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    ‘The city that draws the line’: one Arizona community’s fight against a huge datacenter

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    A company’s opaque plan to build a huge datacenter outside Tucson, Arizona has roiled the desert city over the past few months, the latest US community to push back as tech companies aggressively seek to build out infrastructure for cloud computing and to power the AI boom.The proposed datacenter, known as Project Blue, would span 290 acres in Pima county, and become the biggest development ever in the county, or anywhere in the southern part of the state.The $3.6bn project wasn’t on most Tucsonans’ radar until 17 June, when the county board of supervisors narrowly agreed to sell and rezone a parcel of land just south-east of town to the developer Beale Infrastructure.The San Francisco-based company hoped to get the project annexed by the city, a necessary step for it to be supplied by the public utility, Tucson Water.But since the parcel sale agreement, the proposed center has faced stiff pushback from a community upset over the enormous amounts of water and electricity it would require, and the lack of transparency with which the developers and some in local government have pursued the project.Conflict over the project made what is normally a sleepy time for Tucson politics – the city council is off in July amid searing heat and, with luck, monsoon downpours – into “the craziest seven weeks I’ve seen in Tucson”, said Michael Bogan, an aquatic ecologist and hydrologist at the University of Arizona who has long worked in the area.View image in fullscreenThe episode in Tucson illustrates the secretiveness and tenacity with which developers are rushing to build datacenters throughout the US, and the emotionally charged mix of issues that confront communities, weighing sometimes murky promises of economic incentives and jobs against effects on the environment and natural resources.In Memphis, Elon Musk’s xAI built one of the world’s biggest supercomputers, bringing in tax revenue to an economically depressed area, while also setting off a battle over air quality concerns related to the development’s methane turbines. Phoenix has one of the nation’s largest concentrations of datacenters, which keeps expanding, encouraged by tax incentives and local business leaders; local opposition and ordinances around noise pollution and water use are also on the rise. High-profile projects have been postponed or cancelled due to local pushback in recent months in northern Virginia, the nation’s biggest datacenter hub; in St Charles, Missouri; and in several towns in Indiana.But in even more locations, datacenters are moving forward, often under a cloud of secrecy.Quest for AI computing powerThe project in Tucson is one of many emerging in the quest for AI computing power and to serve data-intensive companies.The project envisions a vast warehouse full of computers in the Sonoran desert, including $2.4bn worth of equipment. Community outrage over the project grew soon after the city council’s 17 June vote, and much of it centered around the issue of water.Datacenters use water in two ways: to maintain a steady humidity, and to cool off the hot computers, which is often accomplished by running cold water past the machines, consuming water in the form of steam.Communities throughout the US have seen groundwater depletion and contamination after datacenters crept up. Tucson has long embraced water conservation, and this protective ethos is more salient there than many other communities, said Ed Hendel, president of Sky Island AI, a Tucson-based company. As one example, the city treats wastewater and releases it to the Santa Cruz River, home to wildlife such as endangered fish.Hendel’s daily work relies on datacenters, but he said they should be built where they make sense. Placing water-guzzling warehouses of computers “in a hot desert is not a good starting point”, he said. “Putting them in a hot desert in the midst of a drought is even more absurd, because that water is precious.”View image in fullscreenBeale did not detail exactly how much water it would use and from where in the weeks after the June vote, even though it claimed the project would be “water positive”. In the absence of details, Bogan set out to analyze how the project would be water positive, projecting it would be most likely to use treated water that now flows into the Santa Cruz. But even if the company went that route, Bogan wrote in a white paper on 11 July, it could dry up significant portions of the river, harming the many plants and animals that live there.The city manager, Tim Thomure, acting as an intermediary between Beale and the public, released the first concrete details about the project’s planned water use in mid-July after Bogan’s white paper came out: Project Blue would not affect the Santa Cruz River, he said. It would use three sources of water, including from two locations where treated wastewater is currently stored underground for future use, as well as the Tucson airport remediation plant, which treats contaminated groundwater that currently stays on site. And it gave an estimate of water use: over 1,900 acre-feet, or 620m gallons, enough to supply more than four typical 18-hole Pima county golf courses, according to Thomure.Beale also pledged to invest $100m in a pipeline to transport and use treated wastewater, and create 180 jobs.But this is not “water positive”, and it would rather cause “net depletion of our groundwater resources to supply Project Blue”, said Bogan, the aquatic ecologist. He pointed to a city document which notes that if Project Blue were to use more groundwater than it could replenish, it could make payments, or “water positivity rates” to make up for it.Lisa Shipek, executive director of southern Arizona’s Watershed Management Group, agreed with Bogan’s assessment. By possibly paying for using up groundwater, Project Blue, Shipek said, would potentially “replace wet water with ‘paper water’”. The tactic – paying for consuming wet water, or offsetting it in another way, whether in the form of water conservation or education measures – has been used to deplete groundwater throughout the world.Water not the only concernWater wasn’t community members’ only concern. Beale Infrastructure is not a typical developer, but rather a subsidiary of the asset management company Blue Owl. On 21 July, the local news site Arizona Luminaria published a story revealing that Pima county staff possessed a memo stating that Project Blue would be financed by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The story prompted fresh outcry from community members frustrated with Amazon’s anti-union actions, and overtures by its owner, Jeff Bezos, to the Trump administration.An AWS spokesperson said: “AWS has previously engaged in standard due diligence processes in Arizona, like we do in any geographic location we consider building and operating our infrastructure. We do not have any commitments or agreements in place to develop this project.”But the company declined to answer a question about whether AWS was affiliated with Project Blue in the past, or, potentially, in the future.A Beale spokesperson said: “We cannot comment on our tenants until a more advanced stage of the project.”Another wrinkle that added to the uproar was a news release from Tucson Electric Power (TEP) put out hours after the county vote on 17 June, announcing it was requesting a 14% rate increase to offset grid investments and inflation. With datacenters driving up electricity demand across the country, many community members assumed the rate hike was related to Project Blue, said the county supervisor, Matt Heinz.It wasn’t. The timing was coincidental, and a huge mistake, he said. “It’s unfortunately really plagued this whole project.”A TEP spokesperson, Joseph Barrios, said that the rate increase had nothing to do with Project Blue, but was based on costs already incurred in 2024 and before.View image in fullscreen“We understand that any rate increase could have an impact on our customers and it’s not something we take lightly,” he said.Outrage over Project Blue grew rapidly over the summer. Eliseo Gomez, a local high school teacher and organizer, convened with a small group at the base of Tucson’s “A” mountain shortly after the 17 June vote. “We were like: what can we do?” They decided to target the annexation vote. The group started a website and social media channels named No Desert Data Center, encouraging people to express their concerns with the mayor and city council.In response, the city arranged for two public meetings with presentations from Beale Infrastructure, as well as Tucson Water and TEP. The majority of attenders at both meetings were clearly opposed, most wearing red shirts saying “no to Project Blue” or holding protest signs. Union members, enticed by promises of construction jobs, made up a supportive minority at the events. Attenders grew increasingly upset, Gomez said, as they felt their concerns and queries were dodged or ignored. By the second meeting, on 4 August, many locals appeared fed up. Beale executives gave similar speeches, without providing much further detail, incensing the crowd, whose boos and shouts made it difficult for presenters to continue.Many citizens presented their own research. “I feel like I learned more about Project Blue from the public than the city,” said city councilman Rocque Perez.On 6 August, in an unscheduled vote, council members unanimously decided to discontinue discussions with Beale, each sharing short speeches revealing sharp opposition to Project Blue. Tucsonans packing the council chambers cheered and celebrated; Beale executives, appearing stunned, were booed as they left.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionImpact on Tucson politicsStill, Beale hasn’t given up. In mid-September, the company proposed moving forward with an air-cooled system that uses less water than the original design. Beale co-filed a state application with the TEP, to be supplied with up to 286 megawatts – enough to power to up to 250,000 homes.In a statement, Beale has described the new design as a closed-loop system that “uses minimal amounts of water that are continuously recirculated, thereby eliminating water loss”.Several local leaders said the Republican-led Arizona Corporation Commission, which oversees electricity use in the state, is likely to approve the project’s electricity request. That would mean Beale’s main remaining hurdle is finding a water source. The company has not said how it would obtain any such water, however, and given the city council’s vote, they cannot be supplied by the city’s public utility.Meanwhile, the controversy has had a profound impact on Tucson politics. Even supporters acknowledge the Project Blue process started poorly, partly because non-disclosure agreements between Beale and city staff dating back to 2022 meant that most elected leaders knew little to nothing about it until some time this year.Supervisor Jennifer Allen said the first meeting between Beale and the board in late May was short on details, including water use, and her requests for more information turned up nothing concrete. It was “a lot of greenwashing”, she said. She voted no on 17 June, as did her colleague Andrés Cano.Heinz, a longtime Democrat, said he voted for the rezoning and sale because the project had long been championed by city staff, including city manager Thomure, and because the tens of thousands of hi-tech jobs in the area will need access to nearby datacenters.Though there weren’t detailed water use estimates at first, Heinz said he wasn’t worried as Beale would be working with Tucson Water and the city would be “putting in those guardrails”.View image in fullscreenThe new design, he said, “will be an even better fit for southern Arizona”.“I frankly wish they’d approached us with this air-cooled design to begin with.”Heinz, as well as supervisors Rex Scott and Steve Christy, have come under withering scrutiny from constituents, who have implored the board to revisit the sale agreement. Heinz said that wasn’t going to happen. “There’s no vote before the board,” Heinz said. “It’s done. And I don’t want to reverse it.”Scott acknowledged that NDAs played a negative role in the affair and noted that both the county and city had already implemented new guidelines for handling them, which should grant more transparency to the process, Scott said.The city council has also since passed new rules to give more transparency and oversight over big water users, and they are developing specific guidelines and guard-rails to govern any future proposed data centers.‘Cities across the country are being sold the same story’While Beale’s air-cooled system may use less water, it has highlighted the other enormous costs of datacenters: electricity. Air-cooled systems use huge amounts of energy and are less energy efficient – especially in a desert where the daily average high is 29C (84F).It’s now a national issue – a 2024 report to Congress co-authored by Oak Ridge National Laboratory researcher AB Siddik estimates that datacenters consumed 4.4% of the nation’s total electricity as of 2023, which could rise to as much as 12% by 2028.TEP’s involvement has brought scrutiny to the private utility; locals have recently been protesting at their headquarters. On 23 September, the mayor and council announced they plan to intervene in the utility’s request to the state for the rate hike, saying in a statement such an increase “will strain families and small businesses and slow the transition to clean, affordable energy”.View image in fullscreenThe saga has also raised the possibility that the Tucsonans or their leaders could consider pursuing a public utility to replace TEP when its contract is due for review in 2025, though that could be an enormous effort, Perez said.“I’m disappointed that Tucson Electric Power is partnering with Beale despite strong community concerns,” said councilman Kevin Dahl. “It certainly makes an argument for public power.”TEP spokesperson Joseph Barrios said that the utility’s involvement with Project Blue would not raise customers’ rates or affect their service.“We have an obligation to serve, and that includes all customers within our service area,” Barrios said.As far as the possibility of public power, “we feel our community is better served by continuing to work together”, he added.Council member and vice-mayor Lane Santa Cruz said this wasn’t just about Tucson, though.“What’s happening here isn’t unique to us: cities across the country are being sold the same story, with promises of jobs, innovation and progress,” she said. “But what’s not being talked about is who really benefits and what it costs us.”Too often, she added, these projects are extractive, using a community’s water, electricity, and labor – while providing only a small number of jobs – instead of being a sustainable partner.“We need to be the city that draws the line,” she said. 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      US Congress committee investigating Musk-owned Starlink over Myanmar scam centres

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      A powerful bipartisan committee in the US Congress says it has begun an investigation into the involvement of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite business in providing internet access to Myanmar scam centres, blamed for swindling billions from victims across the world.The move comes as it was revealed that large numbers of Starlink dishes began appearing on scam-centre roofs in Myanmar around the time of a crackdown in February that was supposed to eradicate the centres, according to a investigation by Agence France-PresseStarlink has come from nowhere to become the war-torn country’s biggest internet provider in three months, data from the APNIC Asian regional internet registry shows.SpaceX, Starlink’s owner, has not replied to AFP requests for comment.The US Congress joint economic committee told the news agency it began an investigation in July into Starlink’s involvement with the scam centres. The committee has the power to make Musk testify before it.China, Thailand and Myanmar forced pro-junta Myanmar militias who protect the centres into promising to “eradicate” the compounds in February. They freed about 7,000 people – most Chinese citizens – from the brutal call centre-style system, which the UN says runs on forced labour and human trafficking.Many workers said they were beaten and forced to work long hours by scam bosses who target victims across the globe with telephone, internet and social media cons.Senator Maggie Hassan, the leading Democrat on the US congressional committee, has called on Musk to block the Starlink service to the fraud factories.“While most people have probably noticed the increasing number of scam texts, calls and emails, they may not know that transnational criminals halfway across the world may be perpetrating these scams by using Starlink internet access,” she said.The senator wrote to Musk in July demanding answers to 11 questions about Starlink’s role.Former California prosecutor Erin West, who now heads the Operation Shamrock group campaigning against the centres, said: “It is abhorrent that an American company is enabling this to happen.”While still a cybercrime prosecutor, she warned Starlink in July 2024 that the mostly Chinese crime syndicates that run the centres were using its technology, but received no reply.Americans are among the top targets of south-east Asia scammers, the US treasury department said, losing an estimated $10bn last year, up 66% in 12 months.Up to 120,000 people may be being “forced to carry out online scams” in the Myanmar centres, according to a UN report in 2023.On the Thailand-Myanmar border, new buildings have been springing up inside the heavily guarded compounds around Myawaddy at a fast pace, with some festooned with Starlink receivers, satellite images and AFP drone footage show.Analysis of satellite images from Planet Labs PBC found dozens of buildings going up or being altered in the largest of the compounds, KK Park, between March and September. More

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      ‘Americans are democracy’s equivalent of second-generation wealth’: a Chinese journalist on the US under Trump

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      On a Friday night in late May, Wang Jian was getting ready to broadcast. It was pouring outside, and he was sitting in the garage apartment behind his house, just outside Boston, eating dinner. “I am very sensitive to what Trump does,” Wang was telling me, in Mandarin, waving a fork. “When Trump holds a cabinet meeting, he sits there and the people next to him start to flatter him. And I think, isn’t this the same as Mao Zedong? Trump sells the same thing: a little bit of populism, plus a little bit of small-town shrewdness, plus a little bit of ‘I have money.’”Wang was sitting next to a rack of clothing – the shirts and jackets the 58-year-old newsman wears professionally – and sipping a seemingly bottomless cup of green tea that would eventually give way to coffee. By 11pm, he would walk across the room and snap on a set of ring lights, ready to carry on an unbroken string of chatter for a YouTube news programme that he calls “Wang Jian’s Daily Observations”. It was a slow news night but he would end up talking until nearly 1am. This was his second broadcast of the day. Different time zones, he explained to me, different audiences.Wang, who has more than 800,000 subscribers on YouTube, is representative of a small but influential part of the Mandarin-language media landscape. He is part of an exodus of media professionals who have left Hong Kong and mainland China in the past decade; and one of a handful who have started posting news and analysis videos on YouTube. Wang serves an audience of Chinese expatriates – along with mainlanders savvy enough to get round China’s great firewall – who tune in hoping that he can fill in the gaps left by propaganda, censorship and disinformation.Wang’s fans find him entertaining and reassuringly professional. (“He’s very objective, I think,” one told me.) His broadcast manner moves from the impersonal, rhythmic cadence of a veteran newscaster to personal asides that bring to mind a slightly incredulous university lecturer. He loves a rhetorical question (“Is this the way a US president speaks?”) followed by his favourite English-language interjection: “C’mon.”I have spent the months since Trump’s inauguration watching Wang on YouTube. He was first recommended to me by a journalist working at a prominent Chinese news outlet who, even while reporting for a similar audience, frequently checked in on Wang’s broadcasts. “He’ll be perfect for you,” they said. Americans have always loved looking at themselves from a distance.Watching the US through Wang makes our political reality appear more comical and more dangerous. He centres China in all his broadcasts, offering a kind of been-there-done-that account of authoritarian creep. He places the US on an arc of history we have long pretended to transcend. “Americans are democracy’s equivalent of second-generation wealth,” he told me. They were born into democracy and have no appreciation of what life is like without it. Chinese people, on the other hand, “have been bullied by rulers for thousands of years. We’re very familiar with these situations.”There are many American reporters, Wang said, who report competently on China. But when I asked how the US media was doing covering the US, he burst into laughter. “If I were the New York Times, I would be putting curse words on the front page every day,” he told me. “F-word, F-word, F-word.”In the US, the China narrative can fluctuate depending on the day. We thought, briefly, that the outbreak of the pandemic in Wuhan constituted a “Chornobyl moment” that would undermine the regime. It did not. We wonder, on and off, how China builds rail systems so quickly. We worry about whether China will overtake us in AI development. Our sense of national decline is intensified by China’s rise. In April, a New York Times op-ed by Thomas Friedman ran with the headline, “I just saw the future. It was not in America.” (It was in China.)In China, meanwhile, people looking to understand the US are also subject to a push and pull based on the political climate and – under Xi Jinping, China’s long-serving president – the narrowing space for free expression. China’s propaganda operation no longer resembles the lumbering machinery of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. There are still fustier national newspapers – Xinhua and the People’s Daily – that clearly represent a Communist party perspective. There is also the more nationalistic Global Times. “If the US did not interfere in China’s internal affairs or challenge its sovereignty,” said one recent article, “there would be no need for it to worry about China’s defence development”.View image in fullscreenAt the turn of the last century, these bigger publications were balanced by a handful of independent, market-driven media outlets pushing the boundaries of censorship in China, although these mostly reported on domestic issues. Over time, however, most Chinese media consumers have moved online and today, just like Americans, they get most of their information on social media. Mainland China blocks Facebook, YouTube, X and Google. Instead, information spreads on Sina Weibo or, most commonly, WeChat. These platforms are monitored by human censors and AI programmes that hunt for sensitive phrases or keywords. China’s censorship is not monolithic or infallible, but these combined efforts mean that, typically, the news that spreads is the news that the government permits to spread.“Mostly, the things that spread on WeChat are video clips or screenshots with text,” Yaqiu Wang, a researcher based in Washington DC. Clips that highlight American gun violence, protests or inflation flow freely, without any censorship. She mentioned the popularity of snippets from the Trump-friendly Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Yaqiu Wang’s parents will, not infrequently, call at night, concerned about her safety. They are not reading government propaganda so much as a curated selection of American bombast, spin and disinformation.How much Chinese people know about the reality of life in the US varies wildly. “There are those people with power, or those people working in universities, who will jump the great firewall,” Yaqiu Wang told me. These people can read BBC’s Mandarin news service, for example, or listen to the Mandarin-language podcast run by the New York Times journalist Yuan Li. But if these are too dry for news consumers, Wang Jian is there to chatter the night away. “I think this satisfies people’s needs,” said a Chinese government employee who watches Wang’s programme every day. “You can get real information.”Wang has told viewers that, in all his years as a journalist, the last two had brought about some of the biggest global changes he had seen. Trump, Wang explained, has misidentified the US’s strengths. “Your strengths aren’t your people,” he told me later, expanding on his theme. “I could find a bank teller in Hong Kong, bring them here, and they could do the job of 10 Americans.” What the US has got, according to Wang, is allies and a reliable currency. (“And now you’re threatening to annex Canada?”)Trump, according to Wang, would like to be more like Xi Jinping – a strongman leading a nation with a huge manufacturing base. He likes to point out that the two leaders have birthdays a day apart. Trump would like to take back the supply chain and manufacture everything in the US – an idea that drew a “c’mon” from Wang. There are, in turn, things about the US that Xi would like to emulate – the global influence, the financial power of the dollar. “Maybe we should just let Xi and Trump switch places. We wouldn’t need to do anything. They could leave the rest of us out of it,” Wang joked. “Although I think Xi Jinping would get beat up in the United States.”It’s this kind of irreverence that Wang’s audience most enjoys. His viewers call him “Teacher Wang” and as he talks, a string of congratulatory messages pop up. They often say: “Teacher Wang, JiaYou!” (a term of encouragement that literally means “add oil!” but is closer to “let’s go!”). Sometimes: “Teacher Wang, well said!” And sometimes, when Wang is particularly critical: “Teacher Wang, well scolded!”View image in fullscreenFormally, there are three parts of Wang’s programmes. He opens with a segment of recent news, moves on to a segment that offers opinions and deeper explorations of a particular topic. Finally, he will end with about half an hour of viewer comments and questions. Recent topics have included immigration protests in Australia (“Without immigration, Australia has no chance of being an influential country”) and China’s diplomatic overtures to India. This segment can also involve questions – “Should I emigrate to another country?” “Should I buy an iPhone now?” – that require him to play a variety of roles: agony uncle, consumer advice columnist, financial adviser. He does an episode every year while he makes dumplings. He is part newscaster, part professor, part friend.Few of Wang’s fans wanted to talk on the record, but two of the handful I spoke with pointed to this as their favourite segment. Local news that might be censored in China makes its way out in the comments. Wang will discuss issues viewers have raised about mainland China – complaints, for example, that government employees are no longer allowed to go to restaurants in large groups; or that factory workers are being forced to take Breathalyser tests when they get home at night; or that falling real estate prices have wiped out someone’s savings. Some of his listeners will address the US directly. “Introducing a tariff of this size is suicidal!” wrote one viewer. “Is it too simple to blame it on arrogance and wilfulness?”Wang, when he’s interested in a question, will stare into the camera. “You think Trump has thought it through?” he asks. “I don’t think so. Trump is really simple. He doesn’t think very deeply.” Trump’s brain, Wang told me, is a “qian dao hu” – a lake with 1,000 islands, none of them connected.Wang does not sleep much. He starts preparing for the broadcast somewhere between four and five hours in advance. Wang’s first daily broadcast runs from around 11am to noon. He then eats lunch, sleeps if he can, and spends time with his family. Around 6pm, he starts the process again, aiming to go live at 11pm. And then at about 12.30 or 1.00am, he walks across the yard, back to his house, and gets his second, truncated, sleep.Wang has wanted to be a journalist since he was a teenager. He was born to middle class parents in Nanshan County, China, a protrusion of land in the south-west part of Shenzhen. When Wang, in high school, decided he was interested in studying journalism at university, his parents told him they couldn’t support his choice. Wang understood their reservations. “During the Cultural Revolution, the people who were most targeted were writers and journalists. They were afraid I would be denounced.” Wang, however, had a stubborn streak. He stopped speaking at home. “I had a cold war with my parents,” Wang told me. He held out until they agreed.Wang arrived at Jinan University in Guangzhou in the mid 1980s, intending to study journalism, but it wasn’t journalism, exactly, that he learned. “We studied the CCP’s theory of media,” Wang told me. According to the CCP, facts were secondary to the health of the party and the populace. Then, in 1990, Wang managed to land a job as a reporter in Hong Kong, which was still under British rule and enjoyed relatively robust freedom of the press. (Though the British did not extend Hongkongers the right to elect their leader.)View image in fullscreenIn Hong Kong, Wang was suddenly in the privileged position of writing honestly about his new city and the country that he had recently left. Wang won multiple press awards as a young reporter at the daily newspaper Ming Pao and then, in 2001, he joined Sing Tao Daily – the oldest Chinese-language newspaper in the city. By this time, Hong Kong had been transferred to PRC rule and, while Sing Tao operated independently, it had significant ties to Beijing. Wang would eventually oversee the publication’s international expansion efforts, helping establish offices in New York, Toronto and San Francisco. He travelled to all these places but didn’t do much exploring. He was working or meeting Chinese émigrés for dinner. (“You ask me my impression of the United States. I didn’t have a impression! My impression of New York was only: Chinatown.”)Reporters in Hong Kong, at this time, were in a unique position. In authoritarian systems, reliable information has a special value, and Hong Kong journalists were granted some access to PRC officials. “This access made Hong Kong media influential not only among Chinese audiences but also among Chinese officials, who treated Hong Kong media as an alternative source of information,” says Rose Liuqiu, a professor in the Department of Journalism at Hong Kong Baptist University. This was particularly true for journalists covering the economy, Wang’s speciality.This work required diplomacy. Charles Ho, who owned the Sing Tao Daily, maintained close ties with Beijing. He famously said that if he followed Beijing’s directives 100% of the time, he would lose value in Beijing’s eyes. Wang’s own work has always walked a line between attracting viewers, reporting the facts and balancing the concerns of a global power.The precarious balance that sustained Hong Kong’s media did not last. Business ties between Hong Kong’s media outlets and Beijing grew steadily, as did concerns about self-censorship. After democracy protests swept through the city in 2014, prominent editors and journalists became the targets of violent attacks. Jimmy Lai, the founder of Next Media, had his house firebombed more than once. Kevin Lau, the editor of the newspaper Ming Pao, was hospitalised in 2014 after being assaulted in the street with a meat cleaver. In 2016, Wang decided to retire. Beijing was beginning to limit press freedoms in the city and Wang didn’t think the city would recover the openness that had changed his perspective so drastically as a young man.Wang decided to step back from work and, instead, focus on caring for his young daughter, while his wife continued her work in real estate. At the end of 2018, after a visit to his sister-in-law in San Francisco, Wang decided to move his family to the US. He called his wife and told her that he didn’t think there was much future in Hong Kong. His daughter could attend high school in the US, he reasoned. By the time I met him, Wang told me that many of his friends – editors and reporters at news outlets like the now-shuttered Apple Daily – had either fled or were in jail.Wang thought he was done as a news man. But character is sometimes fate, and Wang loves to talk. In 2019, he started holding impromptu gatherings at his sister-in-law’s house on the weekends. At the time, Trump was engaging in the first iteration of a trade war with China and many of their acquaintances in the Bay Area, most of whom worked in the tech industry, wanted to meet and discuss current events. The weekly crowd grew and it was his sister-in-law who suggested that Wang move the conversation online and out of her back yard. By the end of the year, Wang had started his YouTube channel. It was, initially, a chatty, informal programme. And then the pandemic hit, and Wang became a professional again. “All of a sudden it felt serious,” he told me. “I had a responsibility.”It didn’t take long for Wang to acquire an audience, especially after he started broadcasting twice daily. (His is a volume game.) The pandemic was driving people online and China was limiting the flow of information coming out of the cities it had locked down. One regular viewer I spoke with – another government worker in China who asked to remain anonymous – came across Wang around this time, when they were at home during one of China’s restrictive lockdowns. They still listen to his broadcasts daily, looking for news on the economy – still hoping for information that might not be flowing freely from town to town. “During the comments you get a glimpse of what’s happening locally in China,” they told me.Eventually, Wang hired a handful of researchers – some of whom were journalists who had fled Hong Kong after a crackdown in 2019 – paying them from the advertising revenue from his broadcasts. He also started a membership programme and a Patreon and began offering a small selection of goods for sale. The tea he sells through YouTube, he told me, was sourced by a fan. “We don’t make any money on the tea,” he laughed. “I’m the one who buys most of it.”Wang, and the handful of other newscasters like him, are part of an ecosystem of influencers, often called “KOLs” in China for “Knowledge and Opinion Leaders” (an English term that likely originated in Hong Kong). The KOLs compete for attention with western sources – the Joe Rogan and Fox News clips. Most KOLs are apolitical; posting on TikTok or XiaoHongShu about beauty trends or daily life. Within China, many of these influencers are tacitly approved by the CCP. A woman named Li Ziqi, for example, runs the most popular Mandarin-language programme on YouTube and cross-posts on sites in mainland China. Her videos offer an idealised portrait of village life – making traditional crafts while soothing music plays in the background. Political KOLs are less likely to be making video content, and those within China are either pro-CCP or frequently find their accounts blocked. One, who goes by the name Gu Ziming, is famous for managing to pop up with new accounts after having an old one shuttered by censors.View image in fullscreenWhen I visited Wang, it was Friday evening. His researchers – who also wished to remain anonymous – had submitted the evening’s potential topics via a shared Google document. They laughed about Trump’s negotiation strategies (“No one trusts him!”) and speculated as to why a large job recruitment platform in Shanghai had stopped reporting salaries (“It means they’re scared to issue the report”). They moved topics up and down the list, in the order that Wang would plan to address them. In some cases, Wang questioned the news that they brought to him and urged them to seek out more sources.The proposed topics included elections in South Korea; a systemwide shutdown on San Francisco Bart trains; and a Texas ban on Chinese nationals buying property. “Have those Chinese living in Texas done nothing?” Wang asked. “No resistance or protest?”“I think there were protests before,” came the researcher’s voice through the phone. “But it turns out they’re giving exemptions to some people, but otherwise you have to have a green card.”“That’s fine, then,” Wang answered. “Don’t go to Texas to buy a house, then. The housing prices are falling in Texas anyway. This is a very red state. I can clearly see the momentum of this state.” The topic made the broadcast.Years ago, when I first started reporting on the media landscape in China, I thought of it as a foil to the more raucous and open media environment in the west. Now it feels more like a funhouse mirror – a different, exaggerated version of something fundamentally the same. Chinese readers have long approached their news sources with cynicism. In the US and most of the west, media sources are, for the most part, still free and unrestricted. Facts, on the other hand, are increasingly under attack.According to the researcher Wang Yaqiu, there is a division she sees in the US and China. Those who have political power, money, or enough education or energy, will do their best to seek out reliable information. This was true when Wang Jian began his career in Hong Kong, when Communist party officials looked to Hong Kong media as a reliable source. It is true now, when reliable information often comes at a cost – to unlock paywalled information, or to get a VPN to evade the great firewall. Wang’s programme is free to watch, but accessing it takes knowledge, desire and knowhow. Good information, and the ability to find it, Wang Yaqiu pointed out, is more and more a matter of privilege and money – and this is true on both sides of the Pacific. “The rest of us,” she said, “will all be swimming in the same trash.”Wang doesn’t get asked, often, what to do about the authoritarian creep he is commenting on in the US. He has been in this position nearly his entire life – reporting from Hong Kong as its democratic freedoms were eroded, and now the US. He enjoys enough of a distance to look at things from a bird’s-eye view, able to see events as funny and alarming. He has, at the same time, a truculent, slightly traditionalist, belief in the value of the news. After a lifetime patrolling the boundary between truth and nonsense, Wang believes that people build their realities based on what is available to them: their lived experiences, their teachers, the media they consume. They are reasonable. They just need access to reliable information.In recent months, as political violence and censorship in the US have grown, his references to the value of journalism have multiplied. When Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September, he gave a rapid, dispassionate explanation of Kirk’s record. “Kirk pushed forward conservativism and Christian nationalism,” Wang informed his viewers. “He denied the efficacy of vaccines. After Kirk’s death, Trump ordered all the flags fly half-mast.” The next day, Wang made a fresh argument for his line of work. “Media’s role is helping everyone regulate power,” he told his audience. “China castrated the media.” A few days later, he returned to the question. “How do you change your destiny?” he asked. “You change your destiny with knowledge. How do you gain knowledge?” Wang continued. “You read the news.”Wang issues warnings, but his work is fundamentally hopeful. He often returns to his own experience arriving in Hong Kong. He walked the streets, looked at the buildings, and marvelled at the fact that he could just go and look up who owned them. That had not been possible back home. He read old copies of Life magazine and began questioning the Communist party’s version of history. It was an epiphany. “My mission is to provide everyone with an opportunity to change their view of the world,” Wang told me, as he transitioned from tea to coffee. “This is the value of this programme. You need to know that this world is made up of countless puzzles. This, what is happening in the US, is one of them.”On the night I visited, Wang wrapped up around 1am. He thanked his audience. He sighed, momentarily letting his exhaustion slip through. He asked for upvotes and follows. “Join us as a member and help support us,” he said. And then he closed with his regular signoff. “Broadcast better,” he said. “Be better.” More

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      Peter Thiel’s off-the-record antichrist lectures reveal more about him than Armageddon

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      Peter Thiel famously isn’t into academia. And yet, in four recent off-the-record lectures on the antichrist in San Francisco, the billionaire venture capitalist has made a good case for credentialing.In these meandering talks, Thiel is clearly aiming for the kind of syncretic thinking he so relished in the books and lectures of the philosopher and professor René Girard, whom he knew at Stanford University and whose work he has long admired. Unfortunately, more often than not, Thiel ends up with something that reads like Dan Brown.Thiel has previously workshopped his talks on Armageddon at Oxford and Harvard, at various theology departments, and with a few unfortunate podcasters. For a man so vocal in his disdain of our institutions of higher education, he seems to spend an awful lot of time in them.Overall, the picture of Thiel that emerges in these lectures is someone desperately trying to disidentify from their own power. “You realize,” he tells his audience when interpreting a particular Japanese manga, “in my interpretation … who runs the world is something like the antichrist.” Here’s a man who, together with a couple of fellow Silicon Valley freaks, helped return a sundowning caudillo to a presidency he is obviously unsuited for, and who uses the awesome might of the US government to remake society and the world. A man who funds the companies that harness your data and determine who gets doxed, deported, drone struck. Who funds far-right movements that seek to remake the very face of liberal democracy.Immanentizing the KatechonTo be fair, Thiel has blazed a successful path outside of the ivory tower. Ungodly rich by age 30, the founder and investor has since spread the gospel of not going to college. He believes that higher education is a bubble. In his first book, co-authored with his Sancho Panza, David Sacks, he attacked US universities as bastions of diversity group-think, with slipping standards. He has evidently stuck to this diagnosis, even though admissions rates, scholarly output and Nobel prize recognition would seem to contradict it. To Thiel, even then, Jerusalem was definitely not build’d here, among these dark Satanic diploma mills.In September, Falter in Austria published a long profile about the theologian Wolfgang Palaver, who is one of those academics Thiel used as beta testers on his antichrist material. Palaver says it makes sense to him that Thiel is seeking out academics: “It’s really difficult in his environment: who tells him the truth to his face?”There is something deeply funny imagining a rapt audience, cowed by Thiel’s legend and wealth, following the billionaire into the autodidact’s private cosmos, in lectures whose bullet points were certainly more robust at the start of lecture one than at the close of lecture three. Thiel is lost in a bizarre thicket of his own references and preoccupations. You picture the theological faculty at the University of Innsbruck sitting politely through disquisitions about the manga One Piece, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, or gripes with specific effective altruists in Silicon Valley. In one lecture, Thiel identifies “the legionnaires of the antichrist”, such as the researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky and former Oxford professor Nick Bostrom. In another, he considers Bill Gates as an antichrist candidate. With enemies like these, who needs friends?But such is Thiel’s odd relationship to academia. For someone who dislikes universities and researchers, he has a hard time staying away. Thiel, who received a bachelor’s degree from Stanford in 1989 and a JD from Stanford Law School in 1992, was deeply impressed with the thinking of Girard, his Stanford professor. He has spent decades promoting Girard’s “mimetic theory”, including attributing his famous investment in Facebook to “betting on mimesis”. His current “Whore of Babylon” tour started with a presentation at a Paris conference devoted to Girard’s work.Thiel clearly admired Girard not just for his arguments but for his style of argumentation. These lectures don’t so much feel inspired by Girard’s ideas. They feel like his attempt to do Girard.Mimetic style over substanceGirard’s books were breathtaking in their range. They were deeply eclectic, but managed to be a mad dash through the western canon. The connections the philosopher made could seem to come out of left field, but at times the absurd swerves were held together by the sheer force of his erudition. Most importantly, Girard was always having a conversation all his own: his work could look like theology, but it wasn’t ultimately that religious; his work could look like philosophy, but wasn’t really in dialogue with academic philosophy. In San Francisco, Thiel appeared to be cosplaying this kind of performance.One of the things he replicates is the airtight and airless insularity of Girard’s thought. Thiel seems to take on board objections only to then barrel ahead with his initial instinct. Palaver is quoted in Falter as saying that he is “no longer the professor, and he’s no longer the graduate student”. It’s a funny remark because watching Thiel take feedback makes him seem exactly like a graduate student about to crash out of his comprehensive exam.In his telling, Thiel is already a part of an intellectual community. He loves telling his audience what he “always” says, he refers to standard answers and even a “spiel” that he gives. He seems a little bored with himself. Based at least on the recording, the actual audience in San Francisco seemed puzzled by Thiel’s disquisitions.Like his inspiration Girard, Thiel is prone to speaking in absolutes that, in order to make any sense at all, have to be quite a bit less than absolute. “In all times and all places, people want to always scapegoat the Christian God for our problems,” he said in his second lecture. Big if true, as they say.What is Thiel actually arguing? He suggests that we live in an age obsessed with apocalyptic thinking (keep that “we” in mind, it’ll become important later). “It’s AI, of course, it’s climate change, bioweapons, nuclear war,” “maybe fertility collapse”, he says.His overall point is that the current fixation on the apocalypse gets it wrong in two different directions: we’re too apocalyptic and “not apocalyptic enough”. Not apocalyptic enough because we tend to think of the various plausibly forecast ends of days as mutually exclusive: either climate change will get us, or nuclear war. The antichrist is Thiel’s attempt to think about the end of the world holistically.But we’re also too apocalyptic: in each lecture, Thiel comes back to the idea that “the Antichrist will come to power by talking about Armageddon nonstop.” Or, as he puts it in the second lecture, “the Antichrist might present himself or itself or herself as the Katechon”, meaning that withholding element that forestalls the apocalypse. This lecture is more or less a gloss on Carl Schmitt’s assertion in Nomos of the Earth, that the Katechon was what allowed for the identification of Christianity with the Roman empire. The doubleness of Thiel’s apocalypse – that what halts the apocalypse might in fact bring about the apocalypse – allows the billionaire to tilt boldly at any number of big questions: empire, Christianity, progress, and Silicon Valley’s dominance. Each of these, to Thiel, is ambiguous, might stymie or accelerate Armageddon.Warring with windmills, confusion and contradictionSo who or what is the antichrist? Thiel is admirably and uncharacteristically specific on this matter in a scattershot sort of way. The antichrist wants to erect a one-world state, which largely seems to mean any kind of global regulatory regime. Longtime Thiel watchers will recall his preoccupation with sovereignty and seasteading. The antichrist appears to be any force opposing that. The antichrist also is people who are against AI, especially those who seek to regulate it. If you were hoping for Al Pacino chewing scenery, this might be a bit of a letdown. It does lead, however, to the insight that the antichrist is “someone like Greta”, as in Thunberg, the climate activist, but “not Andreessen”, as in Marc, the venture capitalist.“I think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because, you know, the antichrist is popular.” Respect where it’s due: that is a good line.But let me return to Thiel’s list of possible apocalypses: artificial intelligence, climate change, bioweapons, nuclear war, fertility collapse. The list is unintentionally revealing. Thiel is probably not wrong to say that people are pretty worried about the climate crisis. But the examples of AI, bioweapons and fertility collapse in particular suggest that Thiel has confused the world’s worries for those of a very recherché set of aging tech entrepreneurs he hobnobs with. And the antichrist, too, seems very Silicon Valley-coded. This suggests, I think, that in Thiel’s mind there are two cosmic forces warring over creation itself, and they both consist of Peter and his friends.Thiel thinks that by both increasing knowledge and particularizing knowledge, modernity has made thinking of the totality more difficult. He has observed there is “this sort of incredible fragmentation of knowledge”. We do more science than ever but without true insight. In the “post-modern multiversity”, “science continues to grow like a colony of rabbits”, but since the inputs, in terms of people, degrees awarded, investment, etc, keep increasing, “you have to suspect that there are diminishing returns,” he says.So for those playing along at home: Thiel is both a “classical liberal” who just thinks in terms of inputs and outputs and wants the university to be as efficient as it can possibly be. And he is a fire-breathing theologian who thinks that the university is failing at its job of considering the totality, venerating at the altar of hyperspecialization and postmodern deathworks. He is the libertarian offended at researchers “stealing money” and “not doing anything”, he says in one lecture. And he is the campus critic he was during his Stanford days, the one who refers to former Harvard University president Claudine Gay as “the DEI person”.How any of that mishmash fits together isn’t as important as why it goes together: it serves as a justification for Thiel’s own autodidactism.What does it all mean? Anything?It’s important to note that he holds himself to a vastly different standard than just about anyone else: he thinks just raising some questions about the antichrist might be useful in its own right – which may be true for all I know. But then he wants to quantify what everyone else contributes to knowledge in a way I can only describe as Doge-like. It would be difficult to count the monetary value of theorizing about Armageddon, as he is doing while pontificating about the cost-ineffective academic from the other side of his mouth. The rules appear to be different for Thiel, at least in his own mind. And such is Thiel’s odd relationship to power.One is reminded of the scene in Apocalypse Now where Martin Sheen’s character comes across a platoon and asks who’s in charge here. “Ain’t you?” Ain’t you running the world, Peter? If it isn’t you, who is?If we want to look at Thiel as something he can’t seem to see himself as – as, in the end, a pretty standard specimen of homo siliconvalliensis – then what is interesting in these lectures is not the amateurish breadth and ambition. It’s the narrowness. Thiel’s vision of the antichrist may not be holistic enough. In the first lecture, where Thiel proposes that the catastrophes we see in the various end-of-days narratives in the Bible are threatening to play out literally in our day. He says we shouldn’t think of “the apocalyptic prophecies in the Bible … in a mystical way”, but almost as “rational scientific calculations of what people will be able to do to themselves in a world in which human nature is not changed or improved”.But that is surely not what Revelation is about: the end of days in the Bible is in there because it attests to a view of the cosmos, its alpha and omega, its entire meaningful constitution. Otherwise, it is just a bunch of trumpets and locusts and people who give suspiciously good speeches. In the end, it isn’t clear how meaningful these four lectures make the antichrist or indeed the apocalypse.It’s not even clear how they make meaning. During the Q&A after the second lecture, someone in the audience asked Thiel whether he was moving away from his erstwhile teacher Girard – which is the central question, though perhaps not for the reason the questioner thinks. It gets at what Thiel is aiming at with these lectures. Perhaps some of their surface strangeness is explained by the fact that Thiel is ultimately engaging in some kind of Girardian play with doubles, mirrors and imitation. Not least among those would be the fact that the description he gives of the antichrist might also apply to one Peter Thiel.So maybe getting stuck on the details means we are missing the hidden, esoteric meaning within? But in that case, what’s the point of these lectures? As he warns in his third lecture, “excessive esotericism means you don’t really think coherently enough about your ideas; they get lost and you communicate them too subtly”. It feels like Thiel is keeping both options open. He gets to tap dance between “I said what I said” and “you don’t understand what I’m doing here”. 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      Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist

      by

      Peter Thiel, the billionaire political svengali and tech investor, is worried about the antichrist. It could be the US. It could be Greta Thunberg.Over the past month, Thiel has hosted a series of four lectures on the downtown waterfront of San Francisco philosophizing about who the antichrist could be and warning that Armageddon is coming. Thiel, who describes himself as a “small-o orthodox Christian”, believes the harbinger of the end of the world could already be in our midst and that things such as international agencies, environmentalism and guardrails on technology could quicken its rise. It is a remarkable discursion that reveals the preoccupations of one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley and the US.“A basic definition of the antichrist: some people think of it as a type of very bad person. Sometimes it’s used more generally as a spiritual descriptor of the forces of evil,” Thiel said, kicking off his first lecture. “What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic interpretation of antichrist: an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times.”Thiel was on the forefront of conservative politics long before the rest of Silicon Valley took a rightward turn with Donald Trump’s second term as president. He’s had close ties to Trump for nearly a decade, is credited with catapulting JD Vance into the office of vice-president, and is bankrolling Republicans’ 2026 midterm campaigns. Making his early fortune as a co-founder of PayPal, he has personally contributed to Facebook as its first outside investor, as well as to SpaceX, OpenAI and more through his investment firm, Founders Fund. Palantir, which he co-founded, has won government contracts worth billions to create software for the Pentagon, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and the National Health Service in the UK. Now, with more attention and political pull than ever, the billionaire is looking to spread his message about the antichrist, though he is better known for his savvy politics and investments than his contributions to theology.“I’m a libertarian, or a classical liberal, who deviates in one minor detail, where I’m worried about the antichrist,” Thiel said during his third lecture.The meandering gospel of PeterThiel’s talks, which began on 15 September and ended on Monday, were long and sweeping, mingling biblical passages, recent history and philosophy and sometimes deviating into conspiracy theories. He peppered them with references to video games and TV shows along with musings on JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. He likewise recalled conversations with Elon Musk and Benjamin Netanyahu and spoke at length about how he thinks Bill Gates is “a very, very awful person”.Tickets for the series went for $200, selling out within hours. Attenders were told that the lectures were strictly off the record and that they were forbidden from taking photos, videos or audio recordings. At least one person who took notes and published them had his ticket revoked by a post on X.Guardian reporters did not attend the lectures or agree to the off-the-record stipulation. Recordings were provided by an attender who gave them on the condition of anonymity.When reached for comment, Thiel’s spokesperson, Jeremiah Hall, did not dispute the veracity of the material given to the Guardian. Hall did correct a piece of the Guardian’s transcription and clarified an argument made by Thiel about Jews and the antichrist.The Silicon Valley heavyweight drew on a wide swath of religious thinkers, including the French-American theorist René Girard, whom Thiel knew at Stanford University, and the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, whose work he said helped create the core of his own beliefs. He credited the English Catholic theologian John Henry Newman as the inspiration for his four-part series, saying: “Newman did four, so I’m doing four. I’m happy about it.”The venture capitalist has hosted and attended events and lectured on the topic for decades, going back to the 1990s, according to a report by Wired. In recent months, he has spoken to theologians and podcasters about the antichrist both publicly and in private. His beliefs are diffuse, meandering and often confusing, but one tenet he’s steadfastly maintained over the years is that the unification of the world under one global state is essentially identical to the antichrist. In his talks, he uses the term “antichrist” almost interchangeably with “one-world state”.“One world or not, in a sense is the same as the question antichrist or Armageddon. So in one sense, it’s completely the same question,” he said.His version of history, and its potential end, posits technology as a central driver of societal change and takes a Christianity-focused, Eurocentric view that declines to engage much with other religious movements or parts of the world.On the day of Thiel’s final lecture in San Francisco, as the mostly young and mostly male crowd lined up to get in, a group of about 20 protesters stood out front holding anti-Palantir and anti-Ice signs that said things such as “Predatory tech”, “We do not profit from people who profit from misery” and “Not today Satan”.View image in fullscreenA trio of self-described “satanists” dressed in black costumes with goth makeup walked up and down the line of attenders carrying a goblet of red liquid with a small plastic replica of a bone. “Will you bring our dark lord Peter Thiel this baby’s blood?” they asked. Then they performed what they called a “dark ritual”, dancing slowly in a circle to Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, which ended with them writhing on the city sidewalk, and yelling: “Take us to your personal hell … Thank you for being our dark lord.”What do Thiel’s lectures say?The Guardian is publishing substantial quoted passages alongside contextual annotations so that the public may be informed on what an influential figure in politics and technology was saying behind closed doors.He believes the Armageddon will be ushered in by an antichrist-type figure who cultivates a fear of existential threats such as climate change, AI and nuclear war to amass inordinate power. The idea is this figure will convince people to do everything they can to avoid something like a third world war, including accepting a one-world order charged with protecting everyone from the apocalypse that implements a complete restriction of technological progress. In his mind, this is already happening. Thiel said that international financial bodies, which make it more difficult for people to shelter their wealth in tax havens, are one sign the antichrist may be amassing power and hastening Armageddon, saying: “It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money.”
      It’s because the antichrist talks about Armageddon nonstop. We’re all scared to death that we’re sleepwalking into Armageddon. And then because we know world war three will be an unjust war, that pushes us. We’re going hard towards peace at any price.
      What I worry about in that sort of situation is you don’t think too hard about the details of the peace and it becomes much more likely that you get an unjust peace. This is, by the way, the slogan of the antichrist: 1 Thessalonians 5:3. It’s peace and safety, sort of the unjust peace.
      Let me conclude on this choice of antichrist or Armageddon. And again, in some ways the stagnation and the existential risks are complementary, not contradictory. The existential risk pushes us towards stagnation and distracts us from it.
      How does Thiel think Armageddon will happen?Thiel rarely gives a definitive answer about who exactly the antichrist might be or how Armageddon might come about – a central point across his lectures is that nothing is written in stone or inevitable – but he does give the contours of what a global conflict that could lead to Armageddon might look like.
      There’s all sorts of different ways, one world or none, antichrist or Armageddon, that I’m tempted to think about this, and here’s one sort of application. In terms of how does one think about the current geopolitical moment. How does one think about the nature of the conflict between the United States and China, the west and China. You don’t really know how it’s going to go. You can ask, are we heading for world war three or cold war two? And if you sort of reflect on the history of the two world wars and the first cold war. But first, if there ever was an unjust war, world war one is an unjust war. If there ever was a just war, world war two was probably a just war, with certain caveats. World war one is really insane. World war two was about as justified as a war can be. I think we can say that if you had an all-out world war three or war between nuclear powers involving nuclear weapons, it would simply be an unjust war. A total catastrophe, possibly literal Armageddon, the end of the world. So world war three will be an unjust war. But then if you have a cold war, you have to distinguish between – can you have a just peace and an unjust peace?
      Somehow, it’s very strange how the first cold war from ‘49 to ‘89 ended. But it ended with roughly what I think of as a just peace, where somehow you didn’t have a nuclear war. And somehow our side, which I think was more the good side, basically won. And you ended up not with a perfect peace, but more or less a just peace. And so if we have world war three, it will be an unjust war. If we have cold war two, maybe it can end in a just peace or an unjust peace. Reflecting on this material and thinking about it, it’s obviously not written in stone and there’s a lot of different ways this stuff can go. But I keep thinking that, if you had to put odds on it, aren’t the odds that we’re trending towards the fourth quadrant this time. The fourth possibility that cold war two will end an unjust peace.
      Thiel devotes a large section of his second lecture to a quote from the Book of Daniel that involves a prophecy about the end times, which he equates to modern advances in technology and globalization.
      Let’s go on to ‘many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased.’ It means science progressing, technology improving, globalization, people traveling around the world. Of course in some sense, I think these things … I’m not sure they’re completely inevitable, but there is some direction to it. Where there’s a linear progression of knowledge and something like globalization that happens. But of course, the details matter a lot. Knowledge increasing, science progressing, technology improving can be a very good thing. No disease, death, protect people from natural disasters. Then, of course, we can destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons, bioweapons, etc. And similarly, globalization is … you have trade in goods and services. There’s certain ways to escape from tyrannical governments. And of course there is danger in the one-world state of the antichrist.
      As the antichrist is synonymous with a one-world state for Thiel, he also believes that international bodies including the United Nations and the international criminal court (ICC) hasten the coming of Armageddon. Throughout his lectures, he warns of what he sees as the danger of these bodies and the harms they have already caused. In the following quotes, he’s lamenting the actions of the ICC:
      They’ve started arresting more and more people. Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, was arrested this year. They had arrest warrants out for Netanyahu and Gallant.
      When I met Netanyahu early in 2024, about a year and a half ago, we talked about what he’s doing in Gaza, and the one-liner he had was: ‘I can’t just Dresdenize Gaza – you can’t just firebomb them.’ So it’s like, come on, ‘I’m less of a war criminal than Winston Churchill. Why am I in so much trouble?’
      During a Q&A portion of one of the lectures, an attender asked specifically about Thiel’s thoughts on abolishing the ICC, saying: “If we get rid of the ICC or other organizations that exist to bring, in theory, justice, how can we right crimes? Should we not have prosecuted Nazi criminals?” Thiel responded:
      I think there was certainly a lot of different perspectives on what should be done with the Nuremberg trials. It was sort of the US that pushed for the Nuremberg trials. The Soviet Union just wanted to have show trials. I think Churchill just wanted summary executions of 50,000 top Nazis without a trial. And I don’t like the Soviet approach, but I wonder if the Churchill one would have actually been healthier than the American one.
      Who could be Thiel’s antichrist?Thiel believes that the antichrist would be a single evil tyrant. He mentions several figures he believes are particularly dangerous and, while he never definitively says who the antichrist is, he makes suggestions about how some people could be antichrist-type figures.
      A basic definition of the antichrist. Some people think of it as a type of very bad person. Sometimes it’s used more generally as a spiritual descriptor of the forces of evil. What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic interpretation of antichrist: an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times.
      Specifically, he suggests the antichrist would be a “luddite who wants to stop all science”, referencing Thunberg, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Marc Andreessen.
      My thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the antichrist would have been a Dr Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science. In the 21st century, the antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer.
      It’s not Andreessen, by the way. I think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because you know, the antichrist is popular. I’m trying to say some good things about Andreessen here, come on.
      During a question-and-answer session, Thiel was asked to respond to a quote from fellow investor Andreessen – a name he audibly bristled at. He said Andreessen was engaged in hyperbole and “gobbledygook propaganda” when it comes to the promises of AI.
      Where should I start? I’m tempted to be triggered in some nasty ad hominem argument, but I can’t resist so I’ll do that. I don’t know, this is just pure Silicon Valley gobbledygook propaganda. I wouldn’t give someone who said things like that too much money to invest.
      Later, he returns to these “legionnaires of the antichrist”.
      In late modernity, where science has become scary and apocalyptic, and the legionnaires of the antichrist like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom and Greta Thunberg argue for world government to stop science, the antichrist has somehow become anti-science.
      Gates, the philanthropist and co-founder of Microsoft, is high on the list of people Thiel does not like.
      One of my friends was telling me that I should not pass up on the opportunity to tell those people in San Francisco that Bill Gates is the antichrist. I will concede that he is certainly a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-type character. The public Mr Rogers, the neighborhood character. I saw the Mr Hyde version about a year ago, where it was just a nonstop, Tourette’s, yelling swear words, almost incomprehensible what was going on.
      Ultimately, Thiel concedes Gates cannot be the antichrist, bringing up the topic more than once:
      He’s not a political leader, he’s not broadly popular, and again, perhaps to Gates’s credit, he’s still stuck in the 18th century alongside people like Richard Dawkins who believe that science and atheism are compatible.
      I don’t think even someone like Bill Gates, who I think is a very, very awful person, is remotely able to be the antichrist.
      Pope Benedict XVI is someone who Thiel admired because he was one of the few popes who referenced the possibility of an antichrist:
      The tl;dr: my belief is that Benedict literally thought that the historic falling away from the church during his papacy was a sign of the end times.
      However, Thiel said Benedict failed at spreading the message of the antichrist because he “was not very courageous”.
      I often like to say libertarianism and marijuana are both gateway drugs to alt-right, other ideas. The danger of the red pill is you move on the black pill. And somehow Benedict overdosed on red pills.
      Musk, a longtime friend and ally of Thiel, came up during one of the lectures in the context of the Giving Pledge, a pact Gates founded in 2010 where billionaires pledged to donate the majority of their money to philanthropy. Here is Thiel recapping the conversation:
      If I had to pick a little bit on Elon – and I’m going to pick on him because I think of him as one of the smarter, more thoughtful people …
      This is a conversation I had with him a few months ago, and it was like: ‘I want you to unsign that silly Giving Pledge you signed back in 2012, where you promised to give away half your money. You have, like, $400bn. Yes, you gave $200m to Mr Trump, but $200bn – if you’re not careful – is going to leftwing non-profits that will be chosen by Bill Gates.’
      And then I – one step ahead – rethought it and said: ‘You don’t think about this much because you don’t expect to die anytime soon, but you’re 54 years old. I looked up the actuarial tables: at 54, you have a 0.7% chance of dying in the next year. And 0.7% of $200bn is $1.4bn – about seven times what you gave to Trump. So Mr Gates is effectively expecting $1.4bn from you in the next year.’
      And to his credit, Elon was, well, pretty fluid on it. He said: ‘Actually, I think the odds of me dying are higher than 70 basis points.’ A shocking explosion of self-awareness. Then: ‘What am I supposed to do – give it to my children? I certainly can’t give it to my trans daughter; that would be bad. You know, it would be much worse to give it to Bill Gates.’
      When asked about the slain far-right commentator Charlie Kirk’s memorial in reference to the role of Christianity in American politics, Thiel initially demurred saying it was “above his pay grade”. When further prompted, he described what he saw as two versions of Christianity on display at the event:
      I think, um – what to say – I was thinking about, you know, I had the chart: the katechon pagan Christianity versus the eschaton – the Christianity of Constantine versus that of Mother Teresa. We had an illustration of that with Kirk’s wife saying that she forgave the murderers because that’s what Christ would do. This was an incredibly saintly form of Christianity. And then, you know, President Trump – I don’t know, I forget the language exactly – but, you know, Charlie was into forgiving, being nice to his enemies. He doesn’t believe in being nice to his enemies; he wants to hurt his enemies. And that’s sort of the pagan Christian view. And the problem – the naive view – is: there has to be something somewhere in between, right? But how do you concretize that? What’s the thing that’s in between Mother Teresa and Constantine – between forgiving the murderer and delighting in punishing your enemies?
      Perhaps, I don’t know, perhaps the in-between thing I thought was that maybe Trump and Elon were able to forgive each other.
      Thiel argues that, in order for the antichrist to be able to pull off the Armageddon in one lifetime, they need to be young today – he points to 33 as an auspicious number. In these quotes, he draws parallels to powerful figures who died at the age of 33, including Jesus, Buddha and some literary characters:skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion
      Christ only lived to age 33 and became history’s greatest man. The antichrist has to somehow outdo this. I don’t want to be way too literal on the 33 number – I’d rather stress the antichrist will be a youthful conqueror; maybe in our gerontocracy, 66 is the new 33. But something like these numbers do occur almost mystically through a number of different contexts.
      Buddha begins his travels at age 30 and experiences Nirvana, ego death, at age 33. But I had to be ecumenical and say something nice about Islam. One idea that’s pretty cool is, when you’re reborn into your afterlife, you’re born into your 33-year-old self. Your 33-year-old self is your best self. Livy’s – the Roman historian’s 33rd chapter of the 33rd book – it announces this 33-year-old conqueror. It’s like Alexander at the peak of his power. Or even in Tolkien, the hobbits have a coming-of-age ceremony at 33. That’s how old Frodo is when he inherits the ring.
      By the same token, people who are older cannot be Thiel’s antichrist. Here Thiel gives some examples:
      Trajan, a Roman emperor, wept when he reached the Persian Gulf in AD115 at the age of 65. He’s too old to beat Alexander the Great’s achievements in India. He died two years later. Hitler is 50 by the time world war two starts – he mimetically loses to Napoleon, who’s only 30 when he became first consul of the French Republic. That goes on to the same problem for a seventysomething Xi Jinping. Racist, sexist, nationalist, maybe the second coming of Hitler. But not even the second coming of Genghis Khan. Past the sell-by date.
      He frequently oscillates between talking about the antichrist and the katechon – a term very briefly used in the Bible that refers to something holding back the coming of the antichrist. In one example, he describes a post-cold war shift to embracing neoliberalism and bureaucracy as an example of antichrist-like government.
      Of course, you have all these examples where it’s one toggle switch from katechon to the antichristic thing. Claudius to Nero, Charlemagne to Napoleon, anti-communism after the Berlin Wall comes down, it gets replaced by neoliberalism. Which is, you know, the Bush 41 new world order, which you can think of as anti-communism where there’s no communists left. Or Christian democracy, which is sort of the European form of the katechontic, transnational anti-communism. Once the communists are gone, it sort of decays into the Brussels bureaucracy. All kinds of different riffs one could do with this. Or to go even further, if something is not powerful enough to potentially become the antichrist, it probably isn’t that good as a katechon.
      In his last lecture, Thiel also responds during the Q&A portion to a question about potential 2028 presidential candidates and whether they are antichrist or katechon. When asked about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Thiel says that he worries about there being a “woke American pope”– Pope Leo XIV – and a “woke American president”, creating a “Caesar-Papist fusion”. He goes on to talk about Ocasio-Cortez in relation to Thunberg:
      One of the ways these things always get reported is, I denounce Greta as an antichrist. And I want to be very clear: Greta is, I mean she’s maybe sort of a type or a shadow of an antichrist of a sort that would be tempting. But I don’t want to flatter her too much. So with Greta, you shouldn’t take her as the antichrist for sure. With AOC, you can choose whether or not you want to believe this disclaimer that I just gave.
      What does he say about Trump and politics?Thiel is asked several times about Trump and how he fits into his imagination of what form Armageddon might take. In one instance, he is asked whether Trump’s opposition to global governance makes Thiel feel any relief about the hastening of a one-world order.
      At the very best, you shouldn’t have even the most fanatical Trump supporter. You know, no politician, not even Reagan, will solve all problems for all time. Maybe we both were sort of delusional about Reagan in the 80s. There was some moment in the 1980s when we thought that Reagan had permanently solved the deepest problems in the world for all time. And that’s too high a bar. That was too high a bar for Reagan. That’s an unfairly high bar you’re giving to Mr Trump. You’re just trying to make a subtle anti-Trump argument and I’m not going to let you do that.
      One of Thiel’s longstanding political affiliations has been anti-communism, and in his fourth lecture, he suggests that opposition to communism following the second world war is something that held back the antichrist. At other times, he is critical of post-cold war presidents and government order.
      I always sort of wonder what functions as the katechon in the world after 1945. This is Schmitt’s 1947 diary. ‘I believe in the katechons, for me the only possible way to understand Christian history and find it meaningful. The katechon needs to named for every epoch for the past 1948 years.’ The way I interpret this is that sotto voce, Schmitt is saying he has no idea what the katechon is. And maybe, the New Dealers are running the whole planet. Then of course, 1949 the Soviets get the bomb, and my sort of provisional answer is that the katechon for 40 years, from ’49 to ’89, is anti-communism. Which is in some ways is somewhat violent, not purely Christian but very, very powerful.
      I’ve argued that the katechon, or something like this, is necessary but not sufficient. And I want to finish by stressing where one goes wrong with it. If we forget its essential role, which is to restrain the antichrist, the antichrist might even present himself or itself or herself as the katechon, or hijack the katechon. This is almost a memetic version. A similarity between the antichrist and the katechon, they’re both sort of political figures. The katechon is tied in with empire and politics. If the antichrist is going to take over the world, you need something very powerful to stop it.
      Thiel also opines on modern-day Russia and offers his views on Vladimir Putin:
      In some sense, there are perhaps two candidates for the successors to Rome. For all sorts of reasons, I don’t particularly like the Russian theories of all these ways where you have Putin describing himself as the katechon and the last Christian leader in the world. It’s hard to look into someone’s heart. I always suspect he’s more of a KGB agent than a Christian. And then, of course, to be a katechon, you have to be strong enough to possibly become the antichrist. And Russia is not nearly powerful enough to take over the world. It cannot simply be the katechon or the new Rome.
      Thiel also comments on the relation between Jewish people and the antichrist. He argued against medieval theologians’ idea that the antichrist would be Jewish.
      There’s probably a lot I can say about the relation of the Jews to the antichrist. The philo-semitic rebuttal, just to get it on the table, is that the Jews in the Bible are described as a stubborn and stiff-necked people. Which is mostly a bug, but maybe in the end times, it is a feature because – this is sort of the way [Vladimir] Solovyov phrased it – that they’re too stubborn to accept Christ, they will be too stubborn to be charmed by the antichrist. And so, they become the center of resistance to the antichrist in the Solovyov narrative.
      In response, Thiel’s spokesperson said: “Peter was arguing against medieval, antisemitic theologians who suggested that the antichrist will be Jewish,” citing Solovyov.Thiel’s final lecture dedicates a large portion of its time to talking about empires and what role the US government plays in holding back or advancing the antichrist. He is characteristically noncommittal, describing the country as having characteristics of a one-world government and also being outside it:
      Now this is not meant to be an anti-British or anti-American lecture. It’s just that America is, at this point, the natural candidate for katechon and antichrist, ground zero of the one-world state, ground zero of the resistance to the one-world state. The US world police is the one truly sovereign country. They always say the president is the mayor of the US and the dictator of the world. International law gets defined by the US. That’s sort of Nato’s prime, to see in some ways, coordination of the world’s intelligence agencies.
      Then of course, the global financial architecture we discussed is not really run by shadowy international organizations, it’s basically American. And perhaps always a very important feature is the reserve currency status of the dollar, where it’s sort of the backstop for all the money. The petrodollar regime, there’s sort of crazy ways you have trade deficits, current account deficits, but then in all these ways, the money gets recycled into the US.
      Then of course, there’s sort of a way where from a certain perspective, the US is also the place that’s the most outside the world state. In many ways, it’s probably one of the best tax havens, at least if you’re not a US citizen. And then there are all these ways the US is a kind of ideological superpower. Christian, ultra-Christian, anti-Christian sense, woke Protestant liberation theology, social gospel, social justice. City on a hill, this institution serves as a beacon of light for other nations and honor.
      At another point in his final lecture, he seems to suggest that when things are codified or formalized they tend to lose their power or ability to operate. He selects Guantánamo Bay detention camp as an example:
      By 2005 in Guantánamo, you were way better off as a Muslim terrorist in Guantánamo, the liberal lawyers had taken it over by 2005, than as a suspected cop killer in Manhattan. In Manhattan if you were a suspected cop killer back in 2005, you know, there was some informal process they had for dealing with you. Guantánamo, it was formalized. Initially, they did some bad things and then very quickly, they weren’t able to do anything, any more. And this is again a sort of revelatory unraveling process.
      During the Q&A section, Peter Robinson talks about John Henry Newman’s description of the antichrist promising people things like civil liberty and equality. “He offers you baits to tempt you,” Robinson said, quoting Newman. Then, Robinson says to Thiel: “The antichrist is a really cool, glamorous hip operator. Is that Zohran Mamdani?” Thiel doesn’t directly answer the question, but does offer his take on the young, progressive mayoral candidate:
      I don’t think Mamdani can be president because he’s not a natural-born citizen. So he’s capped out at mayor. I also don’t think he’s really promised to reduce my taxes.
      In his final lecture, Thiel was asked to comment on various potential 2028 presidential candidates and whether they’d be more of an antichrist figure or a katechon.Thiel says he is “very pro-JD Vance”. But he has some concerns about his allegiance to the pope.
      “The place that I would worry about is that he’s too close to the pope. And so we have all these reports of fights between him and the pope. I hope there are a lot more. It’s the Caesar-Papist fusion that I always worry about. By the way, I’ve given him this feedback over time. And you know with the sort of … I don’t like his popeism, but there’s sort of a way if I steel manned it. It’s always, you have to think about whether if you say you’re doing something good, whether it’s a command, a standard or a limit, or whether in philosophical language, is it necessary or sufficient. And so when JD Vance said that he was praying for Pope Francis’s health, it’s as a command, as a necessary thing. OK, that’s … if you’re a lot more if you’re a good Catholic. But what I hope it really means is that it’s sufficient, and that he’s setting a good example for conservative Catholics like you, Peter, who listen to the pope too much. And perhaps all you have to do to be a really good Catholic is pray for the pope. You don’t really need to listen to him on anything else. And if that’s what JD Vance is doing, that’s really good. I’m worried about the Caesar-Papist fusion.
      Thiel also spoke about San Francisco and his views on Gavin Newsom, the California governor.
      ​​I would say that if we go to the katechontic thing and the US is that, tech and politics are radically separate, Silicon Valley is really, really separate from DC in an extreme way. If these things could be fused, … someone like that perhaps represents a way to do that. That’s the part where, if there was a way to … you know, he was the governor of California, he was the mayor of San Francisco. In a way, San Francisco is more important than California. The world city is more important than just this sort of silly province called California. And if you could fuse Washington and San Francisco, that’s a very dangerous thing. It’s kind of, it’s sort of in a way the last precedent where such a fusion of sorts happened. I think it was FDR with New York and DC. So that’s the piece that would be tricky.
      And you know, by the way, these things have been very, very unfused historically. Back in 2008, one of my liberal friends was trying to get 75 tech-type people to endorse Obama and they got like 68, 69 and thought maybe they could get me. I told them, man, if there are only six or seven, you want to be in the minority. It’s more valuable to be one of the seven than one of the 68. And then his counterpoint was, well, you know, we need to all get on board with Obama because he’s going to win and then we’ll have an influence. And then, the really crazy … and then in a way, Obama … if you think about the primary in 2008, the Democratic primary, Obama had the students, the minorities, the young people. Hillary was the finance world in New York, the unions. Hollywood was sort of split 50/50 between Obama and Hillary.
      But Silicon Valley was the one sector of the economy that went all in for Obama. But it didn’t work at all. And then if you fast forward to the Obama cabinet, there were zero people from Silicon Valley. There was no representation at all. And so, even Obama was very far from anything resembling a fusion. And then the question is whether Newsom will be like that or different.
      Why is he fixated on stagnation?Chief among Thiel’s concerns about how quickly the world is hurtling toward an Armageddon is what he describes as a stagnation or slowing down of technological and scientific progress. He attributes part of that to the use of science and technology – once largely seen as a force for good, in his telling – for harm.The creation of the gun and the machine gun “wounded our faith in science and tech”, he said. “And then the atom bomb somehow blew it up entirely. And in some sense in 1945, science and tech became apocalyptic. It left us with a question.” This fear of tech is what the antichrist will seize on to gain power, he says.During the Q&A portion of the first lecture, Thiel is asked about how artificial intelligence (AI) – the much-hyped darling of his fellow Silicon Valley investors – fits into this larger narrative of technological stagnation. Thiel said AI was a symptom of the larger tech stagnation and that people including Andreessen needed to boost its promises because there’s nothing else going on.
      If we’re going to not have this sort of crazed corporate utopianism versus effective altruist luddism, luddite thing. If you try to have some more nuanced version of this, you try to quantify it. How big is the AI revolution? How much is it going to add to GDP? Add to living standards? Things like that. My placeholder is, it’s looking probably on roughly the scale of the internet from 1990 to the late 90s. Maybe it can add 1% a year to GDP. There are big error bars around that. And I think the internet was quite significant. People talked about the internet in very similar terms in 1999. That’s another way where it sounds like roughly the right scale.
      The place where it’s very different, where it feels both true of the internet and maybe it’s true of AI, maybe a place where I would agree with Andreessen. The negative part of the statement is: ‘But for AI, nothing else is going on.’ He’s not talking about going to Mars, so it doesn’t sound like he believes Elon’s about to go to Mars. I think there’s a negative part, if AI was not happening, wow, we are really stuck. Things are really stagnant. And maybe that’s why people have to be so excited about this one specific vector of technological progress. Because outside of that, to a first approximation, things are totally, totally stagnant. Maybe even the internet has run out of steam but for AI. So that’s another framing. Now, the thing that strikes me is very different from ’99, if I had to give a difference, again I’m too anchored and rooted in the late 90s. But the late 90s, it was broadly optimistic. And there were a lot of people who thought about it just like Andreessen does. Nobody feels that personally. You can’t start a dotcom company from your basement in Sacramento. You can’t start an AI company, you have to do it in San Francisco. You have to do it in Silicon Valley. It has to be at an enormous scale. Most things aren’t big enough. And then there are layers and layers and layers where it feels incredibly non-inclusive. Maybe people just updated from the internet because maybe the internet turned out to have a lot of winner-take-all dynamics.
      In one of the lectures, Thiel plays a video of a 60 Minutes segment about a German law that cracks down on online hate speech. He’s trying to show an example of where tech regulation goes too far – hence giving power to the antichrist:
      This kind of video is ridiculous but, of course, indicative of this larger trend. There is this crazy judge in Brazil who is arresting everybody. Australia has more or less ended internet anonymity with age verification required for all social media. The UK is arresting 30 people a day for offensive speech. I’m sort of always in favor of maximal free speech, but my one concrete test is whether I can talk about the antichrist. If I can’t, that’s too restrictive.
      In his fourth lecture, he also suggests that his beliefs about the end of the world informed his own work in tech at companies such as PayPal:
      I was working at PayPal at the time trying to build the technology to evade these policies of the world’s powers and principalities. So it was natural to think about the antichrist in the context of the world of financial architecture. I’ll still defend PayPal as more good than bad.
      References to pop culture and literatureThiel peppered his lectures with references to pop culture, calling out YouTube influencers like MrBeast and throwing out terms like “libtard” – a rightwing slur for people with progressive political views. Sometimes these references pertained to the antichrist; at other times, Thiel was just giving his views on politics, modern society and Silicon Valley, like here:
      The Succession TV show about the Murdochs is unthinkably retro in Silicon Valley. Only a 20th-century media company could be handed off to someone’s children. If you think about the tech companies, I don’t know, would anybody name a company after themselves? The last tech person who did this was, I think, Dell in the mid-1980s. This is like if you’re a retro Republican from Texas. It is so unthinkable to do this.
      In his second lecture, Thiel also explores the idea of the antichrist through four works of literature – Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Alan Moore’s Watchmen graphic novel and Eiichiro Oda’s manga series One Piece. Thiel states that identifying the antichrist is possibly “hard to do in the present and always sort of controversial”, but that “you at least identify the antichrist in literature”.He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war:
      The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work.
      Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.
      In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.
      Thiel, along with a researcher and writer at Thiel Capital, explored these ideas at greater length in an essay for the religious journal First Things earlier this month.Do Thiel’s arguments make sense?In a word, no. For one representative example, look to his muddled, contradictory summation of who the antichrist may be:
      There is a way to think that the antichrist represents the end of philosophy – culmination, termination. He is the individual who gets rid of all individuals; the philosopher who ends all philosophers; the Caesar who ends all rulers; the person who understands all secrets. How is this possible in late modernity, where we don’t believe a philosopher-king, tyrant or ruler can come to power? More

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      in US Politics

      A critique of pure stupidity: understanding Trump 2.0

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      The first and second Trump administrations have provoked markedly different critical reactions. The shock of 2016 and its aftermath saw a wave of liberal anxiety about the fate of objective knowledge, not only in the US but also in Britain, where the Brexit referendum that year had been won by a campaign that misrepresented key facts and figures. A rich lexicon soon arose to describe this epistemic breakdown. Oxford Dictionaries declared “post-truth” their 2016 word of the year; Merriam-Webster’s was “surreal”. The scourge of “fake news”, pumped out by online bots and Russian troll farms, suggested that the authority of professional journalism had been fatally damaged by the rise of social media. And when presidential counsellor Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts” a few days after Trump’s inauguration in early 2017, the mendacity of the incoming administration appeared to be all but official.The truth panic had the unwelcome side-effect of emboldening those it sought to oppose. “Fake” was one of Trump’s favourite slap-downs, especially to news outlets that reported unwelcome facts about him and his associates. A booming Maga media further amplified the president’s lies and denials. The tools of liberal expertise appeared powerless to hold such brazen duplicity to account. A touchstone of the moment was the German-born writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt, who observed in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism that “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … no longer exists”.In 2025, the denunciations have a different flavour. To many of us, the central problem is that we live not so much in a time of lies as one of stupidity. This diagnosis has credibility across the political spectrum. In January, the centrist columnist David Brooks wrote a column for the New York Times titled “The Six Principles of Stupidity”. The new administration, he wrote, was “behaving in a way that ignores the question: What would happen next?”In March, Hillary Clinton – not, perhaps, ideal counsel – weighed in with an op-ed in the same paper, with the headline: “How Much Dumber Will This Get?” “It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me,” Clinton wrote, “it’s the stupidity.” And in April, the Marxist writer and intellectual Richard Seymour posted an essay on “Stupidity as Historical Force”. In place of Arendt, Seymour quoted Trotsky: “When the political curve goes down, stupidity dominates social thinking” – once the forces of reaction predominate, so reason gives way to insults and prejudice.Trump’s lying is no less constant or blatant than in 2016, but by now it feels familiar, already priced in. What more is there to say about the “war on truth” a decade into Trump’s political career?Still, at least two aspects of his second administration are newly and undoubtedly “stupid”. One is shambolic incompetence of a degree that led the editor of the Atlantic magazine to be accidentally added to a Signal group chat about US military operations, a group whose other members included the vice-president and the secretary of defence. A second is its incomprehensible determination to press ahead with policies – such as tariffs and the defunding of medical research – that will do deep harm without any apparent gain, even for Trump’s backers and clients, still less his voters.The spectacle of a prominent vaccine sceptic and wellness crank as secretary of health and human services goes beyond an abandonment of truth; it feels like an assault on human progress. Bans on fluoride in tap water, passed by legislators in Utah and Florida at Robert F Kennedy Jr’s behest, mark a new hostility to the very idea of evidence-based government. The escalation from Trump One to Trump Two has seen irrationality spread from the deliberative public sphere to flood the veins of government.When we interpret the actions of others, a basic principle is to assume that people have reasons for behaving as they do, even if those reasons may be emotional, shortsighted or cynical. In the wake of the group chat fiasco and the tariffs upheaval, social media posters made a kind of parlour game of cramming the Trump administration’s actions into their favoured explanatory paradigm. Signalgate must have been deliberate; tariffs must be a grand plan to crash the dollar in the interest of one economic faction or another. The risk is that ever-more elaborate explanations for stupid actions end up wrongly according those actions a kind of intelligence – rather confirming the insight of the political scientist Robyn Marasco that “conspiracy theory is a love affair with power that poses as its critique”.Such speculations are often met with a retort that leans even harder into the stupidity allegation. No, Trump and his people are not playing four-dimensional chess, the response goes – we are simply witnessing the consequences of allowing a deranged man into the highest office, backed by a coterie of dim and unqualified cronies. When political sociology falls short, medical psychiatry and an unspoken social Darwinism fill the void.Not for the first time, the early months of the second Trump administration drew comparisons to Mike Judge’s 2006 movie Idiocracy, in which a soldier of average intelligence wakes up 500 years into the future to discover a US governed by idiocy. Culturally, technologically and ecologically, the depiction feels grimly prophetic. Waste and pollution are out of control. The president is a TV celebrity with the manner and style of a pro-wrestling star. Doctors have been replaced by clunky diagnostic machines. Consumers sit in front of screens flooded with ads and slogans that they repeat like memes. When the soldier advises people to stop trying to irrigate their failing crops using a Gatorade-like drink and to use water instead, they swiftly abandon this practical suggestion when the drink manufacturer’s profits collapse. “Do you really want to live in a world where you’re trying to blow up the one person who is trying to help you?” the soldier asks in desperation, after people turn on him. And, yes, it turns out they do.View image in fullscreenWe might recognise stupefying consumerism and profit maximisation as symptoms of our own age of idiocy, but the premise of Judge’s satire is a politically ugly one. The reason the US has descended into this abyss over the centuries is that smart people (depicted as neurotic professionals) have stopped reproducing, while dumb people (depicted as violent trailer-park trash) can’t stop, eventually overwhelming the gene pool with stupidity. At a time when racial eugenics, natalist policy and IQ fixation are ascendant once more, this is scarcely a line of thinking that many liberals or leftists can endorse. Then again, who can be sure that opponents of reactionary “stupidity” don’t sometimes harbour eugenicist fantasies of their own? The aftermath of the Brexit vote – like tariffs, a seemingly senseless act of economic self-harm – witnessed liberal mutterings that typical leave voters were so elderly that by the time Brexit finally came into effect, many had already died.One needn’t indulge in such dark fantasies to hope that official stupidity eventually meets its comeuppance. Surely stupid economic policies must lead to stupid political strategy, resulting in the loss of power. Again, Britain’s recent experience offers a precedent: when the then prime minister, Liz Truss, put her own fiscal dogmas above the judgments of the bond markets in September 2022, she was swiftly ejected from office (with the help of the Bank of England) a mere 49 days after entering it. With Trump, many have looked to the bond markets as the final backstop of intelligence in a stupid world, the power that eventually forces idiots to confront consequences. This works up to a point, especially when financial pain is visited upon corporate executives who have the president’s ear – but it only trims away at the stupidity, warding off its worst excesses. Trump’s lack of basic causal understanding, of how policy A leads to outcome B, is not limited to economic policy, nor to Trump himself.The challenge posed by this political crisis is how to take the stupidity seriously without reducing it to a wholly mental or psychiatric phenomenon. Stupidity can be understood as a problem of social systems rather than individuals, as André Spicer and Mats Alvesson explore in their book The Stupidity Paradox. Stupidity, they write, can become “functional”, a feature of how organisations operate on a daily basis, obstructing ideas and intelligence despite the palpable negative consequences.Yet it’s hard to identify anything functional about Trumpian stupidity, which is less a form of organisational inertia or disarray than a slash-and-burn assault on the very things – universities, public health, market data – that help make the world intelligible. Trumpian stupidity isn’t an emergent side-effect of smart people’s failure to take control; it is imposed and enforced. This needs to be confronted politically and sociologically, without falling into the opposite trap of “sanewashing” or inflating strategic cunning to the point of conspiracy theory.“Since the beginning of this century, the growth of meaninglessness has been accompanied by loss of common sense,” wrote Arendt in 1953. “In many respects, this has appeared simply as an increasing stupidity … Stupidity in the Kantian sense has become the infirmity of everybody, and therefore can no longer be regarded as ‘beyond Remedy’.”Arendt’s argument contained a glimmer of hope. Stupidity on a social scale had to be remediable, if only because it was no longer explicable as a mere cognitive deficiency among individuals. She believed that people – intellectuals as much as “the masses” – had stopped exercising their powers of judgment, preferring to mouth platitudes or simply obey orders, rather than think for themselves. But what are the social and political conditions that normalise this? One is a society where people wait for instruction on how to think, which Arendt saw as a key characteristic of totalitarianism.This social model of stupidity – crystallised in the Orwellian image of brainwashed drones, trained to obey – has a superficial plausibility as a depiction of contemporary authoritarianism, but it misses a critical dimension of liberal societies as they took shape in the late 20th century. Judgment was not replaced by dictatorship, but rather outsourced to impersonal, superintelligent systems of data collection and analysis.Over the middle decades of the 20th century, the neoliberal argument for markets, made most potently by Friedrich Hayek, always emphasised that their primary function was to organise a society’s knowledge. Where markets ran smoothly and prices were set freely, there would be no need for anyone to exercise judgment beyond their own immediate wants, desires and expectations. The “stupid” person has just as much potential to thrive in a neoliberal society as the “smart” person, because the price system will ultimately decide on collective outcomes.In the early 21st century, similar arguments have been made for “big data” by Silicon Valley ideologue and former Wired editor Chris Anderson, and for randomised control trials by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Abhijit Banerjee: that they will happily render the theories, judgments and explanations of human beings – with all their biases and errors – redundant. Once everything is quantified, right down to nanodetails, not even measurement is needed, just algorithmic pattern recognition. You don’t need a concept of “rabbit” to identify the furry thing with big ears; you just design machines to identify which word most commonly appears alongside such an image.View image in fullscreenThus when people look to the bond markets to rescue us from stupidity, they are not expecting the return of “common sense”, but merely that certain behaviours and policies will receive lower scores than others. Similarly, large language models, which promise so much today, do not offer judgment, let alone intelligence, but unrivalled pattern-processing power, based on a vast corpus of precedents. (Large language models such as ChatGPT are intelligent within their own limits, but comically stupid when stretched beyond them. Google’s AI-generated search feature has been asked to explain the meaning of nonsensical made-up idioms – such as “you can’t lick a badger twice” and “erase twice, plank once” – which it confidently proceeded to do, producing torrents of bullshit. Professors will also be familiar with the experience of reading student essays that are neither very good nor very bad, but that uncanny combination of the intelligent and the stupid that is the mark of AI writing.)From the neoliberal critique of planning in the 1970s to Elon Musk’s Doge, political attacks on governmental and professional forms of human authority serve the parallel project of opening space for overarching technologies of quantification, comparison and evaluation. Yet the technological quest to “go meta” on the rest of society, thus reducing the role of human judgment, is not new. In The Human Condition, Arendt identified the launch of Sputnik in 1957 as a historical turning point, offering the possibility of an unworldly perspective on worldly affairs, downgrading the latter in the process. The cold war, which gave birth to the internet and myriad tools of control and surveillance, was a battle to achieve the most complete global viewpoint. No behaviour or movement was deemed irrelevant to uncovering the enemy’s intentions. Musk’s fixation on space (Starlink now has about 8,000 satellites in orbit) is of a piece with his flippant approach to human judgment. Pressed on why he falsely claimed, as a pretext for slashing its budget, that USAID spent $50m on condoms for Gaza, Musk casually responded: “Some of the things I say will be incorrect.”The transition of human activities on to surveillance platforms means that truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, become mere data points of equal value. False information and stupid policies can move markets at least as much as accurate information and smart policies, and so offer equal opportunity to speculators. One morning in April, the S&P 500 jumped 6% after a viral rumour that Trump’s tariff policy was being paused – a rumour the Financial Times traced back to a pseudonymous X user named Walter Bloomberg, based in Switzerland, with no offline credentials whatsoever. A Hayekian might point out that the error was quickly corrected – the market dropped 6% again within the hour – but this was a manifestly stupid turn of events.In a fully platform-based world, everything shrinks to the status of behaviours and patterns; meaning, intention and explanation become irrelevant. One of the most incisive accounts of this tendency in contemporary US politics comes from political scientists Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead, in their analysis of the “new conspiracism”.Classic conspiracy theory (regarding, say, the JFK assassination) rests on an overelaborate theoretical imagination, with complex causal chains, strategies and alliances. Its demands for coherence and meaning are excessive, while its tolerance for contingency is stunted. By contrast, “The new conspiracism dispenses with the burden of explanation. Instead, we have innuendo and verbal gesture … not evidence but repetition … The new conspiracism – all accusation, no evidence – substitutes social validation for scientific validation: if a lot of people are saying it, to use Trump’s signature phrase, then it is true enough.”The new conspiracism has its technological basis in digital platforms and the rise of reactionary influencers and “conspiracy entrepreneurs”. Outlandish and pointless fantasies, such as the conspiracies circulated by QAnon or the alleged staging of the Sandy Hook school shooting, exist to be recited and shared, acting as instruments of online influence and coordination rather than narratives to make sense of the world. They may identify enemies and reinforce prejudices, but they don’t explain anything or provide a political plan. The only injunction of the new conspiracist is that their claims get liked, shared and repeated. Engagement – and revenue – is all.View image in fullscreenThis analysis takes us beyond the 2016-era panic over “truth” to help us chart the current political flood waters of “stupidity”. When Republican politicians go on TV and make absurd claims about tariffs, vaccines or immigration, is it best understood as “lying”, or as something else altogether? Often they are simply repeating lines that have already been circulating, filtering outward from nodes – Trump and RFK Jr especially – in the conspiracist network. Some claims act as loyalty oaths (affirmations that the 2020 election was stolen), but more are just deranged and bizarre, not to mention sick, such as the claim that DEI hiring policies were responsible for the fires that devastated Los Angeles in January, and the fatal aircraft collision that killed 67 people that same month. Taken as judgments or explanations, they raise questions about the cognitive faculties of the speaker, but perhaps they are better seen as memes. The individuals might sound stupid, but they are not the architects of a media sphere in which causal explanation has been sacrificed for symbolic mimicry, to fill time and generate content.In the same essay reflecting on stupidity, Arendt distinguished between “preliminary” and “true” understanding. Because it involves applying existing concepts to particular situations, preliminary understanding has a kind of circularity. It can be clever and correct, but it falls short when confronting the genuine novelty of human actions. One can escape the most brute form of stupidity, yet not truly understand the significance of the political and historical moment. Even the cleverest person or system can get trapped in a “preliminary” understanding of events.Arendt argued that there was a second human faculty, in addition to judgment, that allowed understanding to progress to a truer grasp of meaning: imagination. Imagination, for Arendt, is the uniquely human capacity to grasp truth via speculative leaps, drawing on empathy and creativity in the process, as opposed to scientific methods. Politics requires us to navigate situations which are incomparable and immeasurable, because they are genuinely new. This in turn requires something closer to aesthetic judgment than to scientific judgment.“Imagination alone,” Arendt wrote, “enables us to see things in their proper perspective.” The challenge Arendt poses to us is to think of truth and meaning not from the perspective of the economist, financial analyst, data scientist or sociologist, but of the historian, the kind who sees human events as a series of breaks, anomalies and initiations.This is what the “closed world” of platform and market surveillance can’t provide: a kind of understanding that is not reducible to empirical data. Artificial or market “intelligence” has the capacity to learn at ultra-high speed from existing data, but its range of possible outcomes, while extremely large, is nevertheless enumerable and therefore finite. In the gamified space of such “closed worlds”, history is finished, and all that remains is lots and lots of behaviours. Every conceivable event, utterance or idea is already out there, whether in the real-time computer of the market or the archival one of the data bank, waiting to be discovered.Trump and his administration are undoubtedly stupid. They don’t know what they are doing, don’t understand the precedents or facts involved and lack any curiosity about consequences, human and non-human. The tariffs fiasco has been the greatest fillip to the legitimacy of the economics profession in living memory, showing by a series of brute experimental results that international trade does, on balance, enhance prosperity and efficiency. It turns out that the foundational concepts of macroeconomics do have some empirical grip upon the world after all, and that to ignore them is an act of stupidity. Tragically, a similar process is under way in public health.But if our only alternative to stupidity is to reinstall the “preliminary understanding” of expert orthodoxy (welcome as that might be in some areas), then there will be no reflection on the wider historical conditions of stupidity, nor on the extent of stupid policy and process not only tolerated but valued by contemporary capitalism. The outsourcing of judgment to financial markets, digital platforms and fusions of the two is also an invitation for people to behave stupidly, albeit within systems that are governed by some esoteric form of mathematical reason. It would be absurd to seek hope in Trump and Trumpism, but perhaps stupidity on such a world-historical level can at least offer an opportunity for “true” understanding. Nothing – markets, bots or machines – can rescue us, except our imagination.A longer version of this essay appeared in n+1 magazine More

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      in US Politics

      Murdoch’s TikTok? Trump offers allies another lever of media control

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      Donald Trump revealed last week the US and China are close to inking a deal to let TikTok continue operating in the US. Details are not final, but should the agreement go through as has been reported, the owners of the US’s most powerful cable TV channels may soon also steer the nation’s most influential social network. The arrangement would gift Trump’s billionaire allies a degree of control over US media that would be vast and unprecedented.Here’s what we know. Under the known terms of the deal, which Trump declared has the tentative buy-in of Chinese president Xi Jinping, TikTok in the US would get a new group of US investors, led by the US software giant Oracle, which would license TikTok’s vaunted recommendation algorithm and take over its security.Among the other investors, Trump said in a Fox News interview on Sunday, are media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, the CEO of Fox Corporation. Trump said Michael Dell, the CEO of the computer maker Dell, would also be involved.TikTok would get a new seven-member board of directors, six of them Americans. It is a distinct possibility that Rupert Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance and Larry’s son, will occupy some of those seats.The MurdochsLachlan Murdoch, the 54-year-old son of 94-year-old Rupert, is executive chair and chief executive officer of Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News. The Murdoch scion took control of the company following a September legal settlement with his siblings, one of whom, James, reportedly no longer wants anything to do with his father’s conservative empire. The deal for TikTok will likely involve Fox’s parent company investing, rather than Rupert or Lachlan individually, CNN reported.“I hate to tell you this – a man named Lachlan is involved. You know who Lachlan is? That’s a very unusual name, Lachlan Murdoch,” Trump said. “Rupert is probably gonna be in the group, I think they’re gonna be in the group, a couple of others. Really great people. Very prominent people. And they’re also American patriots, they love this country, so I think they’re gonna do a really good job.”Asserting supervision of TikTok would offer the elder Murdoch a mulligan for his abortive ambitions in tech. News Corp purchased Myspace in 2005 for a then-whopping $580m. Three years later, it peaked, becoming the most-visited site in the US. However, the insurgent social network Facebook soon dethroned it, and Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth today amounts to 10 times that of Rupert Murdoch’s, per Bloomberg’s billionaires index.The EllisonsTrump seems to have a fondness for father-son pairs. At the other end of TikTok’s American boardroom may sit Larry and David Ellison, 81 and 42, the founders of Oracle and Skydance Media, respectively.The elder Ellison is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Oracle, an enterprise software and cloud-computing company worth nearly $900bn. Ellison himself, who holds roughly 40% of Oracle’s shares, briefly dethroned Elon Musk as the richest person in the world after the company reported superlative earnings earlier this month. He’s a longtime Silicon Valley fixture and Trump donor who hosted a fundraiser for the president at his southern California estate in 2020. He’s known for a jet-setting lifestyle of multiple mega-yachts and the deed to almost all of the Hawaiian island of Lanai.The younger Ellison’s company has become an entertainment industry vacuum, sucking up Paramount – which operates CBS, BET, Nickelodeon, Paramount+ and the UK’s Channel 5 and which produces the Mission: Impossible franchise – in August. Hot off the heels of its corporate consummation, Paramount Skydance is now reportedly preparing a majority-cash offer to take over Warner Bros Discovery, owner of CNN, HBO, DC Comics, the Discovery Channel, HGTV and the Food Network, to name a few.In the months leading up to the merger, CBS News made a series of Trump-friendly moves like settling a lawsuit against 60 Minutes, appointing a Trump ally as an ombudsman and courting “anti-woke” former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss as a potential leader of a changed version of the channel. The moves may serve as a roadmap for how David Ellison would helm TikTok.How powerful would they become?The power centralized in the Murdoch and Ellison families would be enormous should the TikTok deal and David Ellison’s purchase of Warner Bros Discovery go through. They would command media outlets that reach both young and old audiences, with high degrees of authority and influence. The only age groups perhaps immune to their sway would be gen X, so suspicious of their parents’ viewing habits, and millennials, just too old for TikTok.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWould this type of consolidation be legal? The Federal Communications Commission’s website is blunt in its anti-monopoly rules when it comes to broadcast television: “FCC rules effectively prohibit a merger between any two of the big four broadcast television networks: ABC, CBS, Fox [Broadcasting Company], and NBC.” The regulation does not pertain to Fox News Channel or CNN, as they require paid subscriptions to view.Still, the rule is instructive. What if the owners of the US’s most powerful cable channels also steer the nation’s most important social network? Would that violate monopoly laws?The answer may lie in a rule change the commission made eight years ago when it eliminated a prohibition on owning both a broadcast station and a daily newspaper in the same region. The reason: “the growth in the number and variety of sources of entertainment, news and information in the modern media marketplace”.If a person can have a town’s TV station and its newspaper, why can’t a billionaire take control of a social network used by hundreds of millions and the president’s favorite channel?Parsing the letter of the FCC’s rules likely does not matter as much as the current currency of high-level US government decisions: Trump’s favor. The president’s takeover of the FCC has already been incredibly successful, establishing a fiat over deals that allows him to pressure networks not under his allies’ control. The supreme court ruled earlier this week that Trump’s firing of the lone Democrat on the commission could stand. Though he denies it, head commissioner Brendan Carr seemed to play a leading role in Disney’s brief suspension of Jimmy Kimmel from ABC’s airwaves with threats against the network.The landscape of American media is looking very red as Trump’s TikTok deal takes shape. The largest owner of local TV stations in the US, Nexstar, declared fealty to Trump with its decision to no longer air Kimmel’s show, as did local TV titan Sinclair. Now two of the nation’s marquee news networks, CBS and CNN, may follow Fox’s rightwing lead. Online, X has turned from a heterogenous feed into a conservative social network. TikTok may go the same way under its Maga-approved board.At the moment, the Murdochs and the Ellisons must be savoring Trump’s favor. More

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      in US Politics

      Starmer and Trump to hold talks as PM warned UK faces ‘huge dilemma’ over relationship with US – UK politics live

      by

      Donald Trump and his wife Melania posed for a photograph with King Charles and Queen Camilla in the grand grand Green Corridor at Windsor Castle before Trump headed to the PM’s country residence Chequers, PA Media reports. PA says:
      The four posed for a joint photograph together in the atmospheric corridor which is lined with gilt edged historic paintings and antique furniture.
      Outside at the sovereign’s entrance, the Kkng said a solo goodbye with Trump shaking his hands warmly and placing his other hand on top. The president said “thank you very much, everybody. He’s a great gentleman and a great King”.
      The Windsor Castle detachment of The King’s Guard turned out in the Quadrangle outside to mark Trump’s departure. Although Melania attended the official parting of ways, she is in fact staying behind to carry out joint engagements, first with Camilla, and then the Princess of Wales.
      She was joining the Queen for a tour of Queen Mary’s Doll’s House and the Royal Library in Windsor Castle.
      President Trump is now leaving Windsor Castle. He will be flying to Chequers by helicopter.Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, has thanked King Charles for what he said at the state banquet last night strongly supporting the Ukrainian cause.In a post on social media, Zelenskyy said:
      I extend my deepest thanks to His Majesty King Charles III @RoyalFamily for his steadfast support. Ukraine greatly values the United Kingdom’s unwavering and principled stance.
      When tyranny threatens Europe once again, we must all hold firm, and Britain continues to lead in defending freedom on many fronts. Together, we have achieved a lot, and with the support of freedom-loving nations—the UK, our European partners, and the US—we continue to defend values and protect lives. We are united in our efforts to make diplomacy work and secure lasting peace for the European continent.
      In his speech Charles said:
      Our countries have the closest defence, security and intelligence relationship ever known. In two world wars, we fought together to defeat the forces of tyranny.
      Today, as tyranny once again threatens Europe, we and our allies stand together in support of Ukraine, to deter aggression and secure peace. And our Aukus submarine partnership, with Australia, sets the benchmark for innovative and vital collaboration.
      Donald Trump is likely to become “much more aggressive” towards Russia in support of Ukraine, one of his allies has claimed.Christopher Ruddy, CEO of Newsmax, a rightwing news organisation in the US, was a guest at the state banquet last night. In an interview with the Today programme, Ruddy, who has been a friend and informal adviser to the president for years, predicted that Trump would soon harden his stance against Russia. He said:
      President Trump is not against Ukraine, like some people might think, and he’s moved a long way in his posture. And I think we’re going to see much more aggressive action in the weeks and months ahead.
      Ruddy conceded that Trump was not in favour of sending US troops into action.
      I think the president is highly reluctant to put troops on the ground. That’s nothing to do with Ukraine. He just doesn’t like American troops put in harm’s way. He doesn’t like physical engagements. He’ll do these kinetic strikes from time to time, you saw that in Iran, but it’s still not really deploying American troops and putting them in a lot of risk.
      Instead, Trump sees this as “an economic battle”, Ruddy said.
      He’s been pushing for [lower oil prices]. He wants sanctions. He wants Nato countries to stop buying Russian oil. So he sees this in economic war, as a businessman.
      Asked about Trump’s views on Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, Ruddy said Trump viewed him as “a bad guy, even though he won’t say that publicly”.Trump thought it was worth trying to win Putin round, Ruddy said. But Trump has now decided that’s “not going to work”, Ruddy claimed.
      Putin hasn’t talked to anyone. He hasn’t talked to any American president – reluctant, won’t do anything. So Trump looks at this and says, let me see if I can be his friend. I’ll reach out. I’ll be overly generous, I’ll be overly kind.
      And he tried that. I think he really honestly thought it was going to work.
      And I think he’s coming to the conclusion that it’s not going to work and that he needs to do [things] and that’s why he’s ramping up talk about tariffs and secondary tariffs on India and China.
      Four men who were arrested after images of Donald Trump with Jeffrey Epstein were projected on to Windsor Castle have been bailed, PA Media reports. PA says:
      A 60-year-old man from East Sussex, a 36-year-old man from London, a 37-year-old man from Kent and a 50-year-old man from London were arrested on suspicion of malicious communications on Tuesday night after the stunt at the Berkshire royal residence, Thames Valley police (TVP) said.
      They were released on conditional bail on Wednesday night until December 12 while inquiries continue, according to the force.
      “Those arrested are being investigated for a number of possible offences including malicious communications and public nuisance,” a spokesperson for TVP said.
      The nine-minute film created by British political campaign group Led By Donkeys went over the history of the US president’s links to Epstein, including the recent release by US legislators of documents said to include a letter from Trump to the paedophile financier to celebrate his 50th birthday.
      The film was projected from a hotel room with a direct view over the castle as an act of “peaceful protest”, a Led By Donkeys spokesperson said on Wednesday.
      “My colleagues were arrested for malicious communications, which seems ridiculous, because we’ve done 25 or 30 projections before, no-one’s ever been arrested,” the spokesperson told PA.
      “So suddenly, because it’s Trump, you get this reaction, which is surprising, disappointing and very heavy-handed from police. I think they’ve been arrested for embarrassing Donald Trump.”
      Back to Nick Clegg (see 8.56am), and this is what the former deputy PM told the Today programme about why he was not over-impressed by the US tech investments in the UK that have been announced alongside the state visit. He said:
      Of course it’s great there’s investment in the UK, and it’s better still that a young, London-based company like Nscale is involved.
      But these really are crumbs from the Silicon Valley table.
      If you consider that the total compute capacity in the UK is estimated to be around 1.8 gigawatts, withI’ve read ambitions to reach six gigawatts by 2030. Well, that is about the same as one single data centre being built by my former employer Meta in Louisiana.
      And so I just think some sort of perspective needs to be applied to all the hype that comes from the government and the tech companies at times like this, especially when we are never going to compete with the Chinese and America on infrastructure. We’re never going to develop our own frontier foundation models – the base layer of the AI industry.
      Where we can complete is how you deploy AI in the workplace innovatively through new applications and so on.
      And, crucially, none of this does anything to deal with our perennial Achilles heel in technology in the United Kingdom, which is we’re a very innovative place, with great entrepreneurs, scientists, people who create new companies. But the moment those companies start developing any momentum, they have to go to Palo Alto, to the VC [venture capital] firms there to get money. They then say, well, you’ve got to move to the West Coast if you’re going to take our money.
      So not only do we import all their technology, we export all our good people and good ideas as well.
      And that’s why I just think it’s worth keeping some of the hyperbole at moments like this in context.
      Clegg says everyone in the UK was using phones designed in America, run with US software and US operating systems, with the data stored on American cloud infrastructure
      I sometimes wonder how we would react as a body politic if all that infrastructure, all of that technology that we depend on for every sort of minute detail of our lives, were produced by the French. I think there’d be absolute uproar from Nigel Farage and others.
      Yet because of the very close partnership we’ve had with the United States, understandably so in the cold war period, I think we’ve been quite relaxed about this very heavy dependency … both in the public and the private sector, on American technology.
      Here is a Guardian explain on what the US-UK tech deal actually involves.Jennifer Rankin is the Guardian’s Brussels correspondent.Keir Starmer’s government is expected to soon begin talks with the EU to negotiate Britain’s entry into the EU’s €150bn (£130bn) defence loans scheme.The negotiations can start because EU member states on Wednesday agreed a negotiating mandate for the European Commission, but must conclude quickly if British companies are to be involved.The scheme, called Security Action for Europe (Safe), provides EU member states with cheap EU-backed loans to finance defence equipment, either for their armies or for Ukraine. The UK is not applying for a loan, but would like the biggest possible role for British companies in winning contacts.The first loans are expected to be disbursed in early 2026, with member states due to submit spending plans to the commission by the end of November.Europe minister Nick Thomas-Symonds made clear the deadline was on his mind when he spoke at a conference in Brussels on Wednesday. Asked by politics professor Anand Menon whether the UK could miss out on the first round, he said:I profoundly hope not … But my sense on this is that you’re absolutely right to emphasise the deadline.The Guardian reported this week that France has called for a 50% ceiling on the value of UK components in projects financed by Safe. The final EU negotiating mandate leaves the point vague, giving EU negotiators flexibility.The EU and UK must also negotiate a British entry fee to cover administrative costs. EU sources have suggested the fee will be linked to the level of British participation.Asked about the French position, Thomas-Symonds said the UK and EU were in a live negotiation, without commenting on details. He said:
      The bigger picture here is the real importance, when we have seen the return of war to our continent, that what we are doing is making sure we don’t fragment European defence production at this moment.
      Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, has been accused of putting lives at risk by the anti-slavery watchdog.Yesterday Mahmood said the use of modern slavery legislation to block deportations of migrants made a “mockery of our laws”. Rajeev Syal and Diane Taylor have the story.Today the independent anti-slavery commissioner Eleanor Lyons condemned the Home Secretary’s comments. She told Radio 4 comment like this “have a real-life impact on victims of exploitation, who may now be more scared to come forward and talk about what’s happened to them”.She went on:
      The Home Office are the deciders in this country on whether someone is a victim of modern slavery. They have the final decision-making.
      Both the House of Commons and the House of Lords select committees have looked at this issue in recent years, and they found there’s no misuse of the system.
      It puts vulnerable lives at risk when the Home Secretary is claiming that is the case.
      The ABC has been barred from attending Donald Trump’s press conference near London this week after a clash between the broadcaster’s Americas editor, John Lyons, and the president in Washington DC over his business dealings, Amanda Meade reports.Good morning. It’s day two of the state visit and, after the pomp, today we’re on to the policy. Donald Trump is leaving Windsor Castle and heading for Chequers where he will have private talks with Keir Starmer before the two leaders hold a press conference.In his speech at the state banquet last night, Trump delivered used some uncharacteristically sophisticated and lovely metaphors to describe the US/UK relationship. He said:
      We’re joined by history and faith, by love and language and by transcendent ties of culture, tradition, ancestry and destiny.
      We’re like two notes in one chord or two verses of the same poem, each beautiful on its own, but really meant to be played together.
      Starmer defends his use of flattery diplomacy with Trump on the grounds that it delivers for Britain and, with No 10 announcing US investments in the UK worth £150bn there is evidence to suggest it’s working.But, to return to Trump’s analogy, there are others who suspect that, if anything is being “played” in all of this, it’s us.On the Today programme this morning Nick Clegg came close to expressing this view. As a former Lib Dem deputy prime minister in the 2010-15 coalition government, and a former president of global affairs at Meta, he is very well placed to comment on the relationship. Clegg told Today that the AI investments being anounced for the UK were “crumbs from the Silicon Valley table”. He said he thought the UK had become over-dependent on American technology. And he went on:
      Because of the very close partnership we’ve had with the United States, understandably so in the cold war period, I think we’ve been quite relaxed about this very heavy dependency … both in the public and the private sector, on American technology.
      I just so happen to believe that is now changing because the rupture – notwithstanding the pomp and ceremony of the state visit by Donald Trump this week – the transatlantic rupture, in my view, is real.
      I think the Americans – and we’ve been on notice for this for ages – are turning their attention to the Pacific. They have much less attachment to the transatlantic relationship.
      So my view is, over time, British governments need to learn to ask themselves different questions to how we can roll out the red carpet to American investment, welcome as that is. We need to ask ourselves questions about how we can develop and grow … our own technology companies to the size the need to be.
      Clegg said the UK faced “a huge dilemma”.
      We’ve got to learn, technologically, as much as in so many other walks of life, to stand more on own two feet, rather than just cling on to Uncle Sam’s coattails.
      While that served us well for a while, I think that’s no longer going to be the paradigm that works for us going forward.
      Today I will be focusing mostly on the Trump visit, although I will cover some other UK politics too. Here is the agenda for the day.10am: Donald Trump leaves Windsor CastleMorning: Melania Trump and Queen Camilla visit Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House in Windsor and Frogmore Gardens10.45am: Trump is due to arrive at Chequers, where he will hold bilateral talks with Keir Starmer. The two leaders are also speaking at an event for business leaders, and viewing items from the Winston Churchill archive at the mansion, the official country residence of the PM. And there will be a parachute display by the Red Devils.Around 2.30pm: Starmer and Trump hold a press conference at Chequers.If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm BST at the moment), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog. More

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      Donald Trump to meet the king as protesters gather in London and Windsor – UK politics live

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      Good morning. Official Britain is laying out the red carpet for Donald Trump today. It is the first full day of his unprecedented state visit, and he will spend it with King Charles at Windsor Castle enjoying the finest pageantry the nation can lay on. Keir Starmer, like other Western leaders, has concluded that the key to getting positive outcomes from Trump is flattery and shameless sucking up, and (not for the first time) the royal family is being deployed to this end.But civic Britain will also have its say on Trump today, and – perhaps mindful of his obsession with big crowds and his (supposed) love for free speech – there will be protests all over the country, with the main one in London. When Mike Pence, Trump’s vice president in the Trump’s first administration, was asked he felt about being booed one night when he attended the theatre, he said that was “the sound of freedom”. Trump’s response to protesters is much darker. But there is almost no chance of his hearing “the sound of freedom” today; his state visit is taking place entirely behind closed doors.I will be focusing largely on the state visit today, but I will be covering non-Trump UK politics too.Here is our overnight story about Trump arriving in the UK.Here is Rafael Behr’s Guardian about the potential flaws in Starmer’s obsequious approach to handling the US president.And here is an Rafael’s conclusion.
      Downing Street denies there is a choice to be made between restored relations with Brussels and Washington, but Trump is a jealous master. Fealty to the super-potentate across the Atlantic is an all-in gamble. There is an opportunity cost in terms of strengthening alliances closer to home, with countries that respect treaties and international rules.
      That tension may be avoided if Trump’s reign turns out to be an aberration. He is old. Maybe a successor, empowered by a moderate Congress, will reverse the US republic’s slide into tyranny. It is possible. But is it the likeliest scenario in a country where political violence is being normalised at an alarming rate? What is the probability of an orderly transfer of power away from a ruling party that unites religious fundamentalists, white supremacists, wild-eyed tech-utopian oligarchs and opportunist kleptocrats who cast all opposition in shades of treason?
      These are not people who humbly surrender power at the ballot box, or even run the risk of fair elections. They are not people on whose values and judgment Britain should be betting its future prosperity or national security.
      Here is the timetable for the day.11.55am: Donald Trump arrives at Windsor Castle by helicopter. His programme than includes a carriage procession through grounds (at 12.10pm), a ceremonial welcome (at 12.20pm), a visit to Royal Collection exhibition (at 2.15pm), a tour of St George’s Chapel (at 3pm) and a beating retreat ceremony and flypast (at 4.20pm).2pm: Anti-Trump speakers address a rally at Portland Place in London, before staging a march to Parliament Square.Evening: Fox News broadcasts an interview with Trump.8.30pm: Trump attends the state banquet at Windsor Castle.If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm BST at the moment), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.As the Guardian reports, the long-coveted deal to slash US steel and aluminium tariffs to zero was shelved on the eve of Donald Trump’s state visit to BritainThe Liberal Democrats say this shows Trump is an unreliable partner. In a statement Daisy Cooper, the Lib Dem deputy leader, said:
      It looks like the government has thrown in the towel instead of fighting to stand up for the UK steel industry.
      We were told US tariffs on UK steel would be lifted completely, now that’s turned out to be yet another promise Trump has reneged on.
      It just shows Trump is an unreliable partner and that rewarding a bully only gets you so far.
      The best way to protect our economy is to stand with our allies in Europe and the Commonwealth and end Trump’s damaging trade war for good.
      A reader asks:
      Why no mention on the political blog of the bill to scrap the 2 child cap which successfully passed the first stage in the House of Commons yesterday?
      Because it was a 10-minute rule bill, from the SNP MP Kirsty Blackman, that won’t be further debated, won’t be voted on, won’t go anywhere, and won’t have any influence on government thinking.There was a vote yesterday under the 10-minute rule procedure, which allows a backbench MP every to propose a bill to the house. Yesterday Blackman proposed the bill, and the Tory MP Peter Bedford argued against it. There was then a vote on whether “leave be given to bring in” the bill and that passed by 89 votes to 79. And that is it. With no further time set aside for Blackman’s bill, it disappears into a parliamentary black hole.Sometimes I cover 10-minute rule proceedings because they can reveal something about how much parliamentary support there is for a particular propostion. But there was quite a lot else on yesterday. And it was Lib Dems, SNP MPs, independents and a few Labour leftwingers voting for the Blackman bill – all people whose supprt for removing the two-child benefit cap is well known.Lucy Powell has hit out at the “sexist” framing of her deputy Labour leadership campaign, with people claiming she and her rival, Bridget Phillipson, are standing as “proxies” for two men, Aletha Adu reports.Most of Donald Trump’s policies horrify progressives and leftwingers in Britain, including Labour party members and supporters, but Keir Starmer has said almost nothing critical about the Trump administration because he has taken a view that maintaining good relations with the White House is in the national interest.In an article in the Guardian today, Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London, has urged Starmer to be more critical. He says:
      I understand the UK government’s position of being pragmatic on the international stage and wanting to maintain a good relationship with the leader of the most powerful country in the world. Faced with a revanchist Russia, Europe’s security feels less certain now than at any time since the second world war. And the threat of even higher US tariffs is ever present.
      But it’s also important to ensure our special relationship includes being open and honest with each other. At times, this means being a critical friend and speaking truth to power – and being clear that we reject the politics of fear and division. Showing President Trump why he must back Ukraine, not Putin. Making the case for taking the climate emergency seriously. Urging the president to stop the tariff wars that are tearing global trade apart. And putting pressure on him to do much more to end Israel’s horrific onslaught on Gaza, as only he has the power to bring Israel’s brazen and repeated violations of international law to an end.
      Khan also says he is in favour of Londoners protesting against Trump to “tell President Trump and his followers that we cannot be divided by those who seek to sow fear.”Khan and Trump have a long history of slagging each other off. (Khan is also a Muslim, who may or may not be relevant to why Trump singles him out for special criticism.)On the Today programme this morning Bryan Lanza, a Trump ally who worked for the president during his first campaign for the White House, was asked if Trump would be bothered by comments like those from Khan. No, was the answer. Lanza explained:
      [Trump] receives enthusiasm everywhere he goes. There’s obviously opposition, but at the end of the day, those who are opposed, they don’t matter.
      The American people are the ones who voted this president in. They validated his vision for the country. And if Europe has a problem with the American people’s vision, that’s Europe’s problem. That’s not President Trump’s problem.
      As for the mayor of London, who cares? I mean, he’s nowhere relevant in any conversation that’s effective to any foreign policy that President Trump’s involved in. He’s just a local mayor. I think he should focus more on traffic, on handling the trash, than trying to elevate himself to the diplomatic stage.
      Amnesty International UK is supporting the anti-Trump protest in London today. Explaining why, its communications director, Kerry Moscogiuri, said:
      As President Trump enjoys his state banquet, children are being starved in Gaza in a US backed genocide. Communities of colour in the US are terrorised by masked ICE agents, survivors of sexual violence, including children, face being criminalised for getting an abortion and polarisation emanates from the White House at every opportunity.
      We’ve watched in despair as rights and freedoms have been stripped away across the US. But here too our protest rights are eroded, millions go without adequate access to food or housing, safe routes for those seeking asylum are shut down and our government is doing nothing meaningful to prevent and punish Israel’s genocide in Gaza. With racist bullies feeling empowered to abuse people on our streets, the grim and nihilistic politics of Trump could be on its way here.
      [The march] is about sending a clear message that the UK does not welcome Trump’s policies with open arms. We reject his anti-human rights agenda. We say not in our name, not on our watch.
      The police may have stopped campaigners projecting the Trump/Epstein picture onto the walls of Windsor Castle (see 9.37am), but this morning it is being driven around the streets of Windsor on the side of an advertisting van.Britain and the US have struck a tech deal that could bring billions of pounds of investment to the UK as President Donald Trump arrived for his second state visit, PA Media reports. PA says:
      Keir Starmer said the agreement represented “a general step change” in Britain’s relationship with the US that would deliver “growth, security and opportunity up and down the country”.
      The “tech prosperity deal”, announced as Trump arrived in the UK last night will see the UK and US co-operate in areas including artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing and nuclear power.
      It comes alongside £31bn of investment in Britain from America’s top technology companies, including £22bn from Microsoft.
      Microsoft’s investment, the largest ever made by the company in the UK, will fund an expansion of Britain’s AI infrastructure, which Labour sees as a key part of its efforts to secure economic growth, and the construction of the country’s largest AI supercomputer.
      Brad Smith, vice chairman and president of the firm, said it had “many conversations” with the UK government, including No 10, “every month”, adding that the investment would have been “inconceivable because of the regulatory climate” in previous years.
      “You don’t spend £22bn unless you have confidence in where the country, the government and the market are all going,” he said. “And this reflects that level of confidence.”
      Microsoft is backing tech firm Nscale to contribute towards developing a major data centre in the UK, which the company said would help build out Britain’s cloud and AI infrastructure.
      Asked how much electricity capacity would be required for the build-out and how this would be supplied, Smith said: “We already have the contracts in place for the power that will be needed for the investments that we’re announcing here.”
      Officials said the investment enabled by the tech partnership could speed up development of new medicines and see collaboration on research in areas such as space exploration and defence.
      Starmer said: “This tech prosperity deal marks a generational step change in our relationship with the US, shaping the futures of millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic, and delivering growth, security and opportunity up and down the country.”
      Here is the government news release about the deal.In the Commons yesterday MPs debated the decision to sack Peter Mandelson as the UK ambassador to Washington last week because new emails revealed that his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the paedophile sex trafficker, was closer than he had previously disclosed. One MP said Donald Trump must think the UK government “complete plonkers” for their handling of this because, by sacking Mandelson, Keir Starmer has put Epstein back at the top of the UK news agenda just ahead of Trump’s arrival. And Trump, of course, is deeply embarrassed about his own past friendship with Epstein.British protesters are doing their best to ensure Trump can’t ignore the story. Four people have been arrested after images ofTrump alongside Epstein were projected on to Windsor Castle last night. Reuters has more here.Starmer is not the only leader Trump will be meeting who has “sacked” a close ally over his Epstein links. King Charles, continuing an approach adopted by his mother, the late Queen, has excluded his brother, Prince Andrew, from playing a role in public life follow the scandal about Andrew’s own links with Epstein.Good morning. Official Britain is laying out the red carpet for Donald Trump today. It is the first full day of his unprecedented state visit, and he will spend it with King Charles at Windsor Castle enjoying the finest pageantry the nation can lay on. Keir Starmer, like other Western leaders, has concluded that the key to getting positive outcomes from Trump is flattery and shameless sucking up, and (not for the first time) the royal family is being deployed to this end.But civic Britain will also have its say on Trump today, and – perhaps mindful of his obsession with big crowds and his (supposed) love for free speech – there will be protests all over the country, with the main one in London. When Mike Pence, Trump’s vice president in the Trump’s first administration, was asked he felt about being booed one night when he attended the theatre, he said that was “the sound of freedom”. Trump’s response to protesters is much darker. But there is almost no chance of his hearing “the sound of freedom” today; his state visit is taking place entirely behind closed doors.I will be focusing largely on the state visit today, but I will be covering non-Trump UK politics too.Here is our overnight story about Trump arriving in the UK.Here is Rafael Behr’s Guardian about the potential flaws in Starmer’s obsequious approach to handling the US president.And here is an Rafael’s conclusion.
      Downing Street denies there is a choice to be made between restored relations with Brussels and Washington, but Trump is a jealous master. Fealty to the super-potentate across the Atlantic is an all-in gamble. There is an opportunity cost in terms of strengthening alliances closer to home, with countries that respect treaties and international rules.
      That tension may be avoided if Trump’s reign turns out to be an aberration. He is old. Maybe a successor, empowered by a moderate Congress, will reverse the US republic’s slide into tyranny. It is possible. But is it the likeliest scenario in a country where political violence is being normalised at an alarming rate? What is the probability of an orderly transfer of power away from a ruling party that unites religious fundamentalists, white supremacists, wild-eyed tech-utopian oligarchs and opportunist kleptocrats who cast all opposition in shades of treason?
      These are not people who humbly surrender power at the ballot box, or even run the risk of fair elections. They are not people on whose values and judgment Britain should be betting its future prosperity or national security.
      Here is the timetable for the day.11.55am: Donald Trump arrives at Windsor Castle by helicopter. His programme than includes a carriage procession through grounds (at 12.10pm), a ceremonial welcome (at 12.20pm), a visit to Royal Collection exhibition (at 2.15pm), a tour of St George’s Chapel (at 3pm) and a beating retreat ceremony and flypast (at 4.20pm).2pm: Anti-Trump speakers address a rally at Portland Place in London, before staging a march to Parliament Square.Evening: Fox News broadcasts an interview with Trump.8.30pm: Trump attends the state banquet at Windsor Castle.If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm BST at the moment), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog. More