leadership’s superior judgment. We just saw an example in neighboring Wisconsin, with Francesca Hong’s Thanksgiving-gate.

We unfortunately live in a two-party dominated country, one that people find increasingly unresponsive and obsolete. Republicans were willing to blow up their Party to choose Trump. The same is happening with the Democrats, and the Party leaders clearly see the long-term threat to its survival.

Candidates like Mamdani and El-Sayed have no real choice but to run as Democrats, even when they are not followers of the national platform or the policy approaches. The Party reacts by closing the tent to these outsiders. That’s what it is doing now.

It’s the Party’s prerogative to enforce discipline, of course; but instead of saying that’s what’s happening here, the Party and its media mouthpieces pretend that these “scandals” represent some kind of grave national security crisis. The end result is us spending a week talking about Hasan Piker instead of, you know, actual policies and what El-Sayed represents.

I don’t care that the media is being mean to politicians. That comes with the territory. What I do care about is that we’re stuck talking about stupid shit like decade-old tweets and Twitch streamers instead of the very real problems this country faces and a new generation that is actually driven to action and not just words.

I call it panic button politics, and it’s the latest entry in the Washington playbook used to maintain control. Here are five phrases to be on the lookout for, keywords the political establishment uses to get you to back away from serious discussion of a candidate’s actual policies.

1. “Democratic Socialist”

Nobody actually believes we’re going to wake up one morning with Wall Street replaced by workers’ councils.

Bernie Sanders, the godfather of American democratic socialism who introduced the term to the mainstream, is on record saying he doesn’t believe the government should own the means of production. That’s the textbook definition of socialism!

His actual platform is Medicare for All, free public college, and increased taxes on the rich. That’s Denmark, not St. Petersburg.

The media knows this. It plays the kabuki anyway, treating a rhetorical banner as a legislative agenda — taking literally what neither the candidate, the voters, nor the reporters themselves take literally. But here’s the thing: the voters aren’t buying it.

CNN’s John King has a recurring segment called “All Over the Map,” in which he convenes panels of ordinary voters — the very people whose supposed skittishness justifies all this handwringing about insurgent candidates like El-Sayed. King recently asked the panelists, a group of self-identified Democrats from across the country — including swing states like Michigan, North Carolina and Arizona — how they felt about Democratic Socialist candidates, and their response was interesting.

King asked:

“In some congressional races, now this huge race in Michigan, elsewhere in the country, we’re starting to see more progressive anti-establishment, in some cases, Democratic Socialist candidates win these primaries for the Democrats. Are you excited by that, yes or no?”

All six panelists held up signs reading “YES,” as shown below.

I doubt all or even most of them were democratic socialists; but what’s clear is the term didn’t scare them.

2. “Abolish ICE”

El-Sayed recently sat down for what was to be a heavyweight battle with Fox News’ Jesse Watters, who opened with the panic button: Who is going to deport the criminal aliens from the country?

Here we’re meant to pretend that “abolish ICE” means zero immigration enforcement — that a sitting U.S. Senate nominee wants violent felons to stay put as a matter of policy. Come on.

El-Sayed’s answer was smarter than the format deserved. Long before there was an ICE, he pointed out, there was the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS.

INS sat inside the Justice Department, where illegal immigration treated as what it is: a civil matter. ICE was created in 2003 and placed within the Department of Homeland Security, an agency stood up in response to 9/11 and designed to fight terrorism — which quickly became the framework by which ICE approached immigration. That, El-Sayed said, is what he was opposed to. Not immigration enforcement.

El-Sayed disarmed Waters with his candor, the Fox News host later sheepishly admitting “I like him” and that he found him “compelling,” as I detail in the video below (“like” my page if you’re so inclined!)

3. “Defund the Police”

Here we’re supposed to picture Mad Max anarchy rather than what is actually on the table, which a reallocation of municipal budgets away from the local national security enforcer. You know, routing mental-health calls to clinicians rather than police.

Note that this slogan is essentially dead. I can’t remember the last time someone ran on it. But that doesn’t matter to those reaching into the playbook. Someone who endorsed you once said it, and that’ll do.

4. “Defund the Military”

This one always arrives with a reminder that the phrase appears in the DSA platform, and we’re again asked to read it maximally: that someone who wants to reduce military spending is advocating that the United States have no armed forces at all. I say again: come on.

Let’s check the tape to understand why at least a refund should be on everyone’s mind. The Pentagon’s FY2027 budget request is $1.5 trillion. That’s a 42 percent increase in a single year, the largest jump ever in our lifetimes. There’s a separate $67 billion supplemental for the Iran war on top of it.

I’m not lying awake worrying that we’ll wake up without a military someday. I wish more candidates were willing to take this on, with the very argument that the Pentagon gets everything it wants while the rest of society is lucky to hold onto what little it already has.

And consider this inconsistency: we are asked to be alarmed about a notion that the Pentagon is about to be shuttered when an anti-defense spending movement has never once succeeded in cutting a defense budget. Ever.

5. “Electability”

In an era when pollsters regularly flub election predictions by double-digits, it’s amazing how anyone still takes the sage admonition of “electability” seriously. But it is the all-purpose term the establishment reaches for when it wants to sideline a candidate. Think of it as page one of the playbook.

Not electable, and yet roughly a day after El-Sayed took the nomination, Stevens conceded and offered her support, party leadership that had spent months quietly backing his opponent coalesced behind him, and Kamala Harris was even raising money for him. The un-electability evaporated overnight because that was never the real concern.

Each of these five terms is a device a way to move a candidate out of the category of things you debate and into the category of things you dismiss, out of acceptable into a threat to the stability of the two-party straitjacket or the country writ large.

But think back to John King’s CNN panel. Six swing-state Democrats, hand-picked to represent exactly the caution the political class insists is out there, and every one of them held up a sign that said the opposite. DEFCON 1 declared, the button got pressed, but voters don’t give a shit anymore.

I know I don’t.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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Three bizarre stories caught my eye this weekend, all insane and all pointing to the same thing: national security's war on American daily life.

1. Flock cameras. The AI-fueled license plate reading network is conquering America at an alarming pace, having found an ingenious end-run around our right to privacy: selling to the neighbors instead of the cops.

2. ICE is acquiring robot dogs. The most hated agency in America is shopping for Boston Dynamics quadrupeds to take another bite out of the quaint notion that this country isn’t a battlefield.

3. WNBA embraces Counterterrorism. The WNBA team Chicago Sky is in the news this month for hiring a threat intelligence firm — one built to fight ISIS — to respond to a supposed "extremist" menace to its players.

National security has colonized American culture so completely that none of this registers as creepy. Flock cameras become a cranky privacy controversy. ICE’s robo-dogs become a zany story you roll your eyes at. A counterterrorism firm for basketball players becomes a friendly write-up on NPR about the importance of combating extremism in sports.

Flock Safety, whose AI-powered license plate readers now sit on poles in thousands of American towns, has become the poster child for the surveillance state. But the state is only half the problem. The other half of Flock's revenue comes from private clients: homeowners associations, apartment complexes, strip-mall owners.

The Fourth Amendment restrains the government. It has nothing to say about your HOA — and there is no fascist entity in America more powerful than the HOA. So through no fault of your own, your vehicle's make, model, and driver get fed continuously into a massive database of movements.

ICE, meanwhile, is buying Boston Dynamics' quadrupedal (four-legged, sheesh) robot dogs for "public safety," on the solemn theory that the danger to its agents has grown too grave to face on two legs. Strip away the breathless talk and one stubborn fact remains: not a single ICE agent was killed in the line of duty this past year. Not one. Yet to hear the agency tell it, there's an epidemic.

Perhaps ICE should examine its own behavior and leash itself.

The WNBA story is stranger still: a basketball team retaining a national security threat intelligence firm to counter a supposed “extremist” threat. Pointing to the rivalry between Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark, NPR laments the online threats and abuse directed at Reese, then hands the ball to Moonshot — an outfit founded to disrupt ISIS recruitment and the spread of jihadism online.

Working with Google’s tech incubator Jigsaw, Moonshot built the “Redirect Method” during the war on terror: algorithmic search-ad targeting that steered people looking for terrorist propaganda toward curated de-radicalization content. It is the height of naïveté to think a man drawn to violent jihad can be search-added into the Boy Scouts. But that is now the methodology being deployed against people who are rude about basketball on the internet.

As Elizabeth Neumann, Moonshot’s chief strategy officer, told NPR:

“It says a lot that here we are, 10 years later, taking that same technology, the methodologies that we use to help governments counter terrorism and other targeted violence, and we are now having to apply it to sports entertainment,”

It does say a lot — though not in the sense that she means.

Neumann personifies the revolving door between the federal homeland security apparatus and the private threat-monitoring industry. She served in government national security roles from the Bush to Trump administrations, most recently as Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention at the Department of Homeland Security before entering the private counter-extremism consulting world.

Treating social media hostility (a redundancy if ever there was one!) as a national security contingency requiring counter-extremism methodologies is institutional mission creep at its finest. Internet vitriol is real and nasty — sometimes even justifying a law enforcement response. But to frame that vitriol as a problem of radicalization elevates the problem to the domain of national security, which treats the problem as something akin to an insurgency.

This brings us back to Flock Safety. The genius of modern surveillance is that it doesn’t require an authoritarian decree from Washington to carpet the country in a movement tracking system. It just needs bottom-up panic, which of course national security and its corporate adjuncts happily create.

When Flock launched, it didn’t start by grinding through municipal red tape, contentious city council votes, or public procurement debates. It pitched directly to suburban HOA boards. By selling automated vehicle tracking to neighborhood Karens who monitor their cul-de-sacs with more vigilance than the Pentagon does the Strait of Hormuz, Flock bypassed the very ideals that make America, America in the first place.

Local police departments then partner with the HOAs, gaining real-time access to a sprawling, privately financed surveillance dragnet that taxpayers never had to approve. Then the network of cameras expands, you know, to respond to Amber alerts, and then to kids on electric bikes, and then pretty soon, through the wonders of AI, the entire country is ruled by the big HOA on the lamppost.

This is what permanent war looks like when it comes home.

Rather than a rogue CIA or FBI, it looks like a culture that has come to believe everyday life demands constant threat modeling, automated surveillance, and counterinsurgency. The mainstream media meanwhile misses the point, at best trotting out some civil liberties expert who puts you to sleep with an undergraduate seminar on the Fourth Amendment.

In my own reporting, I’ve moved away from the term “national security state” because it’s not just a government phenomenon. Now I just say “national security.”

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— Edited by William M. Arkin