Thomas Jefferson Napalm™️

Six days ago, I explained why Democrats fear AI. It hits all three pillars of their power: scarcity, narrative, money. And I wrote that since they can't stop the technology, they want to become its toll booth. I didn't think I'd be proven right this fast. If you want to live in a world fully controlled by government, without democracy, you don't have to do anything. Just let the Democrats do it. The bill is called the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. Introduced in September by Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar, and pushed since the midterm wave as a day one priority. Read what's in it. A new cabinet-level federal agency: a Department of AI. To train an advanced model, you'd need a charter from that department. In other words: permission. The secretary gets access to your systems, your staff, your premises. He can cut a model off from the internet. If your charter is revoked, your assets can be seized. And executives who break the rules face up to twenty years in prison. Twenty years. The kind of sentence we reserve for illegally building nuclear weapons. For training software. But the penalty isn't the worst part. The threshold is. The bill defines "advanced" AI as anything trained on 10^25 operations or more. Around thirty public models already clear that bar. And the threshold won't be set by Congress. It will be set by the secretary, with exclusive authority to define it and move it whenever he wants. Read that again. One appointed official, elected by no one, will decide how much intelligence you're allowed to build. That's what I mean by a world without democracy. You still get to vote. But the things that matter are no longer voted on. They're licensed. And if you live in Europe, you already know that number. 10^25 is exactly the threshold Brussels chose in the AI Act to classify a model as "systemic risk." Democrats aren't looking at Silicon Valley. They're looking at Brussels. The continent that wrote the first major AI law before building a single AI that matters. We've seen this movie before. In 1643, the English Parliament required a license before anyone could print a book. A year later, John Milton published Areopagitica, without a license, and wrote that one might "as good almost kill a man as kill a good book." The printing press was the tool that spread knowledge. So power wanted to own the gate. Today the tool is called AI. And the reflex is the same: prior licensing. In 2000, a US federal appeals court ruled that source code is protected by the First Amendment. Code is expression. Requiring government approval before you train and release a model means putting a stamp in front of speech. Now ask the only question that matters: who does a license protect? Never the public. Always the people who already have one. Sanders says he wants to stop the "AI oligarchs." His bill does the exact opposite. The three or four giants with armies of lawyers will survive the toll booth. The independent researcher, the startup, the open-source model will die in the line. That's how upstream regulation always ends. It doesn't break the monopoly. It writes the monopoly into law. Meanwhile, Beijing isn't going to pause its labs because a senator from Vermont asked nicely. Hayek described this logic in 1944. A plan cannot tolerate people who refuse to follow it. So it starts with licenses, moves on to inspections, and ends with prison. So this is for Americans. And for everyone watching from Europe, because you already know where this road goes. AI is the first technology that lets anyone verify, build and create without asking anyone for permission. That's exactly why they want to make you get one. Yesterday, you needed a permit to build a house. Tomorrow, you'll need one to build a mind. You still get to choose whether you want to live in that world. For now.