"Let me be blunt. Left to itself, artificial intelligence will not choose moral liberty. It will choose the passions. It will choose appetite. It will gather power into the fewest hands the world has ever seen and call the result progress. That is the rule of the strong over the weak. That is the dissolution of our moral covenant. It is the oldest temptation in the history of humanity, now just dressed up in silicon. "Make no mistake about which liberty so many of the barons of big tech have chosen. Listen to how they talk of disruption, of moving fast, of breaking things, of a world to be remade by whoever is bold enough to seize it. You strip away that jargon and the sometimes-good intentions, and you’ll find the temptations of an old creed that says the strong should rule because they are strong, that the future belongs to whoever is powerful enough to make it, that might, in the end, makes right. "That is not progress, it is the state of nature. That’s the law of the jungle, scaled now to the cloud and bankrolled to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. It is the very thing John Winthrop and his hearty band of Puritans crossed an ocean to escape, a world in which no covenant stands above the will of the powerful." Read @HawleyMO on how we can Reclaim Citizenship from the Cloud.

"From time to time, throughout American history, the question of whether the United States should remain a republic or evolve into an empire reenters political discourse. It is upon us again, though perhaps not in the way many expected when President Trump returned to office. "Adventurism and democratic evangelism dominated American foreign and defense policy for much of the post-Cold War era. Forever wars, expanding alliance obligations, and an obsession with dominating the global commons produced limited strategic gain at immense cost. Many Americans came to associate these doctrines of the “liberal world order” with stagnation and hardship: depleted public trust, rising fiscal strain, and a growing sense that Washington attended more closely to the world stage than to conditions and interests at home. "The America First movement challenged all that. But while the second Trump administration has accomplished a number of significant doctrinal shifts toward greater realism and restraint, its actions signal a continued—and in some cases growing—imperial ambition. The pursuit of empire was unwise even when America stood alone as the world’s hyperpower and could afford to make such mistakes. In the current environment, constrained by limited resources and sharp tradeoffs, facing a peer competitor with ambitions of its own, the United States risks overextending itself in ways that could prove catastrophic for its citizens. "Though we are teetering on the edge, all hope is not lost for restoring a republic that prioritizes its citizens first. What is abundantly clear is that choosing the republic requires ruthless discipline in both doctrine and implementation. We lack that discipline now and must quickly regain it. A republic can survive the discomfort and fallout of difficult tradeoffs. It cannot survive more of the same bad decision-making rebranded under improved doctrine," Katherine Thompson explains.