OK, so imagine a scenario for a moment. It sounds
like something ripped straight out of science
fiction. You have this massive American tech
company, a huge success story, and they're building
these tools that, well, the military itself admits
are better than anything else out there. The
only tools, in fact, that are trusted on their
classified networks. Exactly. The only ones.
And yet right now, as we speak, the Pentagon
is threatening to label the same American company
a supply chain risk. And we have to pause on
that phrase, supply chain risk. That isn't just
some, you know, bureaucratic slap on the wrist.
That's the nuclear option. That's the label you
give to a company like Huawei, a company you
think is basically an arm of a foreign adversary.
Right. Chinese bi -tech. But here it's being
aimed at a U .S. company. And this whole standoff,
it really sets the stage for today's deep dive,
which we're calling Power and Paranoia. It's
the perfect title, because when you look at the
sources we have today, and they range from internal
Pentagon memos to frankly bizarre tweets of sitting
congressmen. Oh, we'll get to that. All the way
to the polling data. You see this one single
picture emerge. And what's that? You see a government
that's at war with itself, at war with its own
tech partners, and maybe even at war with its
own history. So grab a coffee or maybe check
the brake lines on your car. Which is literal
advice, as you'll soon find out. And let's unpack
this. We've got a lot to get through. First,
this feud between Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth
and the AI giant Anthropic. Then we'll look at
the fracturing of the Republican Party, where
members of Congress are literally tweeting to
prove they aren't suicidal. A sentence I never
thought I'd say. And finally, we'll get to the
numbers. The president's approval ratings are
in a freefall. And the theories voters have about
what it would take to turn those numbers around
are, well, dark doesn't even begin to cover it.
Dystopian might be closer. If... So let's start
with the Pentagon, this standoff with Anthropic.
It seems like a contract dispute, but you're
saying it's much bigger than that. It really
is. Here's the situation. The Department of War
and specifically Secretary Hegseth is furious
with Anthropic. Anthropic makes the AI model
Claude for anyone who doesn't know. Right. And
the Pentagon loves Claude. It's the only AI they
have running on their classified systems. And
we know it works. Oh, it works. The sources confirm
it was used in that raid in Venezuela back in
January, the Maduro raid. So this isn't about
the product being bad. The fight is purely ideological.
It's about the terms of service. Precisely. Anthropic
is saying no to two things. First, weapons that
can fire without a human in the loop. You know,
killer robots. Okay, that seems reasonable. And
second, and this is the big one domestic mass
surveillance of Americans. Wait, stop there.
That seems - completely reasonable. I feel like
99 % of Americans would agree with both of those
things. You'd think so. So why is the Pentagon
willing to blow up the entire relationship over
this? Because from their perspective, these rules
are unduly restrictive. Their position is that
they need to be able to use these AI tools for
all lawful purposes. All lawful purposes. That
phrase sounds so innocent. But it's doing a lot
of work here. We have to look at what's actually
considered lawful in 2026. And this is where
the source is getting a little terrifying. We're
not talking about illegal wiretaps. We're talking
about open source intelligence. Yeah. Right now,
the law says the government can collect any publicly
available information. That's your social media
posts, your public Venmo transactions, voter
rolls, protest permits. And for decades, no one
really worried about that because it was a needle
in a haystack. You couldn't possibly have enough
human analysts to read everyone's tweets. Exactly.
Your privacy was protected by simple human limitation.
But AI, AI removes that barrier completely. And
anthropic sources lay out a pretty clear scenario.
A nightmare scenario. They're worried that an
AI like Claude could just continuously monitor
every single American. 24 hours? I'm not hacking
you. It's just taking everything you put out
there in public and connecting all the dots instantly.
Correct. Imagine a system that sees you criticize
a policy on Twitter, cross references it with
your voter registration, sees you signed up for
a protest permit, and automatically flags you
as a potential dissident. That's the difference
between a librarian looking up a book and a supercomputer
reading every book ever written. every second,
just to see if your name is in it. That is a
perfect analogy. And Anthropic is saying, we
don't want our technology to build that list.
They're drawing a line. But the Pentagon is playing
hardball. Which brings us back to that supply
chain risk threat. But what happens if they actually
do it? It's a contagion. If Anthropic gets that
label, they become radioactive. Any other company,
a Lockheed Martin, a Boeing, if they want to
do business with the military, they have to cut
ties with Ampropic. The source is, quote, a senior
official calling it an enormous pain in the ass.
They did. But they also said they're willing
to do it. to make Anthropic pay a price. So is
Anthropic the only company they're talking to?
Oh no, they're shopping around, negotiating with
OpenAI, with Google, with XAI, and the administration
is confident those other guys will agree to the
all -lawful use standard. So the strategy is
to isolate Anthropic. That's the gamble. Make
an example of them. It's a test of whether an
ethical AI company can even survive when its
biggest potential customer demands total control.
It's a digital power play. But I want to pivot
now from digital threats to, well, physical ones.
It's a jarring transition. It is. Because while
the Pentagon is fighting about code inside the
Republican Party, the fight is for physical safety.
We go from high tech surveillance anxiety to
this very old school, very visceral fear. And
I have to read this tweet. It's from Representative
Thomas Massey, a Republican from Kentucky. He
wrote, quote, I'm not suicidal. I eat healthy
food. The brakes on my car and truck are in good
shape. There are no deep pools of water on my
farm, and I'm a pretty good swimmer. It sounds
like a joke, like some kind of dark comedy routine.
But it's not. Not at all. In this context, it's
deadly serious. He's literally listing all the
ways people have accidents. It's something you'd
expect a Russian dissident to post before falling
out of a window. That's exactly the comparison
the sources are making. Massey is signaling that
if he dies mysteriously, it wasn't an accident.
He's implying he fears being, while the slang
is suicided, for opposing the administration.
And it's not just him. Marjorie Taylor Greene,
who was the face of the Magier movement for years.
Now she's a target. Because she's pushing for
the release of the Trump Epstein files. Right.
She thinks hiding them is more damaging than
whatever is in them. Trump called her wacky and
suddenly she has over 700 death threats against
her family. And she made a really telling point
in the source material. She said when the left
hated her, she got hate mail, but she never felt
like she needed a private security detail. Not
until she crossed Trump. Think about that statement.
I was safer when my political enemies hated me
than I am with my own side. It shows that loyalty
is being enforced with fear. And this isn't just
rhetoric. The sources mention the death of Charlie
Kirk, the assassination of that state rep in
Minnesota, Melissa Hortman. There's a body count.
And that detail about Senator Katie Britt. Right.
She offers some very mild criticism of the president.
And the response from Trump was reportedly that
she is dead to him. Which normally, you know,
is just a figure of speech. But in this climate,
the fear is that some unstable supporter hears
that and takes it literally as an instruction.
It creates this atmosphere where politicians
are afraid to speak, not because they'll lose
an election, but because they might lose their
life. Which brings us to the obvious question.
Why? Why is the pressure so high right now? And
the answer seems to be in the polling data. The
numbers are just... There was no spinning this.
We're looking at net approval ratings for the
president that are hitting historic lows for
his second term. Yeah, between negative 19 and
negative 26 percent, depending on which poll
you look at. AP, Yahoo, NBC, they're all showing
the same thing. A cratering. The floor just fell
out. So one of our sources asked its readers,
OK, what would it take to turn this around? How
do you come back from being down 26 points? The
answers they got, I mean, they're just so cynical.
They show how broken the electorate's trust is.
They basically fall into three grim categories.
The first one is called the 9 -11 condition.
This is the idea that a major terrorist attack
would cause the country to rally around the flag,
rally around the president. Which has happened
before. Bush shot up to 86 percent approval after
9 -11. But here's the dark twist. The readers
aren't just predicting an attack. A lot of them
are speculating that the administration might
actually let it happen. To distract people from
the Epstein story. Exactly. I mean, just think
about the level of distrust you have to have
to think the government would let Americans die
just to get a polling bump. Wow. Okay, what was
the second condition? The Trump stops being Trump
condition. The fantasy scenario. Right. This
is where he holds a fireside chat and admits
to having daddy issues or, you know, suddenly
decides to pass universal health care. Which
the sources basically laugh off as impossible.
Yeah, that one gets filed under never gonna happen.
And the third? The death condition. This one
is just grim. The theory here is twofold. Either
the assassination of a popular right -wing figure
could rally the base out of anger. Or, conversely,
the president himself gets a terminal diagnosis.
A sympathy bump. A sympathy bump. He's dying.
Let's rally around him. The fact that the only
paths to victory people can imagine involve mass
death, assassinations, or terminal illness tells
you everything about the national mood. It feels
like the wheels are just coming off. And it's
not just in the polls. The actual institutions,
the courts, are starting to push back. We're
seeing real institutional friction. The administration
is trying to use the legal system to punish its
enemies and, well, rewrite history, but it's
not working. Let's talk about Janine Pirro. The
U .S. attorney for D .C., she tried to indict
six members of Congress for making a video that
reminded soldiers not to follow legal orders.
And how did that go for her? It was a goose egg.
Zero. Not a single grand juror voted to indict.
That is almost unheard of in the federal system.
It's a total humiliation for the DOJ. And then
there was that ruling about Independence Hall.
Judge Cynthia Roof. And it's important. She's
a George W. Bush appointee, not some liberal
activist. The administration removed displays
about slavery from Independence Hall, just erasing
it. And she ordered them to put it all back.
And she didn't hold back in her ruling. No, she
went straight to Orwell, quoted 1984. She wrote,
all history was a polypsist, scraped clean and
reinscribed. She literally compared them to the
Ministry of Truth. When a federal judge is quoting
Orwell at you, things are not going well. Not
at all. Speaking of Bush, George W. Bush himself
actually resurfaced this week. Yeah, he joined
Substack, of all things. After what, a decade
of hibernating, as the sources called it? His
first post was all about George Washington's
integrity and self -restraint. Pretty clear dig
of the current president. Oh, obviously. But
the sources were pretty dismissive. The consensus
was basically too little, too late. You can't
be silent for years while your party transforms
and then think a blog post is going to fix it.
It feels like someone whispering in a hurricane.
It really does. OK, before we finish, there's
one last story. It's smaller, but I think it
just perfectly captures the absurdity of this
moment. Melania's movie. Ah, yes, the mandatory
blockbuster. So the box office is not great.
It's stalled at around 15 million. But now there
are reports that an active duty commanding officer
ordered his soldiers to go see the film. to boost
the ticket sales. It's just, it's pathetic, but
it's also illegal. You can't use your military
authority to pump up the First Lady's box office
numbers. The sources are calling for the officer
to be court -martialed. As they should be. It
just shows how the rot trickles down. You break
the norms at the top, and you get some officer
who thinks, I guess I have to force my troops
to watch this movie to show I'm loyal. It feels
like something out of a tin pot dictatorship.
Exactly. So if we zoom out, what does all this
mean? We've covered AI, death threats, polling,
the courts. We're seeing a system under extreme
stress. The executive branch is trying to consolidate
power over everything, technology, history, even
its own party members. But the system is kicking
back. The tech companies are resisting. The courts
are resisting. The voters are just exhausted.
It feels like a standoff. Everyone is just waiting.
And that's where the paranoia comes from. When
you can't trust your colleagues, you can't trust
your technology, you can't trust your government.
Stability just becomes impossible. I want to
leave our listeners with what I'm calling the
Massey paradox. We have reached a point where
a sitting U .S. congressman has to publicly announce
the condition of his car's brakes just to do
his job. He has to tell the world, my brakes
are fine because the fear of being taken out
by his own side is that real. It's unbelievable.
So if the people in power, people with security
details and public platforms are this afraid
of each other. Where did that leave the rest
of us? That's the question, isn't it? And I'm
not sure anyone wants to know the answer. On
that cheerful note, that's our deep dive. Thanks
for listening. Stay safe out there. And maybe
check your brakes. Couldn't hurt. See you next
time.