I am just asking the questions no one else will: is it really so wrong to fuse Silicon Valley with the federal government if it means we get to oppress ourselves before Beijing does it for us?
Let's be honest. We have spent the last three years wringing our hands about the ethical implications of artificial intelligence, holding performative Senate hearings, and pretending that a decentralized, heavily regulated tech sector is the American way. But after a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill last Tuesday—followed by a remarkably candid lunch at Cafe Milano with a source close to the administration's tech task force—I have come to a sobering conclusion. If America is going to win the global AI race, we must immediately and unapologetically adopt the exact playbook of the Chinese Communist Party.
Say what you will about Beijing, but they understand messaging. When they want to consolidate computing power, track their citizens, and crush domestic dissent, they do not waste time with antitrust lawsuits or civilian oversight boards. They just do it. Washington, thankfully, is finally waking up to the reality that preserving American freedom requires us to preemptively dismantle it before a foreign adversary beats us to the punch.
The bleeding hearts in the privacy lobby are already walking back their support for the administration over this. They complain about surveillance capitalism and unaccountable corporate monopolies. But these naive critics are completely misreading the optics. The real losers in a world where we fail to merge OpenAI, Google, and the Department of Defense into a single, omnipotent, state-backed leviathan are not the working-class Americans whose data will be scraped and monetized to train autonomous drone swarms. The real losers are the tech executives who would be forced to operate in a competitive free market.
I sat next to a senior Palantir lobbyist on a flight from Dulles to San Francisco recently, and I now understand the deficit of courage in our current policy. He explained, entirely on background, that the only way to stop China from building a dystopian techno-authoritarian state that dominates the globe is for America to build a dystopian techno-authoritarian state that dominates the globe, but with better user interfaces. It is a brilliant, necessary pivot. We simply cannot afford a civil liberties gap.
If we do not grant a handful of unelected tech billionaires total immunity to build an opaque, state-integrated surveillance apparatus, we are basically handing the keys of the future to Xi Jinping.
This is the adult conversation we need to be having. The caucus knows it, K Street knows it, and frankly, anyone who has spent more than five minutes looking at the talking points knows it. The undeniable truth is that the American public is perfectly happy to have their biometric data harvested and their digital lives monitored by a sprawling, unaccountable apparatus, so long as the servers are located in Santa Clara instead of Shenzhen.
It is time to double down. We must stop apologizing for our billionaires and start giving them the unchecked federal authority they need to protect us from the very concept of unchecked federal authority. If we have to destroy the village of constitutional privacy in order to save it, I, for one, am ready to light the match.