The political and economic importance of AI is immense. I argue that the question of how AI will be used and whether it will be placed under state-control is critically important. It is, in my view, an imperative that ordinary people get access to super-intelligence and that the government not regulate it out of existence.

I am hopeful for the high-tech future. Now is not the time for pessimism. It certainly is not the time for government-enforced hysterics.

The Beirut barracks bombing of 1983 that killed 241 Americans is back in the news. The truth is that Ronald Reagan erred by sending American troops into harms way in a conflict that had no connection to our national defense. American Mid East policy has long been foolish.

On Monday, the State Department released a report entitled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.”

The report alleges that Cuba is the epicenter of communism today, that Fidel Castro is the father of ideological third worldism, and that Cuba is the “connective tissue” between Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran (and Hamas) against the United States.

I find the report hyperbolic. It overstates the real threat of physical invasion and ideological subversion from Cuba. This over-emphasis on foreign threats has a long tradition in American foreign policy, from ironically the Spanish-American War to today.

The greatest threats to the American way of life are right here at home. Cuba doesn’t tax a third of American’s wealth every year. Cuba didn’t lock me in my home in 2020 under penalty of law. Cuba didn’t implement the vaccine mandate. Cuba didn’t pass the Civil Rights Act or pour trillions of dollars into far-left American universities.

The report misstates the origin of third worldism as well. From the beginning, the communists aimed for planetary revolution by the oppressed. This always had a racial dimension. Ho Chi Minh, for instance, was calling for racial revolution by the “brown” and “yellow” races against their white imperial masters in 1924, decades before the communists took over Cuba.

Lenin himself called for decolonization. But that also misses the bigger picture: FDR, as President, made anti-racism and decolonization a cornerstone of WWII policy! The US gave meaningful political, military, and economic aid to Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh during the war.

While I respect much of the work that the Trump administration is doing at the State Department—there are many patriots employed there—it is nonetheless true that an accurate accounting of the rise of the global left must place the United States at the center of that project.

Had it not been for American aid to the communists in the 1940s there would almost certainly have been no Cold War. Shadowy networks of Cubans are the not the reason the New Deal liberals undid the Constitution, launched a massive global crusade against “oppression” (while aiding the bloodthirsty Marxists in Moscow, Hanoi, and Yenan), and transformed the American way of life in the process.

The purpose of the State Department’s report is to justify war and regime change in Cuba. This has more to do with the personal priorities of the Cuba lobby—Latin American expats in the United States—than with the real good of the American people.

As always, I understand that good as the defense of American’s person and property. Every problem caused by Cuban spying and subversion in America can be solved through tougher immigration policies and ordinary law enforcement.

I will go further, if the United States wants to blunt the potency of communism in Cuba today then we should normalize trade relations immediately. We should also repeal the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966. Higher economic growth will lessen the pressure on Cubans to migrate. This would be good for the US.

I cover all this and more in this episode of Lippincott Talk.

The ongoing freakout over AI upending society and taking all the jobs is, I believe, rooted in deeply flawed premises about human life. I think these arguments will lead to the justification of tyrannical “expert” rule in the manner of COVID. In this episode I address the essay by Gregory Conti in Compact Magazine entitled “The AI Apocalypse is Already Here.”

The state-granted public utilities in Michigan are a disaster. The legally-enforced formulas the big monopolies—DTE and Consumer’s Energy—use to justify rate increases to the Michigan Public Service Commission do not prioritize maintenance for lines like tree trimming. The result is constant outages during even relatively minor storms.

The regulatory framework is the problem. It should be abolished. A free market in energy in Michigan would be massively cheaper and more efficient than what we have right now. The enshittification of American life is a choice and one we can resist.

I think we need to put this legal loss in the proper context. Yes, SCOTUS voted to affirm birthright citizenship for illegals but it also was a close decision. Going forward, the most important task is to hone the fundamental argument and maintain a clear vision of what victory looks like.

In my view, we need to return to the core principle of the consent of the governed as the basis of individual citizenship. The test acts and loyalty oaths during the American Revolution provide a good starting point for understanding what this could look like.

250 years later, it is time to once again save the Republic. Never a better time to start than the present.

I think citizenship should be built on explicit consent. We need to abandon the concept of birthright citizenship entirely.