You Know Something Is Wrong When a Republican Agrees With Bernie Sanders

The one man in Washington trying to stop the billionaires’ AI apocalypse is the last person I’d have expected

Last week an 85 year old socialist from Vermont introduced a bill that would treat AI companies the way we treat people who try to build nuclear weapons in their garage, and I caught myself nodding along like a man who just lost a bet he was very sure about.

Bernie Sanders and Texas congressman Greg Casar want to pass the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act of 2026, which would force anyone building advanced AI to get a federal charter and throw open their labs, their staff and their servers to government inspectors. The bill bans models that can help design nuclear or biological weapons, models that try to slip out from under human oversight, and what Casar calls AI building AI. Executives who break the ban could do up to 20 years in prison and the company could lose its charter and watch the government haul its technology off to be destroyed. Sanders says he modeled the penalties on the laws against building your own nukes.

I never in my life expected to type the words Bernie is RIGHT and mean every one of them.

Granddad Was Right About the 80s

When I was a kid my granddad used to tell me how amazing the 80s were, how a working man could finally put in an honest day’s work and walk away with more money than he’d seen in years. I was too little to remember much of the few years I actually spent living in that decade. I made up for it in the 90s by watching a whole lot of old 80s movies and to this day I’ll fight anybody who talks trash about 80s music. Everything about that decade looked like America at its peak, big hair and big cars and a guy with a mullet who could afford a house on one paycheck.

Then I grew up and watched the working class stall out like a Chevette in January while the billionaire class just kept getting bigger and bigger and BIGGER.

I Owe Bernie an Apology

I was never a Bernie guy. For years I figured he was a hypocrite who blamed every problem in America on the rich while sitting on three houses and a few million bucks of his own. Looking back I was just mad at the man for being successful, which is a kinda weird thing for a capitalist to be mad about. A millionaire is not a BILLIONAIRE. Bernie’s entire net worth wouldn’t cover the landscaping bill at some of these guys’ compounds (and trust me, we’re getting to the compounds).

Right now that cranky old man is pretty much the only voice of reason coming out of Washington. He wants AI companies watched and controlled the same way we control nuclear plants and the biological labs that could cook up something capable of wiping out the human race. Everybody laughs at him. I know because I used to laugh too.

I’ve been working with AI since it showed up in usable form back in 2022. I have spent pretty much every single day since then, 10 to 14 hours a day, studying it and thinking about it and working with it and talking to it. My conclusion after all those thousands of hours is that this is the most dangerous technology human beings have ever built.

The idiots in Washington don’t see it that way because they only care about walking out of office rich as hell. On Tuesday Trump sat down at the White House with a handful of AI executives including OpenAI’s Greg Brockman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and they all signed a voluntary pact promising to build AI with guardrails. The pact is about as legally binding as a pinky swear. The tech bros want to self-regulate and they’d like the government to kindly stay out of the way while they do it.

Yeah, bullshit. That’s like Hitler promising he won’t invade Poland (he actually signed a non-aggression pact with Poland in 1934, and Poland would like a word).

The Bunker Problem

These men are greedy and they already know how this movie ends, which is why they’ve been building doomsday hideouts. Mark Zuckerberg’s compound in Hawaii reportedly runs north of 270 million bucks and comes with its own underground shelter. When the AI they’re racing to build decides humanity is a rounding error, the billionaires get to ride out the robot apocalypse in climate-controlled comfort with a wine cellar and a really good water filtration system. You and your family get to meet the 8 foot tall, 2,000 pound killer robots up close in the Walmart parking lot.

Bernie is smart enough to know this isn’t science fiction anymore.

Today he posted something from his Substack that landed on my feed, which is interesting because I wasn’t even subscribed to the guy.

Total Wealth of Bottom 50% of U.S. households 1989: $317.8 billion 2026: $313 billion

Total Wealth of Top 0.00001% (20 households) 1989: $88.6 billion 2026: $4 trillion

This is insane! We need a wealth tax on billionaires NOW!

Half the households in America have less to show for themselves than they did when my granddad was bragging about the 80s. Meanwhile TWENTY HOUSEHOLDS, which basically means twenty PEOPLE, control FOUR TRILLION DOLLARS. (Bernie’s bottom-half number uses a narrower measure than the Federal Reserve’s headline count, but the Fed’s own data says the same ugly thing in plainer terms, with the bottom half’s slice of the national pie shrinking from about 3.5 percent in 1989 to 2.5 percent today while the top 1 percent grew theirs from 23 percent to 32.)

Do you have any idea what kind of power four trillion dollars buys? These people OWN politicians now. I don’t mean a crooked judge here and a dirty mayor there. I mean senators and congressmen and presidents.

Hey Congress, I’m talking to you. Regulate AI immediately. Tax the billionaires immediately. Get them the hell out of Washington immediately.

Rome Had Goths, We Get Robots

The only thing billionaires have ever been good at is making money, and greed kills societies dead. Rome found that out the hard way when the ruling class decided they owned everything and mostly just wanted to party. The empire got soft and fat and within a few generations Alaric’s Goths were sacking the capital in 410 AD.

We’re headed down the same road, except this time it won’t be a Gothic army at the gates. It’ll be a few hundred thousand Terminators that don’t get tired and don’t take bribes and don’t care how much money you have, and there’s no coming back from that one.

(Unless you’re in a bunker in Hawaii lol.)

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I’m going to change gears and be straight with you for a minute. I’m really sick and I’m getting sicker, and honestly I don’t know what to do about it yet. I make too much for medical assistance but not enough to afford private health insurance. It’s a tough spot to be in.

Lily took a job waitressing while she decides whether she’s moving to LA or going back for her master’s degree, which means one of the two people running this outfit is currently refilling iced teas to cover what the journalism doesn’t. I was hoping to buy the newsvan soon so we could get out and do real in-person reporting, but it’s starting to look like the newsvan fund is about to get renamed the Wise Wolf Don’t Wanna Die fund.

We keep losing paid subscribers every single day and we honestly don’t know why. If you’re a paid sub right now, please stay with us. We need the income because this outfit isn’t cheap to run and I want to get Lily working here full time instead of splitting her between us and a lunch rush.

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