Connecting Vance's Neo-Nazi Apologia And His Artificial-Intelligence Boosterism

The Silicon Valley-MAGA alliance is out to globalize the DOGE smash-and-grab. Its version of AI "Great Power Competition" is the thin end of the wedge, so watch who embraces it. 

Edited by Sam Thielman

VICE PRESIDENT VANCE has had the kind of European tour that seems like a statement of intent for the foreign policy of the MAGA strain represented by Elon Musk and DOGE. It’s the subset of reactionaries that Quinn Slobodian identifies as the union of "the Wall Street–Silicon Valley nexus of distressed debt and startup culture; anti-New Deal conservative think tanks; and the extremely online world of anarcho-capitalism and right-wing accelerationism." Vance's past week provides a moment of clarity over its foreign ambitions. 

There is no getting around Vance's speech on Friday to the Munich Security Forum, so let's take that first. That speech upbraided Europe, and specifically Germany, for violating "values shared by the United States" by shunning far-right antidemocratic forces rooted in Nazism. In Vance's telling, the for-now-dominant parties in Germany are the real Nazis for refusing to coalition with the Alternative for German (AfD), a Neo-Nazi party making a grab for not just electoral success but the respectability that Vance conferred during the speech. 

Vance put forward an expectation that cooperation with such forces will be the rock upon which the U.S. shall build the new church of its European security guarantees. He reinforced it by meeting with AfD's Alice Weidel, a disgraceful thing to do, and a disgusting profanation of the memory of those slaughtered by the Nazis at Dachau, where Vance visited as transparent cover for promoting AfD. 

There will be those for whom the scandalous aspects of Vance's speech are his implication that Russia and China are not principal threats to Europe. (And I wonder how that line sounds translated into Ukrainian.) There will also be those who foolishly extend antiwar credit to Vance for his disinterest in focusing on foreign threats. But the crucial point is that such disinterest is replaced not with peacebuilding but with Vance's domestic threat inflation, targeting migrants and those who stand in the way of far-right parties that ascended to scapegoat them.

The postwar European architecture that Vance seeks to discredit as undemocratic stands in the way of what Vance described as the various continental Herrenvolks. Vance invests that cohort, exclusively, with democratic legitimacy. Vance inverted what has been admittedly empty, magical rhetoric rhetoric typical of fora like the Munich Security Forum and favored by politicians like Joe Biden—rhetoric treats western democracies as inherently peaceful while obscuring their frequent bellicosity and the material bases for it. (As well as obscuring democratic erosion in both Europe and America which have quite a bit to do with foreign bellicosity.) This gambit of Vance's is familiar enough to be cliché. Far-right forces always claim legitimacy by discrediting the opposition as outside the authentic public, and by redefining the authentic public as, exclusively, its supporters.

Vance's Munich speech was so loud it risks drowning out his earlier speech, in Paris, about artificial intelligence. I would argue the two of them, taken together, shows who the 2025-era MAGA agenda is for. 

The AI speech shows the vision behind Peter Thiel and his Silicon Valley coterie—the group that bankrolled the Appalachian Vance so that he could posture as a voice of the forgotten white worker while serving the capitalists that fleece the working class. Vance's message was that Europe should not "excessively regulate" AI development, since the future is "not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety." Vance's principal target is the GDPR, Europe's post-Snowden data-privacy law, which gives the game away. GDPR is a meager mitigation against surveillance capitalism, but it does rest on the presumption you have a say—and perhaps an ownership stake—in data you generate. [It also forces companies trying to serve the European market from the U.S. to either extend greater protections to Americans or develop multiple versions of their software, a requirement for which the real average American owes the E.U. a debt of gratitude.—Sam]

That strips the veneer away from airy rhetoric about winning the future or whatever. AI is about the capitalist's ability to assert a right to extract value, at scale, from a resource that each of us creates when we interact with the internet. Ever thus, yes, but AI is a new technological form and a new field of economic and geopolitical contest. Vance explicitly warns Europe that the U.S. "will not accept" foreign governments' "tightening the screws on U.S. tech companies with international footprints." Great news for Thiel-funded AI start-ups-slash-defense contractors like Palantir and Anduril. Vance dismisses the prospect of placing basic controls over AI with preserving "incumbent advantage," meaning Google and Microsoft, whose displacement will benefit the Thiel coterie. 

But the sickest joke in Vance's speech is his fairly energetic insistence that AI won't displace workers. "We will always center workers in our AI policy," Vance promised. That's the equivalent of centering cows at McDonalds. Vance tries to insist that AI is about "supplementing, not replacing, the work being done by Americans," but that's obvious bullshit. The main thing that AI will do is wipe out jobs, since it will be a tool of capital, and capital's primary use for it will be to hold down or eliminate labor costs. Vance comes close to giving the game away when he says that what excites him about "the sector" is that it "depends on those who work with their hands, even as robotics will change our factories." He doesn't elaborate on what those changes will be. 

But don't worry, workers who brace for the latest decimation of your industries. The administration "will make sure that America has the best-trained workforce," because the schools "will teach students how to manage, how to supervise, and how to interact with AI-enabled tools." So this is promising even less than the hollow promises of worker retraining in the face of automation, since Vance is looking past the current workforce and toward the next generation of workers. But who's going to do this teaching while the Trump team sets to work dismantling the Department of Education? It won't happen in the schools available to the working class. Notice that Vance's imaginary students are being taught to manage and supervise. 

Here is a holistic picture of the Network State future. Hollow out democracy to a Herrenvolk in whose name the latest iteration of capitalist oligarchy can plunder state institutions, while providing nothing material to that volk, since a capitalist oligarchy will always fear the people. Provide them instead the persecution of out-groups perpetually blamed as the obstacle to the material advancement of the volk. No one can say the formula is unfamiliar. But Vance's emphasis on internationalizing the project—or perhaps it's more accurate to say his support for weakening the various obstacles to their international partners seizing power—provides a guide to understanding the foreign goals of this strain of MAGA that shouldn't be ignored while the foreign-policy commentariat tries to figure out whether Trump's threats to, say, seize Greenland are real. 

I found it significant that Vance's Munich speech accused Europe of forgetting the undefined "lessons of the Cold War." Viewed one way, those forgotten lessons are that capital must triumph over worker power; and that when focused on an external enemy, formerly the Soviet Union and now China, state power, including military power, can be unleashed for that purpose. War is the health of the Silicon Valley state. Watch who among the Democrats and their affiliated organs accepts the logic of the AI Cold War, as Biden did, while ignoring the rest of the agenda. 

Right now, we're witnessing Elon Musk wield government like a private equity firm with a new acquisition in its claws: rip out whatever has perceived value and junk the rest. Vance as a political figure is much closer to the constellation of capitalist forces Musk represents than Trump is. He is its creation. And whatever Trump's maneuvers for dictatorial power after 2028, Vance can indisputably run for president without constitutional challenge. 

I SOMEHOW FORGOT TO PUT IN THIS NEWSLETTER that U.S. warplanes carried out airstrikes in Syria on January 30 and in Somalia on February 1. You can read Nick Turse for more on the Somali strike. Yesterday, U.S. Central Command announced another strike, which took place on February 15, again in northwestern Syria, against a group aligned with al-Qaeda that may not even exist anymore. One that CENTCOM hasn't announced: Reportedly, a drone strike occurred in Yemen on Feb. 12, against a Saudi figure in what remains of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. 

YOU ALREADY FIGURED THAT THE MIGRANTS BEING SENT TO GUANTANAMO weren't "the worst of the worst" and that every Venezuelan captured would be called Tren de Aragua. But here's reporting indicating that Venezuelan migrants are being targeted for having tattoos or coming from the same region as members of this gang that remains obscure in the United States. The roundup is the point, the sorting is not. 

A MAN IN MIAMI BEACH, Mordechai Brafman, is in police custody after shooting two men he reportedly thought were Palestinians. According to the Miami Herald, surveillance video showed Brafman's truck hitting an abrupt u-turn so he could shoot at a car carrying the men he mistook for Palestinians, apparently emptying an entire 17-round clip into the car. His victims thankfully survived. But this attempted murder is the latest reminder of the wages of dehumanizing Palestinians. 

IKE WILSON, a retired U.S. Army colonel and historian whose name commands respect in thoughtful military circles, has a look at the techno-authoritarian future that's contending for control of MAGA. Wilson centers it on Curtis Yarvin, and I thought this line of Wilson's put it well: "The inefficiencies Yarvin decries are not flaws—they are features designed to prevent the concentration of power and the erosion of rights."

A BRIEF PROGRAMMING NOTE: I'm gearing up for a reporting trip far, far away for THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN. That's going to mean a slowed schedule for this newsletter. If we have another edition this week, it will most likely be the reprint of a reported Zeteo piece I'm racing to finalize, which will be for paid subscribers only. Similarly, I'm going to prewrite my similarly-subscriber-only writers' notes on IRON MAN #5, which I'll give to Sam to publish in mid/late next week, when IRON MAN #5 will be in stores for you to purchase. Thanks for bearing with me—this is going to be a whole lot of work that will pay off in the book. 

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! Bulletproof is also selling signed copies of my IRON MAN run with Julius Ohta, so if you want those, buy them from Flatbush's finest! 

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.