Featured American flag draped on a voting machine. The screen says “China”.

Media Ignores Trump Election Integrity Speech, Just as they Ignored the Hunter Biden Laptop Story

On By The Social CriticIn Media & Social Media, Politics & Public PolicyLeave a comment

Legacy media has done to President Trump’s July 16, 2026 speech on election integrity what they did to the Hunter Biden laptop story: It didn’t merit airing because it is an unfounded conspiracy theory.

It’s an argument that didn’t age well, with legacy media belatedly admitting that there was no evidence that Hunter’s laptop was “hacked material” after all — well after the 2020 election had passed. Rather than learn from self harm, media gatekeepers are back to cherry picking what the rest of us see and hear. However, it would be remiss to suggest that only liberal media choked on Trump’s address. Conservative commentators, too, expressed shock that 230 million Americans’ voter registration data has in some form or fashion been obtained by the People’s Republic of China, even as more than a quarter million noncitizens are reportedly registered to vote across just four states.

The White House released what it describes as evidence of the President’s claims of election interference to its own website, while Beijing has denied the allegations. Still, it’s hardly the case that these revelations are entirely new. The following summarizes what many undoubtedly missed, thanks to media coverage that so often lacks context:

  • Public Information: Voter rolls are subject to public records laws. If they are not out of reach of Americans — or Americans share personally-identifiable information with Chinese-owned social media companies such as Tiktok — it should not come as surprise that foreign adversaries might be able to assemble enough information to create actionable harm.
  • So Easy a Kid Can Do It: In 2018, an 11-year-old Florida girl hacked the State’s election website in under 10 minutes.
  • Experts Have Been Consistent: Computer scientists at universities and hactivist groups, alike, have tested electronic voting systems and identified vulnerabilities stretching back more than two decades. They continue to report vulnerabilities. Derision and dismissal of former DNI Director Tulsi Gabbard does not track with the historical record.
  • Privatizing Democracy: The Guardian published an investigative series in 2019: “America’s new voting machines bring new fears of election tampering” and “‘They think they are above the law’: the firms that own America’s voting system”. They were not the only ones to blow the whistle.
  • Foreign Ties: The Carter Center for Democracy — for whom the late President Jimmy Carter once lavished praise on Venezuela’s pioneering role in electronic voting — came full circle in 2024 upon condemning the fraudulent election of Nicolas Maduro. While any election can be compromised to some extent, e-voting is particularly risky because of the sheer scale and technical opacity to the average poll worker. That technologies originally developed for use in foreign countries has been adapted to U.S. election needs with hardware manufacturing ties to China and computer programming links to the likes of Venezuela isn’t new information. These ties caused controversy in the early days of e-voting. However, until e-voting technology was tied to the Venezuela elections scandal, it was possible to deny that abuses at scale could exist on such platforms — although in reality a 2003 Diebold scandal set the precedent — or that the reach of such fraud may extend beyond Venezuela’s borders. A federal grand jury indicted Smartmatic executives in 2024 for alleged “bribery and money laundering.” Another took place nearly a year later, with a federal grand jury indictment in Miami for allegedly bribing a Philippine official in 2016. The wakeup call that too much is at stake is no longer possible to deny.
  • Double Standards: In Colorado, the passwords to voting systems went live on the elections website prior to the 2020 election. Tina Peters, a county clerk in the same state, went to prison for sharing data with a private party without permission. Secretary of State Jenna Griswold “spoke” to the entire world via her office website yet sidestepped accountability. (After winning a primary election, she may soon become attorney general — with the power to decide if future “accidents” tied to her former office are prosecuted vs. dropped.)
  • The Accidental Voter: The Associated Press, among others, have reported for more than a decade on “glitches” in which automatic voter registration associated with obtaining a driver’s license has resulted in noncitizens registered to vote — meaning ineligible individuals need not make an explicit attempt to commit fraud. Motor voter laws have led to such situations in Oregon, California, Colorado and Pennsylvania. But because there is no independent/outside voter roll auditing mechanism what has been publicly acknowledged is likely only the tip of the iceberg.
  • Expanding Access: Sates are pushing to expand voter rolls via automatic registration beyond the Department of Motor Vehicles: “Since 2019, states including Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Minnesota, Oregon and Michigan, plus Washington, D.C., have passed laws calling for their Medicaid offices to transfer information about Medicaid applicants who are eligible to vote so that election officials can automatically register them,” NPR reported in 2024.
  • Yesterday’s Conspiracy, Tomorrow’s Reality: A number of states are openly working to extend voting rights to noncitizens in municipal and state elections, while federal elections continue to prohibit the practice. This introduces new challenges: Separating eligibility to vote in local elections vs. national elections is virtually impossible without adopting citizenship verification measures.
  • Federalism vs. Modernity: When the Founding Fathers called upon States to determine the manner and means of elections, they could not have imagined modern-day realities such as birth tourism or same-day voter registration against a backdrop of transnational travel in which months-long journeys crossing vast oceans by ship have been reduced to a matter of hours by aircraft.
  • Busted for Voting Illegally: Every election cycle, there are stories of foreign nationals (e.g. Chinese students at American universities) voting in our elections — and every time this, too, is dismissed as a fluke. While officially the incidents of such fraud are low, it is impossible to quantify a negative. For every noncitizen voter that is identified and arrested, how many more are never caught?

Given the above, why is the country divided? Enter Brennan Center for Justice, the go-to source for journalists reporting on all things election related. Brennan Center is often portrayed as “nonpartisan”. In reality, activists and attorneys have opposed elections integrity efforts across all 50 states for more than 30 years — often successfully. They are the originators of widespread understanding that noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare. Their members have long argued that voter ID is a civil rights violation. This overlooks that it’s also a civil right to secure and trusted elections — which arguably means meeting the standards the State Department and its partners recommend to the rest of the world: paper ballots, voter ID and biometrics!

While lesser appreciated, there is a federalist argument against a national citizenship verification standard in voting. States’ rights advocates argue that a national Voter ID requirement is tantamount to the federal government administering elections (violation of Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution). But this argument cuts both ways: Establishing a unified baseline is not about stripping states of any and all responsibility to administer elections, any more than it supports the Brennan Center notion that a photo ID is more disenfranchising than protective of one’s long-term civil rights interests in the voting booth. Election integrity is about making sure every lawful vote counts — arguably the civil rights issue of our time in light of globalization realities.

Until mainstream media arrived at the post-2020 election consensus that it was better to portray Donald Trump as a “Big Lie” conspiracy theorist, stories shedding light on the security of electronic voting systems were practically routine. Prominent Democrats such as Sen. Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren led the charge on greater security and transparency for voting technologies. Now media would have us believe the revisionist narrative that any and all such concerns are maladaptive reshashes of 2020 “election denialism”. It doesn’t help that voting system owners have imposed a chilling effect on public debate in recent years by way of high-profile defamation lawsuits aimed at Fox News, Newsmax and others.

The cumulative impacts of such behavior — to silence and intimidate — threatens the public interest and national security alike.

To be clear: In 2016, Russia did attempt to hack election systems in 2016 but reportedly failed. In 2020, China did attempt to influence the election outcome in the midst of a pandemic that was simultaneously leveraged to discredit the president’s fitness for reelection, long before the events of January 6. So while media may wish us to believe that Trump is doing little more than to air old grievances, he in fact sounded an alarm that voters of all political stripe are in harm’s way.

In 2025, Dominion Voting Systems was acquired by a wealthy GOP-aligned elections official, after which the last remaining defamation lawsuit with My Pillow creator, Mike Lindell was settled. It is only a matter of time before Democrats pin the blame on future election losses on Republicans, further perpetuating the erosion of public confidence as the cycle of election irregularity accusations — real or imagined! — rinses and repeats. However, Democrats aren’t the only ones to blame. Members of the President’s own party are inexplicably and inexcusably stonewalling the Save America Act in the Senate.

If the private ownership of our election technologies doesn’t raise conflicts of interest in light of the GOP-linked acquisition of the country’s largest e-voting system provider, what will drive the point home?

The good news? Polls show that the public is not nearly so divided over voter verification as mainstream media would have us believe. Perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, it is not possible to do much of anything in modern life — try receiving medical care without divulging a social security number or use a public email account without agreeing to privacy-invading Terms Of Service issued by the likes of Google and Microsoft!

So why is it that the same media that was more than happy to belabor Russian interference can no longer care less?

Perhaps it’s not a case of knowing too little — but too much. Consider other times the establishment has saved face for China, while driving home a singular and obsessive focus on Trump:

  • Lab Leak Denial: In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci colluded with stakeholders in government to quash the “lab leak theory”. Even after this apparent damage control effort surfaced, journalists continued to put the longtime head of the National Allergy and Infectious Diseases agency on a pedestal. Historians in a post-Trump world will no doubt cite this as one of the greatest American media failings since the perpetuation of faulty Iraq-9/11 “weapons of mass destruction” claims during the Bush-Cheney era.
  • Don’t Call it the “China virus”: Noting an association between China and the COVID-19 outbreak was rapidly branded as xenophobic. Speaker Nancy Pelosi took to the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown in response to emerging concerns over the origins of the pandemic. Prior to 2020, it was not the least bit uncommon for infectious diseases to carry the name of where they were thought to originate — leaving little reason to pivot except as a public relations gift to China.
  • Rhetoric vs. Reality: Hillary Clinton “joked” in an interview with MS Now host Rachel Maddow that China should help Democrats win elections because Russians were helping Donald Trump. When Trump made a sarcastic quip about Hillary’s missing emails in 2016, it was taken at face value — maximizing public outrage and optimizing social media clickbait.
  • The California Connection: The late California Sen. Dianne Feinstein employed a Chinese spy for 20 years during which time she became one of the wealthiest women in elected office thanks, in large part, to Chinese investments on the part of her husband. She also sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
  • Honeypot Trap: A Chinese national by the name of Fang Fang became a future Rep. Eric Swalwell’s mistress — before moving on to other politically-connected targets. For years, the California congressman was permitted to remain on the House Intelligence Committee, yet enjoyed sympathetic media coverage upon his belated removal at the hands of a Republican in 2023 — resigning from Congress in 2026 not because of his romantic entanglements with a spy but in the aftermath of sexual assault allegations.
  • Democrat Enabled?: Was it little more than an ill-conceived oversight when President Biden moved to protect pro-China Confucius Institutes on college campuses in 2021? Or when it was revealed a portion of his illegally-obtained classified documents landed in Chinatown? When he issued pardons to PRC-connected spies as part of a prisoner swap? When the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) released a video and bank records memorandum that appeared to show Chinese efforts to buy influence with the Biden family? How can one explain “Russia real/China fake” media duplicity without considering that Chinese influence may have been even more successful shaping our narrative environment than buying off the Bidens?
  • America in the Dark: Whether the story involves Chinese underwriting of “No Kings” protests, refusing to call attention to the historic ~1.5 million strong Chinese birth tourism industry or a Chinese national caught operating an illegal biological laboratory in California — after which he apparently launched another in a Nevada neighborhood! — the only thing consistent about mainstream media’s response to China is their silence.

With the benefit of hindsight, the coincidental isn’t looking so accidental anymore. Of course, passing the Save America Act won’t eliminate foreign influence operations altogether. Malign actors, for example, can still leverage social media to spread divisive narratives. Similarly, e-voting is bound to carry risks because complex technology will never be as straightforward as scrutinizing a “hanging chad” on a paper ballot. Still, a national voter ID standard should go a long way towards putting a lid on the domestic hysteria of “rigged” and “stolen” elections, which has scarcely let up since George Bush faced off with Al Gore in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election.

Lord knows, there isn’t an American alive who ought to disagree with this much: The one-time hassle of citizenship verification for newly-registered voters is more than worth the savings in election denialism drama.

And that goes for both sides of the aisle.

###

SOURCES

President Trump’s July 16, 2026 Speech on Election Integrity | White House

More than a quarter-million noncitizens may be registered to vote in 4 key states, DHS alleges | Fox News

Read the Save America Act Bill | Congress

Is China funding the democratic socialist wave in US politics? | New York Post (Opinion)

Laws permitting noncitizens to vote in the United States | Ballotpedia

Why American Elections Are Flawed (and How to Fix Them) | Harvard Kennedy School

How Open Source Voting Machines Could Boost Trust in U.S. Elections | MIT Technology Review

Going from Bad to Worse: Internet to Blockchain Voting | Journal of Cybersecurity (PDF)

Chinese Government Poses ‘Broad and Unrelenting’ Threat to U.S. Critical Infrastructure, FBI Director Says | FBI (2024)

FBI Buried ‘Warning’ Intel on CCP Plot to Elect Biden Using TikTok, Fake IDs, CCP Sympathizers and PRC Students—Grassley Probes Withdrawal | The Bureau | Substack (2025)

FBI blocked probe into alleged 2020 election plot by China because it would ‘contradict Director Wray’s testimony’ to Congress, docs show | New York Post (2025)

Democrats Have a Serious Chinese Espionage Problem | Top Secret Umbra, Substack

The Spies Next Door: China’s Espionage Campaign in California | Berkley Political Review

The Chinese (and Russian, and North Korean) Spies Among Us | Los Angeles Magazine

Stolen Elections: The Takedown of Democracies Worldwide | by Ralph Pezzullo, Amazon

Hacking Democracy (Full Documentary) – The Truth About Electronic Voting Machines | YouTube

Featured Speaker at podium outside Supreme Court with America 250 banner and flags

Explainer: Why the Supreme Court Ruling on Birthright Citizenship is Controversial

On By The Social CriticIn Culture CritiqueLeave a comment

The following analysis reflects a textualist and policy-focused perspective.

In Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 decision on so-called birthright citizenship, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing the majority. Roberts’ opinion reaffirmed that children born in the U.S. to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. The ruling drew on English common law traditions of citizenship by soil (jus soli), post-ratification understanding, and longstanding precedent like United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). SCOTUS rejected narrowing the Clause to require parental domicile (residency), citizenship or full “allegiance” in the sense argued by the Trump Administration.

Trump argued that the Fourteenth Amendment’s “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” does not automatically apply to every child born to a noncitizen. Justice Kavanaugh joined the majority, concluding that federal law blocks the executive from reinterpreting the Amendment via executive order — but noted that new legislation could address the issue.

The world in 1868 — the year the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified — was dramatically different in terms of mobility, scale and the practical meaning of “jurisdiction” and “allegiance”. Air travel, global surrogacy markets, rapid returns home, and routine dual citizenship were not factors. A presumption of stakeholder intent upon birth made administrative sense at a time when crossing oceans was rare, expensive and often permanent. As such, it is not entirely surprising that early readings of the Fourteenth Amendment were based on existing norms and prioritized administrative simplicity. Little more than “born on U.S. soil + not a diplomat” served to overcome complex case-by-case inquiries into parental intent and allegiance. But this baked-in shortcut has since come at the expense of the framers’ intent.

The Clause in question says: All persons born… in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.

“Jurisdiction” meant subjection to U.S. authority, with framers such as Sen. Trumbull linking this to “not owing allegiance to anybody else.” Moreover, the framers explicitly carved out exclusions for those not fully under U.S. sovereign authority, among others the children of invading armies. Jurisdiction was not completely automatic upon mere arrival — it required meaningful subjection without hostile or competing claims.

Consider the following hypothetical: If an invading army shipwrecks, loses its weapons, but reaches U.S. soil with hostile intent — does that make them any less an invading force for jurisdictional purposes?

In the modern context, analogous hostile or criminal enterprises — such as organized transnational gangs like Tren de Aragua or terrorist networks — may arrive without formal military arms yet with clear, malicious intent. Rising efforts to deport noncitizens who commit violent crimes, rather than subsidize their long-term incarceration, underscore that U.S. policy already distinguishes formal subjection to our laws from genuine allegiance (stakeholder status). Their offspring’s automatic claim to citizenship raises the same question the framers addressed: whether physical presence, absent meaningful subjection — or in the presence of competing or hostile interests — fully triggers the Clause.

Intent and context mattered then; the analogy suggests they should inform principled application now. Jurisdiction under the Fourteenth Amendment is not exclusively associated with mere physical arrival. It requires meaningful subjection to U.S. sovereign authority. Yet courts largely ignored this for administrative ease, defaulting to territorial rule instead of fleshing out intent and ties.

Historical Context

In the mid-19th century:

  • Most non-citizen births involved long-term residents or settlers with meaningful ties.
  • Dual citizenship was far less common or recognized (many countries still followed strict single-allegiance rules).
  • Strategically-timed crossings for citizenship (“birth tourism”) was not only logistically impractical but often deemed medically risky by the standards of care that existed at the time.
  • The Amendment’s drafters operated in a post-Civil War context focused on securing citizenship for freed slaves while carving out clear exceptions (e.g. diplomats, tribal nations). They referenced common-law jus soli tempered by allegiance, at a time when temporary or adversarial presence of foreign nationals in the U.S. was a fraction of what it is today.

Modern Reality

In the 21st century:

This 19th Century administrative shortcut — treating nearly all territorial births as automatic citizenship — has scaled in ways the framers never anticipated, creating illegal immigration “pull factors” that strain the original understanding that birth on U.S. soil entails a meaningful transfer of primary allegiance.

  • Tourist visa overstays and millions of border encounters are commonplace, while mass illegal border crossings are fueled by the promise of automatic citizenship for children.
  • Documented “birth tourism” packages are marketed internationally, while U.S. Embassy warnings of Trump Administration crackdowns have reached India, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and beyond.
  • Foreign parents treat U.S. soil as a citizenship loophole (e.g., wealthy Chinese couples openly using U.S. surrogates to secure American passports for their children and concierge services marketed in Asia promising a U.S. birth and a quick return flight home). These children are often raised primarily abroad, holding dual passports, with minimal U.S. ties.
  • Many dual citizens spend much of their lives subject to foreign jurisdiction — making it difficult to argue they are truly “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. in any meaningful, ongoing sense.
  • Enforcement challenges accompany so-called anchor babies, chain migration and eligibility for public benefits.
  • Civic cohesion is deeply divided over immigration, among other factors. Per Pew Research, 59 percent of Americans report that America’s best days are behind us.

Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion emphasized the Fourteenth Amendment’s overarching purpose but largely sidestepped how prior precedent emphasized administrative assumptions over the framers’ intent regarding allegiance and real-world jurisdiction.

Key cases that set this trajectory include:

  • United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) extended citizenship to children of long-term resident aliens. While the case involved noncitizen parents with an established home (domicile) — which Justice Clarence Thomas in his dissent characterized as a key distinction that does not apply to temporary visitors — the case nonetheless opened the door to expansions in territorial claims over citizenship linked to longstanding ties.
  • Subsequent rulings expanded earlier rulings to undocumented and temporary entrants, with courts generally defaulting to physical presence over deeper examination of parental intent and documented allegiance.
  • Modern application to birth tourism and surrogacy arrangements, where families often maintain primary foreign ties and minimal U.S. connection, bears a direct resemblance to the diplomats explicitly excluded by the framers due to transient presence and competing loyalties.

In the days before modern air travel, carving out a life in the U.S. was rarely temporary — it went hand-in-hand with an investment in American life as a permanent stakeholder. Consequently, descendants were recognized as American citizens. The framers clearly wanted citizenship settled on principled grounds — otherwise they would not have established grounds to exclude diplomats or Native Americans as members of sovereign tribes, either.

A sustained and longstanding pattern of administrative streamlining — sidestepping the logistical hurdles of adjudicating jurisdictional intent in every birthright citizenship instance — served to displace the burden, leaving future generations to grapple with downstream consequences. Today, those consequences are both plentiful and profound: “Forever border crisis” is largely a way of life, assimilation is not a given, cultural battles are waged over whether it is “racist” to enforce immigration laws, and a cheapening of U.S. citizenship is exemplified by the fact that just 39 percent of Americans — a record low, per CBS news polling — identify as “very patriotic” on the nation’s 250th birthday.

If the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment could see us now, they would not have a difficult time understanding why the nation is so deeply fractured. That decades of Court precedent have contributed to this conflicted state of affairs demands the attention of Congress. Congress, for example, could draft legislation clarifying that “jurisdiction” excludes cases of proven fraudulent entry, increase visa scrutiny for pregnancy-related travel, establish reporting requirements for non-citizen births, or establish presumptions against jurisdiction for short-term “strategic visitors” and surrogacy schemes. Finally, if the political will exists Congress could pass a constitutional amendment to clarify questions of allegiance and jurisdictional intent once and for all.

Why should we care about immigration reform? Because if identifying as an American does not require being a jurisdictional stakeholder in any sense of the word, reaching the country’s 350th birthday is far from assured.

###

SOURCES

DOJ to prioritize birth tourism probes after court ruling  | The Signal

After SCOTUS Loss, Trump Pushes Congress to Pass Birthright Citizenship Bill | truthout

Can Trump Still End Birthright Citizenship? What Options Are Left | Newsweek

The Supreme Court Just Blessed the Birth Tourism Industry | Washington Examiner

A New Baby Boom? Foreign ‘Birth Tourists’ Seek U.S. Citizenship for Children | ABC News

Birth Tourism Market is Estimated to Witness High Growth Owing to Rising Cross-Border Travel for Delivering Babies | News Wire Stats

‘Rich’ dad’s twisted obsession drove sick Cali surrogacy scam to create a future U.S. president | NY Post

Chinese gaming billionaire reportedly sires more than 100 surrogate kids in US, hopes they’ll marry Elon Musk’s children | NY Post

US territory turned tropical maternity ward has produced thousands of ‘American’ babies for parents living in China | NY Post

How China supercharged ‘birth tourism’ and scammed American citizenship for up to 1.5 million babies | NY Post

Have my Baby in Miami, a concierge service, claims to have assisted in over 2,000 international births in US | Fox News

Birth tourism brings Russian baby boom to Miami | NBC News

Citizenship for Sale: The Birth Tourism Industry Built on a Constitutional Loophole | FAIR (PDF)

Two Yale Professors Argue Against the Concept of Citizenship without Consent | The Social Contract (PDF)

Birthright Citizenship for the Children of Illegal Aliens, an Irrational Policy | House.gov (PDF)

By Birth Alone: The Original Meaning of Birthright Citizenship and Subject to the Jurisdiction of the United States | Harvard Law (PDF)

Trump allies blame birthright citizenship for ‘birth tourism.’ How often does it happen? | PolitiFact

What Do We Know About ‘Birth Tourism’? | FactCheck.org

On the Other Side of the Pond: How Europe came to Abandon Unconditional Jus Soli to Preserve the Social Contract | European Parliamentary Research Service (PDF)

Featured

AI is Coming for Your Job. It’s Time for some Ground Rules

On By The Social CriticIn Economics & Globalization, Technology & ScienceLeave a comment

This year — 2025 — may go down as the year that lives in infamy. Not because the world narrowly avoided nuclear Armageddon with Iran (or Russia). But because 2025 is the year artificial intelligence (AI) came for a segment of the population that has historically benefited from innovation: the professional class.

Never mind that AI’s own developers do not really understand how it works. That it hallucinates. Or is capable of blackmail. And that reliance upon AI may dumb us down. Ready, set or not the AI arms race is here.

By some counts, AI can be expected to eliminate half of white collar jobs.

While virtually every period in history marked by innovation has been accompanied by fears of devastating job losses, with the possible exception of the mass exodus of manufacturing in the latter part of the 20th Century, worst fears have not been realized. Buggy builders became assembly line workers for the Ford Motor Company in the early days of the horseless carriage revolution. The laid-off factory worker was admonished to “learn to code”, as Hillary Clinton put it in 2016. And Silicone Valley churned out a slew of wealthy Big Tech winners, while also shunting jobs to foreign-born H1-B visa workers.

This year is different. It marks a fork in the road.

AI has come for computer coding jobs. Creative occupations, from art to music, are on the AI chopping block too. To the extent demand for high-skill foreign workers remains, much of it is justified on the basis of improving America’s AI competive advantage. By the end of President Trump’s second term, much of the job market as it exists today will have been forced to play a game of musical chairs, in which AI takes an increasing number of seats at the economic table.

Where will we be when the music stops?

This monumental transformation of the U.S. economy presents a choice: Treat the AI revolution like any other technology that has burst on the scene in the past 100+ years. Or impose limits to what percentage of the workforce in any given Fortune 500 company can be replaced.

Rather than push for unionization and protectionist measures, liberals are singing the praises of Universal Basic Income (UBI), in which idled Americans sit at home collecting a guaranteed income. Yet with $37T in debt and another $1T in interest piled on every 100 days or so, the Treasury is in no position to pay people not to work. What’s more, should AI replace high-skill jobs held by the top 10 percent of American households, it stands to reason the tax base may collapse too.

The urgency AI demands has yet to translate into the will to tackle it. Democrats and Republicans are instead caught up in a social media feud — brought to a head by Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” — as to whether noncitizens should remain eligible for Medicare, SNAP (food stamps) benefits and similar. The debate is bizarre distraction from the fact that by 2035 even American-born retirees will be lucky to draw a full Social Security check. This reality was understood many years before AI endangered jobs and wages, further straining entitlement spending. Consequently, the national debt crisis does not support the notion that UBI for Americans and entitlements for noncitizens are serious, sustainable proposals.

The only way forward is for Americans to keep their jobs.

What are the obstacles to timely and decisive regulation? A public that largely views AI through the lens of entertainment and novelty. Unfamiliarity among lawmakers with a technology that still feels very much like science fiction. Republicans, for their part, loathe to regulate businesses. Progressives seemingly silent because economic crisis tied to a hasty AI integration into the economy “proves” that Democratic socialism is the only valid response to Capitalist inequalities.

The window is closing on the opportunity to tame the “Wild West” that is AI.

The only thing that will not be destroyed in a Perfect Storm of over-reliance on H-1B visa workers and AI-driven layoffs are the jobs we are so often told nobody wants: Blue Collar. Americans have left many working class jobs to the undocumented: housekeepers, farm laborers, nannies, landscapers and busboys, to name a few. Other forms of employment will be spared because there are limited funds to automate them. Specialty occupations and complex manual labor will be less impacted too.

This begs the question: Could the Trump Administration’s commitment to mass deportations may be motivated, in part, by the coming downsizing of the workforce — in the expectation there simply won’t be enough jobs to go around? Perhaps. But if the President’s only answer to the possibility of mass unemployment is to kick noncitizens out of the country, it is hardly enough.

The AI revolution is not merely about jobs lost to innovation. It is a paradoxical investment in brain drain — meaning that if humans fail to replace humans in the workforce the know-how to run businesses and government without an AI crutch will be lost. Even AI developers may find themselves boxed out. There may be little choice but to put nonhuman intelligence in charge of AI systems as more and more rungs in the career ladder collapse, blocking off a path to the top. This suggests that when the current generation of Big Tech innovators retires, there will be fewer coming up the rear. Even the proverbial geek tinkering with the next big idea in a garage is endangered.

While some have predicted that the AI boom will keep Silicone Valley relevant for years to come, the golden era of human-powered Big Tech innovation may be over.

When AI is doing the coding, who will learn to code?

When AI is doing the banking, who will learn banking?

When AI doctors outperform and undercut human physicians, who will go into medicine?

When AI is capable of designing AI, who will go into will go into AI development?

This is the “AI brain drain” precipice upon which we stand. Once a tipping point is crossed, reclaiming space for a skilled human economy beyond the narrow band of jobs that cannot be easily automated may prove more challenging than the Trump Administration’s attempt to incentivize a rebirth in American manufacturing!

The future may seem a long way off. Indeed, experts point out the AI apocalypse is not yet upon us. Before things get worse, they may even get better as humans train their nonhuman replacements:

The widespread adoption of AI technologies highlights the need for human skills to ensure the successful implementation of the tech. As a result, humans are as in-demand as ever, with AI creating new opportunities for those who embrace the change. — Sabrina Ortiz, ZDnet senior editor.

Still, the writing is on the wall. Take Microsoft. Normally, news that a Fortune 500 company intends to lay off ~9,000 workers — following a first round of layoffs in May and June that slashed ~8,000 workers — would send shock waves through the market. But not this time. Microsoft enjoyed one of its best quarters ever — $26B in profit from January through March — with stock up nearly 20 percent year-to-date. Why? Because investors anticipate that between the H-1B visa workers and AI overtaking many coding and engineering jobs, business operations will become more efficient and profitable than ever.

Addressing existential threats to the human-powered economy does not seem to interest Big Tech. AI is the shiny red ball investors are chasing. Wall Street is buoyed by the expectation that American businesses are poised to realize higher profit margins tied to the AI transition. They are betting on labor savings and productivity gains to boost the worth of their stock portfolios, with or without the drag of President Trump’s trade war.

Perhaps President Trump will conflate Wall Street’s exuberance for all things AI with proof that tariffs did not irrevocably damage the economy. Conceivably, however, unemployment will rise so dramatically that Trump’s trade war will take the blame even if the “AI Great Replacement” is, in fact, the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Whatever the case, if we are to emerge from this transition better for the effort, a commitment to regulate AI as a percentage of any given employer’s workforce and/or as a function of tax reform must come sooner than later.

For now, government seems content to go along for the ride. After all, the rise of AI is likely to prove a boon to the Trump economy. But this should not be mistaken as anything but the calm before the storm.

Calm, unfortunately, favors complacency.

One way to preserve “bandwidth” in the economy is to simultaneously address H1-B visas and AI. This could take the shape of regulating what percentage of jobs in any given industry AI can replace. It also suggests that indiscriminately slashing H-1B visas could be counterproductive, as it may motivate companies to replace still more labor with AI. At the same time, should the federal government move to regulate AI too late, it may very burst the AI bubble, not unlike the dot-com crash of the early 2000s.

All that is certain is that AI is in dire need of ground rules, otherwise efforts to deal with its disruptive impacts may amount to too little, too late.

AI, on the one hand, favors a permanent labor surplus — an employer’s market — which exerts downward pressure on wages. On the other hand, the cost of living is likely to rise thanks to pressure AI infrastructure exerts on water resources and energy markets and, in turn, the cost of goods and services. The ecological impacts of the Internet and cloud computing remain vastly underrated as a cause of rising carbon emissions some 30 years after the debut of the world wide web. AI demands even more gargantuan data centers!

What kind of quality of life will mere mortals enjoy when pressured on climate grounds to reduce living standards to accommodate the resource demands of AI? Similarly, can the United States realistically expect to come out on top of the AI arms race if the deck is tilted — as it is on many manufacturing fronts — in favor of countries who will build faster and better data centers thanks to cheaper, dirtier energy sources?

AI tax repercussions are equally sobering. In the event American jobs are lost in great numbers to AI, the national debt crisis — which is already nearing critical mass — will explode too. The top 10 percent of income earners account for 90 percent of U.S. consumer activity. Given that about 70 percent of the economy (GNP) is consumer driven, losing a significant chunk of the top 10 percent to white collar job losses would be catastrophic not only to quality of life but the tax base.

And if it looks bad now, consider that we haven’t reached so-called artificial general intelligence, the next big phase in the AI Age. At that point, AI can understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks, just like a human. AGI would be capable of reasoning, problem-solving, and adapting to new situations across any domain without being reprogrammed. — Jason Nelson, reporter for Decrypt

The fact remains: Many of today’s top 10 percent — households earning $250,000 or more annually — will face AI disruption because white-collar jobs tap the very cognitive processes that AI threatens to replace. A dual-income household consisting of a tax professional and a physician’s assistant, for instance, could conceivably find that one or both are replaced. At minimum, their wages can be expected to fall over time to remain competitive with AI counterparts.

What happens when the bottom falls out from under the skilled labor market?

Given that AI does not (yet) represent a taxable unit of labor — unlike the human talent it replaces — it is a no brainer for businesses such as Microsoft and Amazon to pursue AI-driven labor savings. State and federal governments, however, have a responsibility to avert a full-blown unemployment crisis, with Social Security, Medicare and other critical areas, such as national defense, already under immense pressure caused by the national debt crisis.

The good news? The Main Street economy is not yet totally dependent on AI. It is still early enough to reimagine the AI rollout without long-term brain drain, either.

One possible solution is for the federal government to approach AI-powered Fortune 500 businesses and large regional employers in the same way the Trump Administration has attempted to re-shore manufacturing — by offering companies that hire humans a domestic tax advantage and/or those that disproportionately replace their workforce with AI with a tax penalty. (In turn, it may be necessary to impose penalties on foreign countries who dump their cheaper AI/automated products into our market, at the disadvantage of a human-powered economy.)

An even more novel solution is to make AI an avatar for its human counterparts in the labor force. In this case, proceeds from AI labor would translate to a percentage of an individual’s paycheck and one can continue to collect a stipend if and when one’s job is completely automated and replaced. (Unlike UBI, this would represent a unit of value tied to the performance of the employer in the private sector.)

The bad news? Put the AI reckoning off another three to four years and there may be no turning back. Re-humanizing the skilled labor force could be a decades-long endeavor, at a time when tax revenue losses are such that the federal government can scarcely afford to Make Work Human Again.

The private sector may seem to be the winner in all this — but this, too, is an illusion. AI efficiencies are so great that they amount to an act of self-cannibalization. To understand why efforts to minimize labor costs at all costs is a flawed approach, it is necessary to look back in time when another technological revolution was at hand: the automobile. When Henry Ford came up with the Model T in 1914, he decided to pay his workers enough to retain their services, with weekends free to own and enjoy a horseless carriage of their own. Ford invested not only in the development of a product but the creation of a market.

What AI gains in efficiency and labor savings it may lose to an equal but opposite proportion in consumers who can afford the goods and services that have largely displaced their labor.

Once every last ounce of fat is trimmed from corporate America and the consumer, alike, the self-harm will become self-evident. Better that businesses contemplate the trade-offs now than too late!

Fear that if we fail to rush off the AI precipice the U.S. will lose the AI race to China or Russia is not a policy, nor a plan. If at the same time Wall Street greed continues to put short-term gains ahead of long-term sustainability, the economic consequences will be so severe that even more pressure will mount on what remains of the labor force to automate in order to remain competitive in the race to the bottom.

Ground rules governing the how, what, when, where and why of AI are every bit as important as developing rules of the road in the days of Henry Ford. Rather than descend a slippery slope in monkey-see, monkey-do fashion, the U.S. must lead the developed world in pursuit of an AI treaty by which to standardize AI labor practices, ethics, environmental conditions and human rights. This country — and indeed the global economy — will not fare well without leadership.

Will the Trump administration have the foresight to rise to the AI challenge?

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