AI is making it easier to build real things again. It is proliferating outside of Silicon Valley and has ignited a promise for exportation across the nation: any community can become a hotbed for innovation and opportunity.

The Right often talks about building a worker-centered coalition. Agriculture is where that idea could actually take shape...[but]...America is preparing for the AI age everywhere—except the place that feeds the country.

For at least a decade now, commentators on the political right have called for the reindustrialization of America, for putting our people to work building things in the real world. Now the digital and physical economies are converging, and the time has come to forge a worker-centered coalition focused on development and opportunity.

The frustration over data centers is both real and earned, in large part because the initial expansion of data centers came with tax handouts, no energy supply, and a culture of secrecy, bound by non-disclosure agreements, that exacerbated distrust in communities across the country. But the people cheering these delays have badly misread what is actually happening, who it hurts, and what it means for America's position in the world.

Rivers of bits pound through the air into the smallest channels, twisting and turning upon themselves, throwing themselves against our minds through great bright screens that never flag or tire. This great psychic Borg is changing us and everyone knows it.

One of the great opportunities for statesmanship in coming years is the forging of such an alliance.

The delegation of AI alignment responsibility to a small, ideologically homogeneous research community that is largely irreligious, disproportionately progressive, and nearly entirely unaccountable to democratic institutions is the most disastrous governance failure of our time.

Anthropic’s Claude stands, by most credible accounts, as the most capable AI model currently operating in classified military systems. The Pentagon reportedly used it in the January 2026 capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Eight of the ten largest American corporations rely on it. And yet the company that builds this tool now presumes to tell the Department of War when and how the military may employ it in defense of the United States. This is an extraordinary claim. It deserves an extraordinary response.

If you're reading this and feeling anxious about your own career, your own mortgage, your own kids' future (good). That means you're paying attention. The worst thing any of us can do right now is assume this doesn't apply to us. It applies to almost everyone. The best thing we can do is start talking about the gap honestly, without pretending we have answers we don't have. Because the gap is coming. And the only question is whether we build a bridge or fall in.

Hegseth was essentially ordering Anthropic to build a new capability—one that contravenes its most deeply held ethical principles, and lies outside the scope of its current contracts—and make that available to the U.S. military. If any party is radically revising the nature of defense contracting, it is the U.S. government.

While our federal bureaucracy hums along, a man who helped bring this issue to a head last year, Elon Musk, believes that AI has the power to replace all jobs and “make work optional.” But are we ready to use that power to shrink the federal workforce?

For two hundred and fifty years, America has vaulted forward on waves of innovation. Steam engines, the internet. We controlled them all, constructing a superpower. But with AI, for the first time, we might be at the mercy of the machine. What happens when it truly learns to think, to create, to decide? It's time for a real plan. We must harness AI's inevitable power in the interest of life and liberty. Or else.