Os EUA vão ter eleições de meio de mandato a 3 de novembro de 2026. Em que consiste uma eleição intercalar, qual a importância desse processo, o que poderá acontecer? Esta série de artigos procura explicar as eleições intercalares a um público não americano

Prime minister is considering different options for new relationship with Brussels ahead of summit in November

Andy Burnham says he wants an “honest discussion” with the British public about the possibility of a return to free movement between the UK and the EU as part of his plans for a new relationship with the bloc.

The prime minister has been open about his desire to revisit the relationship between Britain and Brussels. He has said a new deal could mean the UK goes “all the way” and rejoins the EU.

French police have made 1,000 arrests and Italian officers have raided homes in Milan, with protests also taking place in Spain and Albania

Jesse, 40, a charity worker from the north of Paris, had turned out for the street march.

She said: “I’m so angry. I’m here to support schoolchildren’s demands for better conditions. I’m so proud of them and we have to stand together.”

Multinational ‘anti-war bloc’ uses Istanbul summit to call for a diplomatic solution to Middle East crisis

Foreign ministers at a summit of eight European and Middle Eastern countries have urged the US and Israel not to renews their attacks on Iran, warning a fresh outbreak of fighting would spread conflict and push oil prices even higher.

The development of a new multinational “anti-war bloc” represents a challenge to the increasingly open plans by the US and Israel to relaunch strikes on Iran while talks on Tehran’s nuclear programme remain deadlocked.

Four years ago nearly every government on Earth agreed to protect nature. Now, as countries gather for Cop17, the pressure is on to follow through on those commitments

• Cop17 at a glance: everything you need to know about the UN’s nature summit

Passersby could smell the dead fish before they saw them. In August, more than 3,000 pike, roach, carp and rudd were found lifeless along the River Wensum in Norwich. Some gasped for air in their final moments, desperate for the oxygen that heatwave conditions had depleted in the water. Investigators believe that the die-off was triggered by heavy rainfall that flushed through high concentrations of pollution at a time when wildlife were already struggling.

The 45-mile (70km) chalk river is one of about 250 in the country. They are a geological accident almost unique to Britain – and one of Earth’s rarest habitats. They emerge from chalk aquifers and are home to species such as freshwater shrimp, otters and stoneflies, also providing drinking water for millions of people. But just 11 have formal protection, with many ravaged by sewage pollution and overextraction. The Norfolk river is one of the few that does have legal protection, but it is in poor ecological health.

This month’s biodiversity summit in Yerevan, Armenia, aims to push governments to meet the 23 targets agreed at Cop15 in 2022

• Can countries deliver on a deal to save the world’s plants and animals?

This month, nearly every country on Earth will return to the question of how to stem the rapid destruction of the natural world. Humans are driving it, but so far we have not found a way to stop it.

In late 2022, governments reached an ambitious once-in-a-decade deal to better protect nature amid scientific warnings that the planet is going through the largest loss of life since the extinction of the dinosaurs. Now, they are assessing their progress on the targets for the first time.

The Green Party motion defining Zionism as "racism" and demanding the destruction of Israel shows why we must keep setting out the Jews’ right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, says Dr James E. Patrick.

The post Why Israel Has the Right to Exist appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Where there is no vision, the people perish. – Proverbs 29:18 (KJV)

To all of those who have read my books, listened to me in person, on roundtables, videos, and radio: I have heard your cries of “What can we do to protect ourselves?” Here is my answer, in layman’s terms, to help you see the big picture and then take courage and take cover.

Something is being done to you, and it is being done with your signature.

It is not being done with a sheriff at the door, or a decree from a capital, or a soldier in the street. It is being done with an app, a friendly rate, a faster paycheck, a fund with a new name on the menu, and a number on a screen that looks like a gift. You are being asked, politely and one convenience at a time, to hand over the ownership of what you have and accept access to it instead. Most people are saying yes. Most people do not know they were asked.

This writer has one sentence for what is happening, and the whole of this book is the working out of it:

They take the deed and leave you the key.

The deed is ownership. It is your name on the title to your house, on the register of the company whose shares you hold, on the bond you bought from your own government. It is the coin in your hand. It is the thing itself, held by you, answering to you. The key is access. It is the login, the balance, the token, the receipt, the ticket the coat-check girl hands you when she takes your coat. A key is useful. A key is convenient. A key opens the door only as long as the person who holds the deed lets it.

A system is being built now, quickly and on purpose, to convert every deed in the world into a key. Your house. Your shares. Your retirement account. Your paycheck. Your dollar. Even the gold in your safe, if they can talk you into a token instead. When it is finished, a very small number of people will hold the deeds to nearly everything, and everyone else will hold keys, and the difference between the two will decide who is free and who is merely permitted.

That is the charge. The rest of this book is the evidence.

Why this is your book

You may think this is a book about Wall Street, or Washington, or the strange world of digital money that you have been told you do not need to understand. It is not. It is a book about the deed to the house you are sitting in. It is about the paycheck that lands on Friday and where it lands. It is about the account with your name on it and whose name is actually on the shares inside. It is about the retirement you have been saving for and who decides what it will consist of when you get there. It is about the inheritance you mean to leave your children, and whether what you leave them will be a thing they own or a ticket they must keep renewing.

Every one of those is being moved, right now, from deed to key. Not by force. By offer. The offers are real, and some of them are good on their face, and that is the whole difficulty. A faster paycheck is faster. A lower rate is lower. A way to “unlock” the value sitting in your walls does put money in your hand. Nobody is lying to you about the convenience. They simply don’t mention what you gave up to get it, and by the time you notice, the convenience has become the way things are done, and the old way has quietly closed.

That is why this book is personal. Not because it will make you angry, though it may, but because every chapter is about something you hold, and every chapter ends with where your footing still is. You will not be asked to become an expert. You will be asked to learn one distinction, deed, or key, and to apply it to everything anyone ever offers you again. Once you can see it, you cannot stop seeing it. That is the point.

Why this book, and why now

The people who understand the machinery of digital money mostly do not know what it is for. They write about it as innovation, as efficiency, as the future of finance, and within their own frame they are not wrong. The people who understand what it is for, who have followed the long project to manage the world as a single system run by experts, mostly do not understand the machinery. They see the outline of the thing and cannot show you the gears.

This writer has spent more than fifty years on the second half of that problem, tracing the movement called Technocracy from its origins to its present-day heirs, and has written a shelf of books about it. In 2018 he wrote about the three institutions that ran the world’s money and what they meant to do with it. Then, over the last two years, the machinery arrived, and it arrived faster than anyone predicted, in laws signed and companies launched and products placed in front of ordinary people, and it became possible for the first time to put the two halves together: to show the gears and to say what the machine is for.

So far as this writer can find, this is the only book that does that. It is the only book that blows the whistle on what is, in plain words, the biggest heist in the history of the world, and does it in language a person without a finance degree can follow, with the evidence laid out chapter by chapter, and with an answer at the end to the question every reader will be asking by then. That is not said to boast. It is said so you know why you have not heard this before, and why the people who could have told you did not: because it takes both halves to see it, and almost nobody holds both.

And it must be said now, because the machine is being built at a run. The builders are moving as though the old order might not last the decade, and this writer believes they are right. What is put into their vault before the weather turns will have a clear owner on the far side. What is left outside will not. The time to know the difference between a deed and a key is before the storm, not during it.

What you will hold when you finish

This is not a book that leaves you with dread and no door. It was written for people who have asked for years what they can do, and it answers them.

You will understand what tokenization actually is, in the words of a coat check rather than a white paper, and why the ticket is not the coat. You will understand the difference between the two kinds of digital money, the one that pretends to be a dollar and the one that pretends to be a share, and what each one does to the thing it stands for. You will see, one at a time, what is happening to your investments, your retirement, your house, your job, and your money, and in every case you will see where the ground is still solid under you. You will understand why the arguments about inflation and deflation are both right, in order, and what that means for the dollar in your pocket. You will learn what gold and silver can and cannot do for you, and how to hold them so they do it. You will learn who built this, and why, and why they were in such a hurry. At the end, you will have a way to count what you actually own, a handful of principles that hold whatever your circumstances are, and a short list of signs to watch so you are never surprised again.

None of it is personalized financial advice. This writer does not know you and would not presume. All of it is a way of seeing, which is a thing that belongs to you once you have it, and which no one can freeze, reverse, or revoke.

A word about fear

The proverb at the head of this introduction is usually read as a line about foresight, and it is that. But the Hebrew word underneath it means something closer to revelation, the thing a watchman sees from the wall and reports, and the word for “perish” means to be let loose, to run without restraint. As the old saying goes, “They cry and shout and run about.” Where there is no vision, the people throw off restraint. They sign. They pledge. They unlock. They hand over the coat because the ticket is shiny and nobody has shown them what the ticket costs.

Vision is the cure, and vision is the opposite of fear. A frightened person signs faster. Every product in this book was designed to be accepted by someone who was worried and in a hurry, which is why the calmest person in the room is the hardest one to rob. This book will show you things that should alarm you, and it will not soften them. But it will show them to you whole, with the mechanism visible and the motive named, and a thing you can see whole is a thing you can stand against.

So read it as a watchman’s report and not as a siren. See the big picture. Count what you hold. Learn the one distinction that governs everything else. And then, as this writer said to the people who asked, take courage and take cover.

They will take the deed and leave you the key. Unless you know the difference.

Last Sunday morning, the Treasury Secretary Bessent and the Vice Premier of China sat down to negotiate the commercial future of the two largest economies on earth. They did not meet at the Treasury or at a consulate, but rather at the Manhattan headquarters of JPMorgan Chase. This seems a little fishy to me.

The official explanation, given to Reuters by one unnamed person, is that UN security made the building convenient and that JPMorgan was not a party to the talks. But when two governments need a room and the room they choose belongs to the largest bank in America, you are looking at a picture of how the world actually works.

On Thursday, Xi Jinping arrives at the White House for a full state visit. In May, I wrote in The China Card that Trump’s trip to Beijing was not a trade summit but the merger of American and Chinese Technocracy into a single global order, with China coming to the table because it had run out of time. Xi’s visit closes that loop. Before he lands, here is what has held up since May, what is still hanging, and what to watch this week.

What I Told You in May

I wrote that three boards were being assembled to replace the post-UN, post-WTO order: a Board of Peace for conflict, a Board of Trade for commerce and a Board of Investment for capital. The two new boards had no charter and no members, and I said this is exactly how technocratic architecture gets built. The framework arrives first. The democratic debate never does.

I described five walls going up around Beijing, from Pax Silica to the energy squeeze. And I ended by saying that Xi Jinping, for all of China’s multipolar rhetoric, would decide for Technocracy.

The Boards Are Going Up

On June 5, the U.S. Trade Representative published a notice in the Federal Register asking for comments on the Board of Trade. The title of that notice describes it as a mechanism for “Reciprocal Managed Trade With China.” Managed trade is the phrase I used in May for what the Trilateral Commission built into the WTO. Now the government uses it about itself. The notice cites no legal authority for creating the board. It names no members, no chairman, and no role for Congress.

Yet when Scott Bessent and Jamieson Greer came out of that meeting on Sunday, Greer announced that the Board of Trade had been “operationalized.” A board with no charter, no members, and no vote of any legislature is now operating. He said its job is to find a “critical mass of goods” that can be set apart “when and if there are trade measures” down the road.

That is the Abraham Accords template I described in May, and now it comes from the Trade Representative’s own mouth. You lock in the commerce first. You wall it off from politics. Then the political questions, Taiwan above all, become too expensive to raise. The Chinese Embassy put it more bluntly, saying the boards move the relationship from “crisis response” to “mechanized management.” Technocrats on both sides of the Pacific speak the same language because they hold the same doctrine.

What Is Still Hanging

Jensen Huang was the last-minute addition to Air Force One in May. Trump personally called him over the objections of the China hawks in Congress, and I wrote that AI chips were on the table. They were. Washington had licensed about ten Chinese companies to buy Nvidia’s H200 chips. The terms were remarkable: a 25 percent cut of every sale paid to the U.S. Treasury, and every chip inspected on American soil before it shipped.

Beijing turned it down. Trump said so himself on the flight home, telling reporters that China “chose not to” buy because “they want to develop their own.” Chinese firms withdrew their orders and were pointed toward Huawei. Nvidia’s share of that market went from around 95 percent to essentially zero.

I said China was boxed in and would take the seat on American terms. On chips, it did not. In my judgment, Xi saw that the carrot had a leash attached. A chip that is taxed by Washington and inspected by Washington is a chip administered by Washington, and he chose to pay the price of building his own.

So why is Jensen Huang on the guest list for Thursday’s state dinner, alongside Jamie Dimon, Jane Fraser and Sam Altman? Because the offer is still on the table. What I want to know is whether the terms have changed.

Other threads are hanging as well. The Board of Investment stalled over the summer, yet Reuters reports new rules coming to let American drug companies invest in China, and Trump says he is open to Chinese automakers building plants here. The investment is moving even if the board is not.

He Lifeng is bringing a delegation of Chinese companies that Reuters says mirrors the group Trump took to Beijing. No names have been released. In May I showed that six of Trump’s executives sat on the Tsinghua University advisory board. When Beijing’s list comes out, I will be looking for the mirror image.

And Taiwan has not appeared in any readout I have seen. That fits a political question being walled off. It also fits ordinary caution before a summit.

The Sentence Nobody Noticed

Before Sunday’s meeting, Bessent put out a statement saying the United States is open to discussions on “avoiding shared risks and avoiding bifurcation of our two systems.” Afterward, he announced a proposed “U.S.-China AI Dialogue,” with a notification mechanism for AI incidents that threaten national security. He talked about transparency between “the number one and the number two AI powers in the world.”

The press keeps telling you this is an AI race. People in a race do not set up notification channels with each other, and they do not describe splitting into two systems as a risk they share. Pax Silica was designed to do precisely that — divide the world into an American stack and everybody else. If the Treasury Secretary now calls that division a danger, then Pax Silica was never the goal. It was the leverage. I said as much in May. One sentence does not prove it, but Thursday might.

What to Watch For This Week

Watch the chips first. If Beijing approves the blocked purchases, or Washington drops the 25 percent fee or loosens its rules, the deal I described in May is done.

Watch whether the Board of Trade gets a charter, named members or any role for Congress, or simply keeps operating without them. Watch whether the AI Dialogue becomes a permanent body, and notice that it is the Treasury Secretary running it, not anyone from defense. Watch for what is not said about Taiwan.

And watch the dinner. The White House reportedly turned down a formal CEO roundtable, which means the executives of both nations will do their talking over dessert, off the record.

If China takes the chips, my May conclusion stands, four months late. If it refuses again, we are looking at something I did not anticipate: one doctrine running on two separate infrastructures, coordinated at the top by boards and dialogues. Whatever comes out of that room, I will report it to you next week.

What I can tell you today is that it has never mattered which flag flies outside the building. The men inside believe the same thing: that the world is an engineering problem, and that they are the engineers.

Nobody in either country has been asked to vote on any of it, and nobody will be.

Most Americans know Stripe as the checkout box on a website. That picture is five years out of date.

Stripe reports that businesses on its platform generated $1.9 trillion in total volume in 2025, up 34 percent in a single year. By the company’s own reckoning, that is roughly 1.6 percent of global GDP. It claims 90 percent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 80 percent of the Nasdaq 100 as customers.

A private company, owned by insiders and venture funds and answerable to no public shareholder, already clears a measurable share of the world’s commerce. Now it is building the payment system for customers that are not human.

Two Kinds of Token

This writer has spent the past year explaining tokenization: stocks, bonds, real estate, and dollars converted into programmable entries on a digital ledger. That is the first kind of token.

There is a second kind. Every artificial intelligence model consumes and produces “tokens,” the small fragments of text that are the unit of machine computation. Every query to an AI model is metered in tokens and billed in tokens.

Tokens of value and tokens of computation are different things. Stripe is the one company positioning itself to meter, price, and settle both.

Emily Sands, Stripe’s Head of Data and AI, is an economist by training. In a recent interview with Nate B. Jones, she said this about inference tokens:

“Tokens are not yet a currency—maybe they will be, we’ll see—but they are certainly a very valuable asset.”

Stripe’s own AI chief is saying publicly that units of machine computation could become money.

The Pieces, In Order

The factual record comes from Stripe’s own announcements.

• Stripe acquired Bridge, a stablecoin platform. Its 2025 annual letter reports that stablecoin payments volume doubled to around $400 billion, that an estimated 60 percent of it was business-to-business, and that Bridge’s own volume more than quadrupled.
• With the venture firm Paradigm, Stripe built Tempo, which it describes as “a blockchain purpose-built for payments.”
• The Machine Payments Protocol. On March 18, 2026, Stripe launched the protocol alongside the Tempo mainnet. It lets a business tell an AI agent, in machine-readable form, what it sells, what it costs, and how to pay.
• Stripe acquired Metronome, a usage-based billing company that meters consumption in real time.
• Streaming payments. At its Sessions 2026 conference, Stripe combined the two into “streaming payments.” These are stablecoin micropayments on Tempo, tied to Metronome’s meter, so that a business can “get paid for every token, exactly at the moment it’s used.”

Stripe was candid about why the old system cannot do this: “The amounts are too small and the usage is too fast—existing systems aren’t capable of processing minute sums every few milliseconds.”

A credit card cannot move a penny, because the fees alone exceed the payment. A stablecoin on a purpose-built chain can. Sands was measured about it: “Stablecoins bring us a long way. It is not the only way… but so far stablecoins seem to be an important part of microtransactions.”

Why OpenRouter Matters

In August, the financial press reported that Stripe had agreed to buy OpenRouter for more than $7 billion.

OpenRouter is a switchboard. A developer sends it a task, and OpenRouter routes that task to whichever of some 400 AI models best fits the required cost, speed, and quality. Roughly eight million developers use it.

Every request through OpenRouter is a metered event, and every metered event is a bill. With the acquisition, the company that counts the tokens and the company that collects the money are the same company.

Stripe has always seen the revenue side of a business: who paid, how much, how often. OpenRouter shows it the cost side: which model was used, what it cost, and how well it performed. Sands said it directly:

“You want to maximize profit on both the revenue side and the true-cost side, which requires getting deep into the guts of the underlying intelligence in your product and agent.”

She also gave the acquisition a name: “the rails for intelligence—not the rails for money, but the rails for intelligence.”

Stripe president Will Gaybrick told Payments Dive that the company is evolving from a payments company into “an AI infrastructure player.” He predicted there will not be room “for 100 different AI orchestrators.”

That describes a company expecting the market to consolidate around a few orchestrators and planning to be one of them.

The Permission Layer

The payments are the visible part of the system. The reputation scoring that precedes them matters more.

Sands described how Stripe helped the AI coding company Cursor with a new kind of theft: fraudsters opening accounts to steal free computing credits. No payment had occurred, so there was no transaction to flag. Stripe solved it anyway:

“That allowed us to move from scoring transactions to identifying abusive or risky customers.”

Because Stripe sees across millions of businesses, it can judge a person at the moment he creates an account, before he has bought anything. It then passes those scores to sellers, so that, in Sands’ words, “businesses can make decisions.”

Stripe’s Link wallet, which Sands puts at about 300 million consumers, is becoming “the wallet for agents.” Your identity is attached to it. Your agent spends through it. The human owner sets the spending limits, and every purchase traces back to a named person.

The stated purpose is fraud prevention, and the fraud is real. But a cross-merchant reputation score, run by one private company and applied before any transaction exists, is a permission system whatever its purpose. This writer has documented the same architecture at the Bank for International Settlements and the largest banks. Stripe arrived at it from the commercial side, with no mandate and no public debate.

What This Means for the Individual

Sands made two admissions that deserve attention.

First, on pricing: “There is probably no longer such a thing as a SKU.” The fixed, posted price, the same for every buyer, is giving way to pricing that adjusts continuously by customer and by outcome.

Second, on negotiation between machines:

“Agents are relentless. They are willing to negotiate as long as they need to negotiate… You could imagine consumer surplus being eroded relatively quickly.”

Consumer surplus is the economist’s term for the good deal, the difference between what you would have paid and what you did pay. An economist at the center of this system expects that difference to shrink.

My Thoughts

My inference is as follows. Stripe has assembled, under one private roof, a wallet bound to identity, a reputation score that precedes the purchase, a meter on machine intelligence, a stablecoin, and a blockchain to settle it. Each piece has a reasonable business justification. Together they amount to the ledger, the meter, and the gate for machine commerce.

Technocracy was defined in 1938 as the science of social engineering, with the measurement and accounting of all production and consumption at its core. The original Technocrats had no instrument that could do it. Stripe’s stack, built for ordinary commercial reasons, can.

Whoever owns the meter sets the terms of commerce, and Stripe now owns the meter.

References

CoinDesk, “Coinbase-Backed AI Payments Protocol Wants to Fix Micropayment but Demand Is Just Not There Yet,” CoinDesk, March 11, 2026. Cites Artemis data: about $28,000 daily volume, about 131,000 daily transactions, average payment about $0.20, roughly half of activity self-dealing or wash trading.

Forrester, “Why Stripe’s Machine Payments Protocol Signals a Turning Point for Micropayments,” Forrester Blogs, 2026. Machine Payments Protocol launched March 18, 2026, with the Tempo mainnet, co-created with Paradigm.

Nate B. Jones, “AI Agents Are Starting To Buy. Stripe Is Building How They Pay,” interview with Emily Sands, Head of Data and AI, Stripe, YouTube, 2026. Source of all Sands quotations.

Payments Dive, “Stripe Acquisition May Bolster Its AI Strategy,” Payments Dive, 2026. Reported price above $7 billion (Bloomberg) and up to $10 billion (Wall Street Journal); about 8 million developers and 400 models; Gaybrick statements.

Stripe, “Stripe Publishes 2025 Annual Letter and Announces Tender Offer,” Stripe Newsroom, 2026. $1.9 trillion total volume, up 34 percent; roughly 1.6 percent of global GDP; 90 percent of the Dow and 80 percent of the Nasdaq 100; stablecoin volume around $400 billion; Bridge volume more than quadrupled; Tempo.

Stripe, “Stripe Builds Out the Economic Infrastructure for AI with 288 Launches,” Stripe Newsroom, Sessions 2026. Streaming payments; Metronome metering with stablecoin micropayments on Tempo; Link wallets for agents.

Technocracy Inc., The Technocrat magazine, 1938. Definition of Technocracy as “the science of social engineering.”

This story originally appeared in Truthdig on Sep. 15, 2026, and is shared with permission.

During the national anthem of the first three 2016 NFL preseason games, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat down on his team’s bench between two Gatorade coolers. Few noticed, and nobody made mention of the gesture until a Black reporter for NFL Network named Steve Wyche asked him about it following the third exhibition tilt, a home game against the Green Bay Packers. Wyche’s interview with Kaepernick put the quiet protest on newsfeeds across the country. Then, shortly after police shot and killed Alton Sterling and Philando Castile within a 48-hour period — Kaepernick and a teammate, safety Eric Reid, went a step further before the final preseason game on Sept. 1. Instead of sitting on the bench during the anthem, they took a knee. The rest is civil rights and sports history.

The story of Kaepernick’s life before and after that fateful stand is the subject of his new memoir, “The Perilous Fight,” co-written with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Nick Chiles. Kaepernick’s journey from a shy adoptee of color to white parents uninterested in exploring his Black experience, to a boldfaced protest icon is a singular American story, whose hinge moment came at the cusp of the Trump era. The book, which comes out tomorrow, will be available at most places where books are sold — but not Target. Kaepernick is boycotting the retailer over the company’s anti-diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. I spoke with the author in late August. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Truthdig: Beginning where the book begins, have you thought about what it means to be a public face for adopted children? 

Colin Kaepernick: It’s interesting, I didn’t actually hear much about adoption prior to the 2016 protest, which is when I got a surprising amount of letters and feedback from adoptees. It wasn’t immediately on my radar because being adopted is just life for me; like a regular Tuesday, right? But as more and more people reached out over the years, I’ve become mindful and intentional about showing the positive elements of it, but also the realities, and what it requires to work through all of it. Looking back, it’s natural this position came into my realm. I try to represent our community appropriately. 

How were you able to grow as a person at the University of Nevada-Reno?

I was fortunate to find the right relationships early on. Some I stumbled into, like the one with my roommate-teammate Virgil Green. He invited me to attend Second Baptist Church, which became a second home for me because Reno wasn’t overly welcoming to its small Black population either. The town’s historical nickname is “The Mississippi of the West.” Later on in college, another teammate, future Super Bowl champion Brandon Marshall, introduced me to the Kappas, an esteemed Divine Nine Black fraternity, which I didn’t even know we had because the campus population was so small. 

One of the funniest moments in the book is your dad getting all worked up and questioning you because he thinks it’s an “Animal House” situation.

Yeah, Dad. Not the same thing at all. The Kappas gave me a great sense of community, and I’ll add one more to the mix. The Center is a multicultural campus spot where if you weren’t white, you could go hang out and relax. I made a lot of friends there as well. I had these three safe spaces where I could have conversations I never had [growing up] back in Turlock [California]. I explored ideas and concepts I hadn’t been exposed to previously, so even with the demands of football, college allowed me to grow and develop in important ways. 

I revisited your NFL highlight reels and will confess to forgetting how ahead of your time you were. Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen were certainly watching. Do you hope to reclaim yourself as a quarterback, because in many ways it’s been overshadowed and even memory-holed?

I became the 49ers’ starter in 2012, which is when you start to see a broader shift in the style of quarterback play towards what we see today. Mobile with a lot of movement, beat defenses with your arm and your legs. I’m proud of what I accomplished, but the league’s response to the protest itself is the reason my career isn’t remembered in the way it should be. The NFL did significant work to delegitimize the on-field performances to justify blackballing me.

Delegitimizing is an evenhanded way of describing it.

Yes, it’s a very kind word. There was a lot of work done on that front by the NFL, but what gets missed in all of it is that if I wasn’t the caliber of quarterback that I was, nobody would’ve cared. I know how good I was because a backup QB would’ve just been shuffled off the sidelines and it would’ve been the end of it. My success as a quarterback is precisely why the protest drove the NFL crazy. 

To me, the biggest surprise in “The Perilous Fight” is that your first protest in Houston was impromptu. What was it that hit you when the national anthem played? 

At that point in time, there’d been a wave of police killings, year after year on a regular basis. By then, we’re also in a different era with social media. Historically, you look at the L.A. riots, which erupted only because someone happened to shoot video of Rodney King being beaten by LAPD. One person with a VHS camera. Today, we’re consistently seeing Black men killed by multiple cameras everyone carries around. These killings coincided with the reading and research I’d been doing to understand the historical context of police brutality. Walking onto the field for that 2016 game, playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” hadn’t crossed my mind. When I heard it I asked myself, what does this actually mean to you? 

Having a better understanding of the historical systems of oppression, as opposed to ‘one-off’ incidents, gave me a realization in that moment. What the United States purports to represent doesn’t represent me or a significant portion of the population. Why am I supposed to show pride in this? Steve Wyche caught me sitting in a third game, inquired, and I told him why. By the next day, the story had blown up well beyond sports media.

I joked at the time that you should offer to stand for “The Star-Spangled Banner” in exchange for playing the never-mentioned third verse.

Right, dig a little deeper and the question becomes: What is the actual intention of the national anthem? Why would I ever stand up for that? Absurd. To your point though, sure, if we’re going to ring it out in stadiums, play the full thing. Get it all out there. 

There’s a major public misconception about when you changed tactics in the final preseason game and decided to take a knee. The oft-told tale is that former Green Beret and NFL preseason player Nate Boyer convinced you and teammate Eric Reid to do so, but that isn’t what happened at all. How did Boyer become part of the narrative?

The story came out that way because Nate Boyer positioned it that way. It obviously wasn’t the case, it was Eric and I. As I note in the book, I was a Black guy in a national firestorm and, supposedly, I reached out to a white guy I didn’t know to come and advise me on what to do during the national anthem? Laughable. It was Reid’s idea. The really telling part is that nobody in the media questioned Boyer’s version of events. Why? Well, if it’s Boyer’s idea, it’s a more palpable narrative to make a lot of football fans nominally comfortable. 

Eric and I had spoken to Nate beforehand, and he was supposed to take a knee with us and then at the last minute decided not to, which is its own situation altogether. It became a big decision for Eric and I. Should we combat this bogus story in real time, or do we stay with the protest message we’re trying to send? If the thing with Boyer becomes the focal point, then we’ve lost the impact we’re trying to achieve. We didn’t love seeing that narrative run rampant, but Eric and I decided it wasn’t the battle worth fighting. 

It’s a no-win situation, but Boyer’s story did steer the conversation in public circles to one of free speech, rather than police brutality, which are two very different topics.

Very different, indeed. How the protest is talked about through those two lenses was revealing then and remains so today. People who recognize what Eric and I were doing, see it as a protest against police killing Black people, the serious need to address that and systemic oppression more broadly. The free speech piece of it was always a deflection from the core issues at hand. 

Do you feel there’s a connective tissue from taking a knee to the mass public protests over the last decade, both the righteous ones following George Floyd’s murder, and opposite ones like Jan. 6? 

I’ve never thought about it that way. I mainly look at the anthem protest in terms of the wins we’ve had and the progress we’ve made, but also how much more work there is to do, especially given all the resistance to creating a fair and equitable society. How loud and vocal the other side of it has gotten over the last 10 years is both surprising and not at the same time. We’ve taken major steps back, but I’d rather have it all out in the open so we know what we’re up against. It’s valuable to know where it lies. 

Have you found the last decade disheartening?

At times for sure, but my hope is that the awful politics are part of a last-ditch effort. As far as where we’re at as a society, there’s a strong growing undercurrent of people saying “enough’s enough.” We’re heading in the right direction, but you have to weather the hard times. Keep playing offense in the storm. 

One savvy author’s move on your part is mentioning President Donald Trump as little as possible. I thought there would be more pronounced score-settling and was sincerely hoping you’d “motherfuck” the big man once or twice. Did you go back and forth at all about your impressive restraint?

Look, that man had a direct impact, working with NFL owners to blackball me. That exists, that’s real, so there is plenty I could say about him personally—

Wouldn’t it feel good just saying it out loud?  

Maybe, but I know in many ways that’s what they want. They want to be the center of the story and have relevance and influence in that way. Him in particular. There’s obviously a level of power and influence that comes with his position, but I don’t have to lean into that or accept it. I’m trying to stay focused on what’s most important. He doesn’t fit the bill. 

Given the nightmare CTE report that came out this week combined with distance from your playing days, does your brain thank you for missing out on a decade of head shots, even if your heart says otherwise?

It’s a both/and answer. There’s my love of playing football, nothing else like it, with its competitive nature, the camaraderie of a group of guys coming together to win. You put yourself through so much it makes success incredibly rewarding in ways you can’t find anywhere else. And yet, there are serious consequences. I haven’t even read this week’s report yet, but I remember the one where they had more than a hundred players and every single one of them had CTE except for one, a kicker I think. If you want to play, be a kicker. 

The physical consequences of football are real. My wife, Nessa Diab, and I have asked the question so many families are asking. If we have a son, will we let him play football? As a parent who knows the undeniable impact, I would like him to play other sports. In football, CTE is not an if, it’s a when. You don’t want to put your child in that situation. 

On a personal level, I played football for 20-plus years, so time will tell the damage done, but am I glad I saved myself some hits? Yes. Would I love to get back out on the field? Absolutely. 

You write about Jay-Z, who supported you on “Saturday Night Live,” then ignored you, later tried to co-opt you after Roc Nation partnered with the NFL, and then last summer, after the book was finished, called you out at Yankee Stadium. Do you think these will be the tabloid headlines to emerge out of “The Perilous Fight?”

I’m not sure, because there are so many different topical pieces in the book. Like the Nate Boyer story isn’t known, hasn’t been talked or written about, so I think there will be a good amount there. On the Jay-Z side, this is repetitive behavior that there’s been conversations about for quite a while. There may be some surprise around specific details, but Jay-Z’s overall actions won’t be shocking to anyone who has paid attention. 

As noted in “The Perilous Fight,” you do not watch the NFL at all, but I’m curious if you’ve seen clips of Eminem taking a knee during the halftime show of Super Bowl LVI?

I had friends text me about it, but I’ve never seen it because I don’t engage. I hope solidarity is the case. And if so, while I don’t love anyone who is now doing the Super Bowl show because of the Jay-Z deal, I appreciate the sentiment. 

Finally, looking back, can you believe how the last 10 years have played out? How you became a monumental public figure — and all of the fallout that came along with it — for a generally mild act of protest against an ongoing life-and-death problem for communities of color? It’s mind-blowing, no?  

It really speaks to the fragility of a certain portion of society. In basic form, I’m protesting police killing Black people. The flip side of resistance to this simple human concept is — what? Police should be killing Black people? Yes, I’ve been in the center spotlight, but I’m also part of a larger movement of people publicly screaming, “Hey, you shouldn’t be killing us!”

It’s the lowest of bars to get over.

On Monday, the President of the United States told the people of Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, Arizona, and every other state now fighting hyperscale data centers exactly what he thinks of them. “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backward and poor,” he wrote on Truth Social. “If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign.” And then the warning: “If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.”

The context is not subtle. Polling now shows a large majority of Americans oppose new data centers, with complaints centering on rising electricity bills, excessive water usage and industrial noise. Candidates in at least 21 races across 18 states have run television ads on the issue, split almost evenly between the parties. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has warned that data-center opposition in Ohio is, in its own words, the anchor hanging around Senator Jon Husted’s neck in his race against Sherrod Brown.¹

A rational political actor facing that landscape might listen. Trump instead did what Technocrats have always done when the public gets in the way of the engineering plan: he redefined the objection as a moral defect. And to seal it, he tied every county commissioner voting against a 500-megawatt campus to Beijing. “China could not be happier with this anti-data center movement,” he wrote. “Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!”²

If that rhetorical move sounds familiar, it should. It is the secular translation of a sermon Peter Thiel has been preaching for two years.

The Antichrist as Safety Regulator

Beginning in the fall of 2024 and culminating in a four-part lecture series delivered to the ACTS 17 Collective in San Francisco in 2025, Thiel laid out a theological-political thesis that has since become the operating theology of the AI buildout. The Antichrist, Thiel argues, will not arrive as a reckless technologist. He will arrive as a safety-minded administrator, exploiting fears of nuclear war, climate collapse and artificial intelligence to install a one-world governance system. His slogan, drawn from 1 Thessalonians 5:3, is “peace and safety.”³

Thiel named names. In the twenty-first century, he told his audience, the Antichrist is “a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta Thunberg or Eliezer Yudkowsky.” Climate activists and AI safety researchers are, in his phrase, “legionnaires of the Antichrist,” not because they are consciously evil but because they are building the institutional architecture a future world-state would need. And on the technologies themselves, Thiel was candid: “Maybe these things are good or bad. Stopping them seems far, far worse.”⁴

Set that beside the Truth Social post and the structure is identical. In Thiel’s register, the person who wants to slow AI is doing the Antichrist’s work. In Trump’s register, the person who wants to slow the data center is “backwards,” “poor,” and objectively serving China. Neither framing permits the position that most of those Ohio voters actually hold, which is not “stop AI” but “do not make my family pay for your grid load.” Economic objections invite cost-benefit analysis and compromise. Apocalyptic and treasonous framings do not. You cannot negotiate with the Antichrist, and you cannot negotiate with a Chinese asset.

Technocrat-in-Chief

Courtenay Turner and I documented in The Final Betrayal (November 2025) how the second Trump Administration became the vehicle by which a cohort of billionaire arch-Technocrats, Thiel foremost among them, moved from the periphery of American power to its center. Thiel financed J.D. Vance’s political career from the ground up. His Palantir alumni and Founders Fund network populate the national-security and technology apparatus. The Dark Enlightenment’s contempt for democratic consent, which we traced through Thiel’s own writings and those of his intellectual circle, is no longer a fringe philosophy. It is staffing policy.

What we argued then, and what Monday’s outburst confirms, is that Trump has not merely hosted these men. He has become the Technocrat-in-Chief. The populist who promised to return power to forgotten communities is now instructing those same communities that their objection to a hyperscale facility next to their children’s school is evidence of backwardness.

Sorry, that is not populism. That is the voice of Howard Scott and Technocracy, Inc. in 1934, telling Americans that their opinions were irrelevant to the requirements of the energy system and that the Technate would allocate resources according to engineering necessity, not democratic preference.

The MAGA movement was told it was getting America First. What it is getting is a federal executive using the full weight of the presidency to override local self-government on behalf of the single most capital-intensive industry in human history.

Energy Is the Currency

The historical Technocracy movement made one claim that has never been refuted: the fundamental unit of value in an industrial society is the kilowatt-hour and not the dollar. Scott and his engineers proposed replacing money with energy certificates and allocating energy to every man,  woman, and child by expert decree. Thankfully, they failed to seize power in the 1930s. They did not fail to describe the twenty-first century.

Hyperscale data centers are the first industrial class whose product is literally computation purchased with electricity. When a facility draws hundreds of megawatts, the question is not abstract. It is whether the household or the hyperscaler has priority claim on the grid, and who pays for the transmission and generation built to serve the newcomer. Every rate case now pending before a state utility commission is a contest over exactly that. Trump’s post resolves the contest by fiat: the data center wins, and anyone who says otherwise is a traitor to prosperity.

This is resource control transferring from individuals to consolidated institutional actors, which is the definition of Technocracy I have used for two decades. It does not require a world government. It requires only that the people who own the compute also control the political apparatus that decides who gets the power.

The Inversion

Here is the irony Thiel’s disciples never confront. His stated nightmare is a distant regulator overriding local self-government in the name of safety. Yet the actual mechanism now in use is a national executive overriding local self-government in the name of the AI buildout. The tool he warns against is the tool being wielded, pointed the other way. The county that votes no is not the world-state. It is the last unwatched place in the system, and it is being told to shut up and sit down.

And the China card is doing double duty. Trump invokes Beijing as the beneficiary of American resistance in the very month he prepares to host Xi Jinping, the Technocrat-in-Chief of China, at the White House. A congressional committee has demanded an investigation into whether China is stoking the anti-data-center movement; Trump declined to repeat that charge, but said the Chinese “can’t believe it is happening.”⁵

China is the rhetorical enemy for domestic consumption and the strategic partner in the architecture. Readers who followed my analysis of the Beijing summit in May will recognize the pattern. American and Chinese Technocracy are not at war with each other. They are converging, and the American public is being disciplined to accept the merger.

Speak Up While You Can

I have repeated that Free Speech and the First Amendment are on the guillotine in 2026. This may be the last battle that decides our fate.

Certainly, the people of Ohio did not ask for this. They were not consulted. They are being told that their electric bills, their water tables, and their quiet nights are the acceptable price of a race with China whose terms they were never shown. And when they object, the most powerful man in the world calls them backward, foolish, and prone to self-harm.

They should say no anyway. Not because AI is evil, and not because the Antichrist is coming, but because the right of a community to decide what gets built inside its borders is the last practical check on Technocracy that ordinary Americans still hold.

Every local vote against a data center is a vote for the proposition that the people, not the engineers, decide. Thiel calls that heresy. Trump calls it treason. I call it self-government, and it is worth defending precisely because they want it gone.

References

1. Kevin Breuninger, “Trump says U.S. communities opposing AI data centers could end up ‘backwards and poor’,” CNBC, August 31, 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/31/trump-data-centers-backlash-elections-congress.html. The NRSC memo language and the 21-races-in-18-states figure are reported there and in AFP coverage of the same day.
2. Agence France-Presse, “Trump blasts US backlash against data centers,” August 31, 2026, syndicated at https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/trump-blasts-us-backlash-against-161603675.html. All Trump quotations are from his Truth Social post as reproduced by AFP.
3. “Thiel’s Framing of Proponents of an AI Treaty as ‘Antichrist’ Collides with 60 Years of Catholic Doctrine,” Center for Bioethics and Public Affairs in AI (CBPAI), April 8, 2026, https://www.cbpai.org/blog-1/thiels-framing-of-proponents-of-an-ai-treaty-as-antichrist-collides-with-60-years-of-catholic-doctrine; and Fortune, “Peter Thiel just gave the public its closest look yet at his ‘Antichrist’ theory,” July 18, 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/07/18/what-is-antichrist-peter-thiel-pope-leo-ai-regulation/.
4. Leaked recordings of the ACTS 17 Collective lectures, as reported by the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post (September–October 2025) and analyzed in “The Eschatology of Deregulation: On Peter Thiel’s Antichrist,” OILab, https://oilab.eu/the-eschatology-of-deregulation-on-peter-thiels-antichrist/. The Thunberg/Yudkowsky remark is quoted in multiple contemporaneous accounts of the lectures.
5. AFP, op. cit.; CNBC, op. cit. Trump’s upcoming White House meeting with Xi Jinping is noted in the AFP report.