The Brooklyn Rail

To see an autocrat in full flower, you have to see him in the midst of ordering a violent attack. An autocrat can’t resist that. Giving the order to release the death machines is the only thing that temporarily fills the void within them, the only thing that definitively confirms their power over others, even over life and death.

Knowing this, Bibi Netanyahu easily played Trump, who couldn’t resist joining in with Netanyahu’s celebrated attack on Iran. It remains to be seen how successful Trump’s bunker-busting bombing actually was in “obliterating” Iran’s uranium enrichment program, or even if Iran’s nuclear program was, in fact, as close to completion as Netanyahu has been saying it was for decades, and managed to convince Trump of it now. A consensus is building that these acts may ensure Iran’s continued insistence on acquiring nuclear weapons rather than ending it.

In an awkward and somewhat panicked attempt to bring everyone along after the strike, Trump sputtered, “And I want to just thank everybody and in particular, God, I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”

And then he suddenly announced that the war with Iran was over and he was ordering an immediate ceasefire that both Israel and Iran had agreed to. When neither side in fact ceased fire, Trump berated them for not going along with his narrative that the US attack on Iran was like the bombings of Hiroshima (with “Little Boy”) and Nagasaki (with “Fat Man”) that ended World War II.

“They will never give me a Nobel Peace Prize,” Trump complained to Netanyahu in the Oval Office last month. “It’s too bad. I deserve it, but they will never give it to me.” In a speech in Detroit last October, he said, “If I were named Obama, I would have had the Noble Prize given to me in ten seconds.” The void looms larger and larger.

Sending armed masked men in tactical gear to chase down dishwashers and landscapers and pregnant mothers, to uproot stable families and ruin numerous lives, will partially fill the void for a bit, but that kind of power is fleeting, and it is becoming clear that other Americans just don’t like it.

Masked and heavily armed ICE agents tackled and beat a 48-year-old man as he was working at his landscaping job at an IHOP in Santa Ana, California on June 21. Narciso Barranco was born in Mexico and has lived peacefully in the US for 30 years, working hard and raising three sons, one of whom is a Marine veteran and the other two are active-duty Marines. The masked agents in full tactical gear chased Mr. Barranco down the street with guns drawn and were surprised and incensed when he tried to run away from them. They claimed that he had pointed a weed whacker at them, so they had to mace and beat him, dislocating his shoulder.

ICE has now put more than 59,000 immigrants into detention, but they only have funding for 41,500 beds.

On Tuesday, June 24, it was reported that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller stands to make a substantial profit from his program of mass deportation, because he owns up to a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of stock in Palantir, the company that tracks data and conducts surveillance on immigrants for ICE and has received lucrative government contracts to do so. Palantir’s stock has gained 483.18% this year. Miller sought to conceal his investment in Palantir by putting it in the name of his five-year-old child. At least 11 other Trump administration officials also own stock in Palantir.

Peter Thiel’s Palantir has created custom software for ICE that allows them to track and target immigrants for arrest and detention. The software is apparently not foolproof, as a number of citizens and lawful residents have been swept up in the broad sweeps ICE is now using to meet Stephen Miller’s demand that they arrest and detain at least 3,000 migrants a day.¹

In an interview by Ross Douthat of the New York Times published on June 26,² Peter Thiel begins with his “stagnation thesis,” that from 1750 to 1970 everything was inexorably speeding up and then everything slowed down, and that was a bad thing, largely caused by an overemphasis on the environmental costs of accelerated growth. Thiel believes we should take a lot more risks technologically, especially in biotech, in radical life extension and immortality, and in AI.

Thiel tells Douthat about a conversation he had with Elon Musk in 2024:

2024 is the year where Elon stopped believing in Mars—not as a silly science tech project, but as a political project. Mars was supposed to be a political project; it was building an alternative. And in 2024 Elon came to believe that if you went to Mars, the socialist US government, the woke AI would follow you to Mars.

It was a meeting with Elon and the CEO of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, that we brokered. And the rough conversation was Demis telling Elon: I’m working on the most important project in the world. I’m building a superhuman AI. And Elon responds to Demis: Well, I’m working on the most important project in the world. I am turning us into interplanetary species. And then Demis said: Well, you know my AI will be able to follow you to Mars. And then Elon went quiet. But in my telling of the history, it took years for that to really hit Elon. It took him until 2024 to process it.

Thiel is less apocalyptic about AI than some others:

One question we can frame is: Just how big a thing do I think AI is? And my stupid answer is: It’s more than a nothing burger, and it’s less than the total transformation of our society. My place holder is that it’s roughly on the scale of the internet in the late ’90s. I’m not sure it’s enough to really end the stagnation. It might be enough to create some great companies. And the internet added maybe a few percentage points to the GDP, maybe 1 percent to GDP growth every year for 10, 15 years. It added some to productivity. So that’s roughly my place holder for AI.

And then comes this exchange:

Douthat: I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?
Thiel: Uh——
Douthat: You’re hesitating.
Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would I would——
Douthat: This is a long hesitation!
Thiel: There’s so many questions implicit in this.
Douthat: Should the human race survive?
Thiel: Yes.
Douthat: OK.

At the end of the interview, there is a long discussion by Thiel about the Antichrist. To Thiel, the Antichrist is “a bad singularity,” bringing about “the one-world totalitarian state” that is anti-science and anti-technology and is likely to arise in the person of . . . Greta Thunberg! It is green environmentalism that will usher in the Antichrist! “This is I Thessalonians 5:3—the slogan of the Antichrist will be ‘peace and safety,’” concludes Thiel.

Thiel’s historical account of how we arrived at this point includes this: “We landed on the moon in July of 1969, Woodstock started three weeks later and, with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress stopped and the hippies won.”

The hippies brought on stagnation. This is what the person Ross Douthat calls “the most influential right-wing intellectual of the last 20 years” believes. This is what the earliest Silicon Valley adopter of Trumpism and groomer of JD Vance, the founder of Palantir, and one of the most important investors in AI believes about the past and the future.