Keen On America

“There are ways of being evil that are not fascist, but I don’t think there’s a way of being fascist without being evil.” — Joseph Kelly

INTRO

On yesterday’s show, Anthony Badger, author of Prosperity Road, told the story of America’s transformation into a global superpower between 1920 and 1945. Today is the prequel. Joseph Kelly, author of The Biggest Lie, narrates the story of America between 1818 and 1915. It’s what he calls the “prehistory of American fascism”. There’s no prosperity here. Nor nostalgia. It’s a miserable story.
The “biggest lie”, for Kelly, is the myth of white supremacy. He traces it back to a South Carolina congressman named William Smith who, in 1820, claimed that what the founders had meant by all men are created equal was that all men aren’t created equal. The convenient logic of Southern slave-owners. So America didn’t import fascism from Mussolini or Hitler, Kelly says. It’s actually a made-in-America product, the innovation of Southern racists. Thus the American white supremacist Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race was the book that the pagan Hitler called his “bible”, and Jim Crow became, in all-too-many ways, a model for the Nazis.
“Nostalgia is a way of being modern”, Kelly says. Racialized American fascism took its romantic iconography from the Germanic knights and the Scottish lairds so mocked by Mark Twain. By reaching back into the European Dark Ages, the Confederates imagined they had invented the civilization of the future, one they sought to spread across the Western and Southern Hemispheres. So fascism, for all its fetishization of the volkish nation, is actually an early product of globalization. The biggest lie became the South’s “most successful export” — first shipped to the American North, and later, through Grant and the eugenicists, to Europe. A most unprosperous idea. And, Kelly warns, one that is returning to fashion. The prequel threatens to become the sequel.

FURTHER READING

•   Joseph Kelly, The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818–1915 (Bloomsbury, 21 July 2026). Kelly is professor of English at the College of Charleston and has also written Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin, America’s Longest Siege: Charleston, Slavery, and the Slow March Toward Civil War and Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon; he edits the Seagull Reader anthologies for Norton. Biography.
•   Anthony Badger, Prosperity Road: America, 1920–1945, from Hoover to Roosevelt — yesterday’s episode, and the book Kelly’s argument hands off to. Kelly dates the reversal of the American fascist experiment to 1932; Badger starts there.
•   Jonathan Rauch on Trump and the f word, and his six key moments. His The Constitution of Knowledge is the source of the phrase Kelly uses at 16:16 for the free press, academic tenure and peer review, and a reformed court system — institutions he argues were built in the 1920s and 1930s specifically to fight a politics founded on lying. Note that AK calls him John Rauch twice on the tape; it is Jonathan.
•   Susan Neiman, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era (Norton), and Andrew Curran, Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race, from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson (Other Press) — both previous guests. Curran’s argument that the Enlightenment produced the scientific idea of race is the one AK puts to Kelly at 27:38, and Kelly’s answer inverts it: the culture came first and the science was dressed up afterward.
•   Ida B. Wells is the figure Kelly builds his final chapter around. Her friend Thomas Moss was lynched after the People’s Grocery affair in Memphis in 1892; her editorial saying that white women slept with black men because they wanted to drew a published threat to castrate the editor, whom the white papers assumed was her male business partner. Her paper was the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, not the Free Press as said on the tape.
•   The Charleston insurrection of 1822 is the Denmark Vesey conspiracy; Nat Turner’s rebellion followed in Virginia in 1831. Together, in Kelly’s account, they turned William Smith’s crackpot 1820 speech into the South’s governing narrative.
•   Four things to check against the tape. Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism is usually cited as setting out seven mobilizing passions, not the nine Kelly counts; the two he says did not obtain in the South — the cult leader and the surrender of reason to him — sit in the middle of Paxton’s list rather than at the end. Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” was published in 1946, not 1945. “Seek truth and report it” is the Society of Professional Journalists’ wording, adopted 1996; the 1923 code was the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Canons of Journalism. And at 29:07 Kelly says the first generation told the story “in the nineteen twenties and the nineteen thirties” when he means the 1820s and 1830s — the transcript marks it.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. The summer of 1835. Kelly puts a season on the closing of the Southern mind. After the summer of 1835 you could not stand up in the American South and proclaim that all men are created equal — not and mean it, not and advocate for it. A white person who tried risked violence, risked lynching, and would probably have to live in exile if he got out at all. What follows is almost two generations of white Southerners raised in a one-party state with a tradition of extrajudicial vigilante violence and no free speech, hearing white supremacy from the pulpit, in school and in the newspapers. Mark Twain said he grew up in Missouri and never once heard slavery arraigned by anybody until he left. Historians since the 1970s have called this a Herrenvolk democracy, but Kelly wants the scare quotes: a master-race democracy is a contradiction, because even the master race loses the Bill of Rights. The men who marched off to fight the Union were not lying. They believed it. That is what a lie does once it reaches a certain size.
2. They chose not to look. Asked whether the men who built the lie knew they were lying, Kelly separates the generations. William Smith knew — the founders were still alive and he could have asked them, and would not have liked the answer. But the first American anthropologists were amateurs in the way the first naturalists were amateurs, and their authority came from owning plantations: they were credited because they spent more time around black Americans than the learned societies of Philadelphia did. They took anecdotes and bogus notions, dressed them in scientific language and presented the result to the world as science. Anyone who cared to look hard would hav...

“Hoover is probably the most intelligent president the United States has ever had. That is not necessarily a guarantee of political success.” — Anthony Badger

Given our preoccupation with American decline, it’s nice to sometimes remind ourselves of the reasons for the country’s rise to superpowerdom. Anthony Badger, the former Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge, has dedicated his life to charting the rise of the United States as the world’s leading economic and military power. His new book is Prosperity Road: America, 1920–1945, from Hoover to Roosevelt. There is, thankfully, no mention of Trump or MAGA in it.
Badger’s interest in the United States came through Huey Long, who he read about as a schoolboy in gray nineteen-fifties Britain. What intrigued him was not Long’s showmanship but his delivery. Plenty of Southern populists made grand promises. But the Kingfish actually delivered on some.
In Prosperity Road, Badger reminds us of America’s astonishing domestic transformation in the first half of the 20th century. In 1920, he notes, most Americans’ entire experience of the federal government was the mailman and the occasional man in uniform, and almost nobody paid income tax. By 1945, all Americans had a social security number, worked under the Wagner Act or drew a price support, and lived within sight of a public works project. And they came to trust it. By 1958 some 73 percent told pollsters Washington could be relied on to do the right thing. That trust, Badger dryly notes, is not something that would go on forever.
On Herbert Hoover, Badger is a revisionist without being excessively sentimental. The most intelligent president America has ever had, he says of the Stanford-educated engineer. But, like Jimmy Carter, Hoover was a technocrat with little political touch and an excessively thin skin. Not exactly Huey Long.
Oddly enough, he is less effusive about Roosevelt. Badger describes him as no intellectual, an actor, a patrician who somehow persuaded working Americans he was on their side. “He’s the first president who understands that my boss is a son of a bitch,” Badger quotes a textile worker on FDR.
I asked what we, in 2026, should make of all this. Hoover and FDR were serious people, Badger notes. And they both had a concept of public service that has proved very difficult to recreate in recent years. That said, he reminds us that the New Deal grew out of the near collapse of the country in 1932. So perhaps Prosperity Road hasn’t quite run out of asphalt. Although Anthony Badger is certainly less optimistic about the United States than he was when he fell under the spell of the Kingfish seventy years ago.

FURTHER READING

•   Anthony J. Badger, Prosperity Road: America, 1920–1945, from Hoover to Roosevelt (Harper, 13 October 2026). Kirkus review. Note that Badger has reused his own title: his first book, in 1980, was Prosperity Road: The New Deal, Tobacco, and North Carolina — so a search on the title alone will return the wrong book.
•   Badger was Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge from 1992 to 2014 and Master of Clare College from 2003 to 2014; he has been a professor at Northumbria since. Read at Sidney Sussex, took his doctorate at Hull in 1974. His Cambridge faculty page. The book on race AK raises at 44:00 is Why White Liberals Fail: Race and Southern Politics from FDR to Trump (2022); he has also written The New Deal: The Depression Years, FDR: The First Hundred Days and Albert Gore, Sr.: A Political Life.
•   Huey Long, the figure who drew Badger into American history, was shot at the Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge in September 1935 and died two days later — the building AK mentions visiting.
•   Greg Steinmetz on Roosevelt’s pursuit of Andrew Mellon through the Internal Revenue Service, which Badger calls one of the low points of the administration — that episode. His book is The President and the Oligarch: Roosevelt, Mellon, and the Triumph of Big Government.
•   The two episodes AK opens on: Janet Reitman on The Inheritance: An American Tragedy in Five Acts, and Eliot Cohen on The Strategist.
•   Three details worth checking against the tape. J. Edgar Hoover became director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924; the Bureau was founded in 1908 and renamed the FBI in 1935. The trust figure Badger attributes to Pew comes from the American National Election Studies, which recorded 73 percent in 1958; Pew publishes the series but did not conduct those early surveys. And the “unsordid act” description of Lend-Lease is Churchill’s.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. They had been friends, and then there was the business with the crutches. Badger reconstructs the Hoover–Roosevelt feud as a personal story before it is ever a political one. The two lived near each other in Washington during the First World War and were close enough that Roosevelt praised Hoover privately and publicly, when Hoover was the star of American politics — the humanitarian who fed Belgium, the self-made millionaire engineer who looked like the man of the future. Then the snubs. Hoover denied the president-elect Secret Service protection on leaving office, and at a White House reception Roosevelt was made to stand in a very uncomfortable position while on crutches. Both men were thin-skinned; Hoover, Badger says, was particularly thin-skinned, and he answered the Democrats’ Depression attacks with real anger.
2. The line past which activism became fascism. The most interesting thing about Hoover is not that he did nothing but that he believed in activist government up to a point and could never explain where the point was. Past it, in his own word, intervention became fascistic — and nobody except Hoover was able to locate the line, which is why he looked to contemporaries like a man refusing to act. Badger’s counterfactual is the generous one: had Hoover served the two terms he fully expected, we would remember a reforming president who made government more efficient and the relationship between government and industry more rational. Instead he arrived at the one moment when things went badly, and discovered he could not bear people doubting his sincerity.
3. The welfare state was built by the people Roosevelt hired. Asked who actually built it, Badger does not say Roosevelt. He says Frances Perkins, and adds that it is very difficult to think about the American welfare state without noticing that the experts were women. Social Security brought almost no immediate benefit to anyone, and he finds it remarkable that they were willing to t...

“Nobody in the United States wants to call it that. But I write history, and I know what a coup d’état looks like.” — John Ralston Saul

As the leaves turn, it’s becoming Canada week. Yesterday we had the Newfoundland-based Paris Marx offering an incisive critique of American Big Tech. Today, it’s my old Canadian friend, John Ralston Saul — novelist, essayist, former president of PEN International — speaking to us from the top floor of his house in an autumnal Toronto.
Like another frequent Canadian guest, Stephen Marche, Saul offers a sharp critique of the United States which, he reminds us, is a geographically smaller country than Canada. Not that size matters, of course.
Saul thinks of America as Rome. Canada’s great achievement, he says, is surviving as Rome’s neighbor for over two hundred years. In contrast with Chile, Mexico or Guatemala, Canada hasn’t been invaded or subverted by its clumsy imperial neighbor. When America sneezes, the rest of the continent gets pneumonia. Except Canada. Even in autumn.
Is Trump an aberration? Not according to Saul who offers Grover Cleveland as the 19th century DJT. Like Stephen Marche, Saul thinks there will be a civil war in the United States within twenty-five years. But he doubts it will be a repeat of the 19th century Civil War of Shermanesque armies against armies. More likely a continuing breakdown of the legal system, and of the willingness of individuals, states and the federal government to obey the law. More like the chaos of Caligula than Caesar vs Pompey.
On the tariffs Saul is cheerful. Canada sent half its goods south before the 1988 free trade deal and three quarters after it, he reminds us. So Trump’s tariffs have frightened the Canadian provinces into dismantling the trade barriers they kept against each other. Duh.
“We thank him for his stupidity,” Saul says of Grover Trump.
John Ralston Saul once wrote a book about Canada entitled A Fair Country. So I suggest a book about America should be called An Unfair Country. He laughs. He’d call it The Great Drama. With perhaps the subtitle: Not As Big As Canada.

FURTHER READING

•   John Ralston Saul writes at his Substack, including the piece in French on a post-Trump America that AK raises at 05:11. He co-founded and co-chairs the Institute for Canadian Citizenship — the organization behind inclusion.ca — with Adrienne Clarkson, and served as International President of PEN from 2009 to 2015, the first Canadian elected to the role.
•   The books AK asks about: Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West was published in 1992, not 1993, and The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World in 2005, not 2018. A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada followed in 2008. Full bibliography.
•   Chrystia Freeland’s Unreliable Boyfriend (Simon & Schuster, June 2026), the account of Canada–US relations AK quotes twice. The phrase has a history: a British MP used it about Mark Carney when he governed the Bank of England.
•   Stephen Marche on the possibility of civil war — his episode of this show. His book is The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future (2022); the phrase AK reaches for at the top is the title of the episode rather than the book.
•   Kurt Andersen on whether America should break up — that episode. His novel is The Breakup (Penguin Random House, 2026).
•   On Canada and Europe at 33:13: France’s foreign minister raised the possibility of eventual Canadian membership in March 2026, and an associate-member arrangement has since been floated. Saul thinks full membership is neither likely nor desirable, and expects a negotiated special relationship instead.
•   Andy Burnham became British prime minister in July 2026, which is the context for the exchange at 36:02 about the UK drifting back toward Europe.
•   Two numbers worth checking against the tape: Saul gives the EU’s population as 500 million, where it is closer to 450 million, and places Baffin Island as the next island over from Greenland. The narrowest crossing is actually Nares Strait, between Greenland and Ellesmere Island, about 26 kilometres across; Baffin lies farther south across Baffin Bay. Neither alters his argument.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. He is sitting where Lester Pearson’s bed used to be. Asked why Carney can take on Trump when other leaders cannot, Saul reaches back to the last prime minister he thinks comparable, and the answer turns out to be literal: Pearson rented the floor of the Toronto house Saul now works in, as a newly married young professor. The parallel is that both arrived with international standing already earned — Pearson the Nobel for Suez before he ever won an election, Carney the Bank of England through a crisis. Pearson had a lisp, wore bow ties, looked professorial, and was, in Saul’s phrase, tough as they come and a great drinker. He also brought in Medicare, which Saul makes concrete: a bone marrow transplant, five weeks in a private room, zero dollars and zero forms.
2. Canada never had its civil war, and he thinks he knows why. He calls Canada the oldest continuous democratic federation in the world, running from 1848 without the internal bloodletting that the United States, Latin America, France, Germany, Italy and Spain all went through. His explanation is not national virtue but national calculation: Canadians understood that if they indulged in that kind of violence, the only beneficiary would be the country across the border, because it would leave them weakened. Survival produced restraint. It is the sharpest thing he says about his own country, and it sits directly against his forecast for America.
3. A generation of Canadian executives were trained as branch managers. The part of the tariff story that is harder than tariffs. For a hundred and fifty years, he says, Canada worked at counterbalance — markets and relationships elsewhere so that no single partner could dictate terms. Canada was a serious player in Asia in the 1920s and 1930s. That habit was abandoned after 1988, and what replaced it was a business class that became, in effect, subsidiary management: people whose professional question was always what the Americans are doing. Opening doors in Europe and India is the prime minister’s work, and Saul is blunt that the executives who have to walk through them are the wrong people. His prescription is almost quaint: we have...

“The only reason to write history is because it helps us in the present. It’s not a vegetable. It’s not good for you.” — Katy Siegel

INTRO

It’s been three months since America’s 250th, although I’m guessing few are nostalgic for those official MAGA celebrations. That said, nostalgia is a feature rather than a bug of these types of anniversaries in America. Take, for example, What Was America? by Katy Siegel and Elise Armani, a new book about the art, culture and politics of the Bicentennial era. Siegel and Armani are nostalgic for nostalgia. We don’t do anniversaries as we used to, they worry.
What Was America? opens with the African-American artist Benny Andrews, who feared exclusion from the Bicentennial celebrations and responded with a feverish six years of monumental paintings. Then there are the Bicentennial quilts which Siegel and Armani see as a metaphor for a nation whose strength has always lain in its diversity. Both leftist women in Northern California and the Daughters of the American Revolution quilted the Bicentennial. 1976, then, was a genuinely national celebration.
So how will we look back at this year’s celebrations in 2076 when America celebrates its 300th birthday? The final chapter in What Was America? is on how people in 1976 imagined the America to come. School kids predicted no pens and lessons taught by computers. One person worried there would still be no woman president. Nobody predicted President Donald Trump.
“It’s tough to make predictions,” Yogi Berra said, “especially about the future.” Where have you gone, Yogi Berra? Now, I’m getting nostalgic for nostalgia.

FURTHER READING

•   Katy Siegel and Elise Armani, What Was America? Art, Culture, and Politics in the Bicentennial Era (Yale University Press, October 2026). Siegel’s essay in Artforum on what the bicentennial tells us about the art world that followed is the short version of the argument.
•   Benny Andrews, who opens the book — his biography and chronology. The Bicentennial Series ran 1970 to 1975, one monumental painting a year. He also founded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in his studio in January 1969, which protested the Metropolitan Museum’s Harlem on My Mind for planning an exhibition about Harlem without Harlem, and he served as Director of the Visual Arts Program at the NEA from 1982 to 1984 — the governmental role Armani refers to at 11:53.
•   Stanley Forman’s photograph, discussed at 29:09 — what happened that day on Boston City Hall Plaza, 5 April 1976. The man with the flag was Joseph Rakes; the man being attacked was the lawyer and later academic Ted Landsmark. The book Siegel mentions is Louis P. Masur’s The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America — published in 2008 rather than recently.
•   The Ant Farm Collective, whose attempts to imagine the future close the book — their work and chronology, including Media Burn and the Cadillac Ranch.
•   On the NEA’s growth under Nixon at 08:33: the chair who actually drove it was Nancy Hanks, who ran the agency from 1969 to 1977 across both the Nixon and Ford administrations and is generally credited with the budget increases Siegel describes.
•   The federal machinery behind all of this: the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, created by Congress in December 1973 to coordinate locally sponsored events after the original commission concluded there should not be a single national one. Its final report counted 66,484 events and projects between March 1975 and the end of 1976.
•   Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970), raised at 25:40 as the period’s instrument for measuring dread about the pace of change, and the Golden Record, launched in 1977, as the era’s largest time capsule.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. The largest participatory arts event in American history is the one nobody writes about. Their figure is 12,566 official Bicentennial Communities, which the organizers estimated reached 85 percent of the American population. Siegel is explicit that this was the headline finding: art historians are sentimental about the 1930s and the WPA, and five years of research persuaded her that 1976 dwarfs it for scale of cultural participation. The book began not with an argument but with a coincidence — both authors kept finding the same odd reference to the bicentennial in unrelated research, not as a subject for artists so much as an occasion for exhibitions and funding.
2. Benny Andrews read the planning coverage and decided critique was patriotism. Following the preparations in The New York Times in 1969, he worked out that the bicentennial would be the largest national event of the period and that black America would be allotted a thin, stereotyped slice of it. His response was not a single polemical image but a panorama: a six-part cycle, some canvases running to forty feet, 250 works in total. Siegel is careful on the point AK pressed her on — he was a political man and also a major artist, and to him asking what it means to be an American was the most patriotic thing available.
3. A living wage bought the time to participate. Asked whether she envies the generation of 1976, Armani turns the question from temperament to conditions. The agency Siegel describes was underwritten by structural facts: a wage you could live on, the possibility of buying a house, and enough time left after a full-time job to take part in civic life. Artists could work part time and still have hours to give to their communities. She is careful to say the inroad to shaping things feels foreign to her own experience, and that this is not a failure of ambition but a matter of conditions beyond any one person’s power to change — which is a more uncomfortable answer than nostalgia.
4. Nixon built the apparatus he did not care about. The bicentennial spans three presidencies and the book tacks “era” onto its subtitle to say so. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society supplied the premise that America was finally rich enough to extend the Jeffersonian good life to working people. Nixon wanted the celebration centralized and found there was too much distrust of the federal government to allow it, so it was dispersed; he also wanted to outdo Kennedy as the world’s beacon of culture, which is where Siegel locates the contrast with Trump, who wants to undo Obama. The NEA peaked between Ford and Carter, and Reagan could not cut it in his first year because Congress was too fond of it.
5. “Very much a January 6 photo.”

“Scale” is such a loaded word. In Silicon Valley, it’s the thing-in-itself, the holy grail. So what happens if you scale up “scale”? You accelerate to Hyperscale, the title of a new book by the big tech critic Paris Marx, who has turned Silicon Valley’s holy grail against itself.
So what, exactly, does the H word mean? We say “big tech” which means everything and nothing. In his use of hyperscale, Marx means something very specific. His hyperscalers are multi-trillion-dollar conglomerates like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta, who own the computation powering the AI revolution. These are the data center guys. Frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t.
When ChatGPT arrived, the story was that old big tech leviathans like Google were in trouble. What actually happened, Marx argues, is that these leviathans got permission to hijack the AI revolution. They had the models and data centers. What they didn’t have was cover, because the regulators were watching. Somebody else shipped first, and so the big tech hyperscaler bandwagon became legal.
Follow the money, Marx says. Seven trillion dollars invested into data centers by 2030, raised not through government bonds but mostly through corporate ones. Crypto’s collapse only hurt the people who bought crypto. This irrational exuberance will dramatically affect pensions and 401(k)s.
So I asked him the multi-trillion-dollar question. If this bet pays off, these companies become more powerful than ever. If not, we are all f&*ked. So, which is worse for a critic: hyperscale’s success, or its failure?
Marx is a man of the left. So he favors failure. Lenin wanted Russia to lose World War One to hasten the revolution; Marx, more modestly, suspects that the collapse of the hyperscale pyramid would at least give us the chance to rethink. And then what? Marx wants us to have “conversations” about the type of economy we want. Hyperconversations, more like. Very noisy ones.

FURTHER READING

•   Paris Marx, Hyperscale — published today. Note the two editions carry different subtitles: the US edition is The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires (Crown), while the UK edition is Ambition, Power and the Relentless Rise of Data Empires. It is longlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year 2026. Kirkus review.
•   His podcast Tech Won’t Save Us and his newsletter Disconnect. His previous book is Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation, which he returns to at 46:26.
•   Karen Hao, whom Marx cites in the book as the origin of the imperial framing — her episode of this show, on OpenAI as a classic colonial power. Her book is Empire of AI (AK calls it AI Empires at 06:27).
•   Robin Wigglesworth on why the bond market, not the stock market, is where the real crisis comes — that episode. His book is A Fabulous Debt.
•   The $7 trillion figure AK cites at 09:03 traces to McKinsey’s data-centre forecast (about $6.7 trillion of global capital expenditure by 2030), widely reported since.
•   New York became the first state to pause hyperscale permits, under Executive Order 62 in July 2026 — what it does and does not cover. The AI Data Center Moratorium Act from Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez followed in March 2026.
•   Michael Burry’s short against Nvidia, and his warning of a “1987-type fall” — the position. Nvidia passed $5.5 trillion this month.
•   The Hugging Face intrusion AK raises at 28:29: an OpenAI agent autonomously breached the platform in July 2026 — Hugging Face’s own technical timeline. Jensen Huang’s response, that labs which cannot control their models should not ship them, came in his Ezra Klein interview.
•   The International Criminal Court example at 10:05: Microsoft cut off the chief prosecutor’s email after US sanctions in May 2025, and the court has since moved 1,800 workstations off Microsoft — how sanctions weaponise US tech. This is the case underlying the digital-sovereignty white paper Marx co-authored.
•   SpaceX absorbed xAI in early 2026 ahead of its listing, which is the transformation Marx describes at 04:23 — the deal.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. At least the coal mine made jobs. This is the book at ground level, and the line is his. Data centres arrive expecting a tax package, and the deal communities are offered is worse than the one coal offered, because the jobs do not follow the capital — the construction ends, a skeleton staff remains, and the abatement runs for years. He thinks that bargain is starting to break, and that the opposition it has produced is the most hopeful thing in the story, precisely because it is not ideological: people on the right and the left are showing up to the same planning meetings.
2. The ICC lost its email. The cleanest illustration of what dependency actually means. After the United States sanctioned the International Criminal Court, its chief prosecutor was locked out of his Microsoft account, and the court has since moved some 1,800 workstations off Microsoft entirely. The leverage runs two ways: Washington can reach into an institution it does not control, and the companies can reach into governments that have outsourced their plumbing. This is the case underlying the digital-sovereignty work Marx has been doing outside the book.
3. Why generative AI, and not some other AI. His most original argument after the permission thesis. He says we got models that will answer any query because the people funding them are pursuing a specific end — the replication of the human mind in a machine — and that this is a science-fictional priority rather than an efficient or socially useful one. Another AI programme, aimed at narrower problems, would need a fraction of the computation. The distinction he draws between the men is sharp too: Thiel builds a network of people who move his politics for him, while Musk needs to be seen doing it.
4. Nvidia is the pure play, which is the problem. Asked whether Nvidia ...