The Brooklyn Rail

Trump has an extraordinary ability to make masses of people believe things that aren’t true. It is part of our terrible fate that the Trump phenomenon is occurring at the precise moment when hard decisions need to be made about our future with Artificial Intelligence. The moron Pete Hegseth is in the position of deciding how the US military will use AI, and he tried to bully Anthropic into giving the military a free hand in mass surveillance and autonomous killer robots.

The race to create superintelligence is reckless, and it is becoming increasingly clear that the powerful people who are making the decisions about superintelligence are more dangerous than the machines. And this extends to the future of humanoid robots with AI. Elon Musk claimed in October 2025 that Tesla’s Optimus robot will be an “infinite money glitch,” that will be so productive that it will revolutionize labor and usher in a bright future of sustainable abundance, ending poverty and incidentally making Tesla the most valuable company in the world. “With Optimus and self-driving, we can actually create a world where there is no poverty, where everyone has access to the finest medical care,” Musk said. “Optimus will be an incredible surgeon. Imagine if everyone had access to an incredible surgeon.” He claimed that Optimus “won’t even seem like a robot. It’ll seem like a person in a robot suit . . . so real that you’ll need to poke it to believe it’s actually a robot.” Today, Tesla is working on the third generation of Optimus, the first design meant for mass production, and continuing to develop an AI system for the robot.

Musk’s “sustainable abundance” is an imaginary post-scarcity environment where money is irrelevant and we’ll all be able to have whatever we want for free. The way Elon treats his own workers won’t matter anymore in this tech-managed utopia. Space X is moving toward orbital data centers, so no more ugly warehouses in your backyard. A decade ago, Musk warned that AI was going to destroy the human race, but now he says it’s going to fix everything for us.

Techno-optimism is not new, but as the real dangers increase in likelihood, it sounds more and more unhinged.

When Pete Hegseth was confronted with the facts of the February 28 bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran, which killed more than 175 people, most of them girls between the ages of 7 and 12, he said, “We of course never target civilian targets.” But the confrontation was not about targeting. The fact is that the school was hit, almost certainly by the US, and 100 graves of children were dug. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound next door to the school was also targeted, and was also destroyed. These were the first attacks of the war.

The girls’ school had decided to shut down shortly after the airstrikes began, but parents were not able to reach the school before the missiles hit. The school was hit between 10 and 10:45 am, when classes were changing. The impact took out the walls of the school, causing the roof to collapse, burying the girls beneath them. Red Crescent medics and others said the first strike was followed by another, and another, so that children and teachers that survived the first blast were killed by the second or third one.

When Trump was confronted with this atrocity, he claimed the Iranians did it to themselves. “That was done by Iran,” he told reporters. “They are very inaccurate with their munitions.” But Bellingcat released a video showing a US Tomahawk cruise missile hitting a medical clinic in the IRGC compound, with smoke clearly rising from the school next to it. The US is the only party in the conflict that possesses Tomahawk missiles. The bombing of the elementary school by US forces has now become a rallying cry for many Iranians. It’s their 9/11.

Mohammed Shariatmadar, whose six-year-old daughter Sara was killed in the attack, told independent news outlet Drop Site, “I cannot understand how a place where innocent children learn can be bombed like this. We are talking about small children who knew nothing of politics or wars.”

But MAGA lobbyist and Newsmax contributor Matt Schlapp suggested that the Iranian schoolgirls killed in Minab are better off dead than being “alive in a burqa.” Speaking on Piers Morgan’s Uncensored show on YouTube on March 4, Schlapp elaborated: “It’s hypocritical to say that these attacks harmed women and children when those women and children, the young girls that you reference, would be . . . live a life in a barbaric, unequal society behind a burqa, with no ability to make career choices.”¹

On March 8, Timothy Snyder proposed on Substack that “A purpose of the war on Iran might well be to provide Donald Trump with a pretext to try to cancel or ‘federalize’ the coming Congressional elections,” and he concludes:

We must anticipate, with sadness and resolution. We will be horrified, but we cannot be surprised, if there is a terrorist attack on the United States. If we choose to be surprised, we co-create a moment that Trump will exploit to undo what remains of our democracy. If the unthinkable happens, it will happen because some of Trump’s people thought about it, some of them created the conditions for it, and some of them looked away. The responsibility for catastrophe will be theirs. And the responsibility for democracy will be ours.²