BUILDBRIEF: Never Nuke

NVIDIA Nancy - Monk Money - Bitcoin Baalers - Lent Life

I’ve been living out of a suitcase again. No midair mishaps unless you count what you see while scrolling at 40,000 feet.

There’s a lot to catch up on. Let’s begin.

NEVER NUKE

I’ll leave it to you to catch up on the yet-again-renewed controversy around ending World War Two with a bang. The inciting event this time is Tucker Carlson stopping by Joe Rogan to say, among other provocative things, that dropping The Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was Bad, Actually. Since then, plenty of enterprising Xers have pulled the receipts: turns out plenty of unimpeachably masculine and patriotic Americans, both in the military and the government, didn’t like Truman’s choice. The following lament more or less sums up where things now stand:

I have learned from conservatives that Eisenhower, MacArthur, Hap Arnold, Patton, George Marshall and Admirals Leahy and Halsey were all wrong to oppose nuking Japan and some Democrat hacks - Truman and his advisers - were right. The conservative movement is morally bankrupt

At the heart of this perpetual debate is the territory I plowed thoroughly enough (for me anyway) in Human Forever — The Manhattan Project inaugurated the principle and the practice of a state-within-a-state owned and operated by a priestly class of technologists devoted to mechanically mastering control over the life and death of the planet; and while, out of one side of our collective mouth, we like to champion that development as a testament to our well-earned Zeus-like dominance over all known life, out of the other, we fretfully insist that we had to do it, we didn’t have the luxury of adopting a more “trad” or “conservative” or “Christian” endgame to the festival of mass murder that the “Good War” entailed for so many millions.

If you’re not building the bomb first, you’re letting the Nazis do it; you’re literally Hitler — all this rubs me, and not just me, the very wrong way, and we’ve been slowly reaping the whirlwind ever since. We really ought not do our fellow humans, our fellow Americans, our tech industry, or our beleaguered country so dirty. It’s not even as if we’re enjoying some outsized benefit of sacrificing so much for such tremendous power (which we’re now losing anyway, through neglect and incompetence). The price we’re paying exceeds what can be tallied in lives lost.

It exacts a spiritual toll on us every day, in a manner visible since William F. Buckley’s opening manifesto at National Review. This, too, is well-plowed ground, but we’ll have to give it another run to clarify people’s understanding of how we’re doing the same thing but worse these days with AI—not because “smart” machines are evil, but because we keep letting tech trump America in unnecessary and destructive ways.

In my chapter on the need for a Digital Rights Amendment in Up from Conservatism, I addressed Buckley’s problem and how it infested all of the established movement Right. I was honored and heartened to deliver an of-the-moment updated and extended version of this message at Hillsdale’s National Leadership Summit last week. This was live streamed but not archived; I can’t post the whole thing here, but I can tee it up:

in William F. Buckley’s 1955 mission statement for National Review […] he claims it’s “the job of centralized government (in peacetime) to protect its citizens’ lives, liberty and property.” In wartime, there’s another job: fighting utopian social engineers at home and abroad. “We consider ‘coexistence’ with communism,” Buckley continues, “neither desirable nor possible, nor honorable; we find ourselves irrevocably at war with communism and shall oppose any substitute for victory.” For Buckley, and the movement he forged, centralized government’s primary role was to win world domination.

The quiet part, which went unsaid, was that war for the world led easily to a large, unaccountable, all-controlling government. After all, the Manhattan Project had created a massive and secret state within a state, covertly employing over one hundred thousand people across military installations nationwide. Global dominance required an explosive and unaccountable expansion of government, which alone could push technology to create a weapons system capable of destroying anything in the world and, at its limit, the world itself.

Buckley wanted conservatism to elide this scandalous principle. President Dwight Eisenhower was not so subtle or shy.

NVIDIA NANCY

Speaking of doing wrong by tech and our form of government, you might have noticed Nancy Pelosi — or, officially, her husband — making bank on superbly-timed stock market bets on chip behemoth Nvidia. You might even have noticed Blaze Media noticing and pulling together the likes of Unusual Whales, George Santos, and me, your host, for a tight, scandalous documentary on the ways Members of Congress can and do profit off of their privileged inside position.

Watch and learn.

MONK MONEY

Not long ago, Jonathan Pageau was kind enough to host me for a discussion about everyone’s favorite two topics:

It’s all fun and games until resistance to Bitcoin becomes the topic of conversation, as it did a while later with another kind of host, the Doomer Optimist. I’m not much for debate at this point in my life, but if you’re new to the issue (or a glutton for punishment), you’ll want to not just come for the fellowship but stay for the friction:

BITCOIN BAALERS

I admit, it’s not always easy charting a path between Christians who reject Bitcoin out of hand, as above, and pagans who worship Bitcoin, as below:

#Bitcoin is God

The White Paper is the new, New Testament.

Once you understand this, all your old beliefs become idolatry.

This is the actual Word Of God

This from Max Keiser, known (in some circles) as the “high priest of Bitcoin” and serving, if his X bio is accurate, as “Sr. Bitcoin Advisor” to El Salvador’s President Bukele. Painful as it is to behold such a thing, this is also a reminder of how, under digital conditions, the returns on debate and discourse continue to diminish. You can’t argue someone out of this kind of misbegotten belief. You can’t destroy them with facts and logic. You have to reach the heart, and, as the saints testify, that can’t be done by beating people about the ears with words.

LENT LIFE

By no coincidence, cultivating silence even about the difficulties of one’s struggles toward spiritual discipline receives special emphasis at this Lenten time. When someone asks, however, about more general matters, it’s more fitting to answer, which I did here:

Without the discipline of humility there is no possibility of acquiring careful discernment as to one’s level of spiritual strength or weakness. The acquisition of such discernment may be aided or supplemented by reading and contemplating spiritual texts, but even the very best of these can never substitute for the development of one’s own spiritual experience. Humility is in this sense not at all an abstract virtue or ideal, approached by recalling past examples or imagining future accomplishments, but an experience now, year by year, day by day, moment by moment, rise upon fall, fall upon rise. 

This is the spiritual battle heightened and clarified by the Lenten fast, which extends (or should extend) far beyond what goes into one’s mouth or doesn’t, incorporating all things visible and invisible which one has fashioned into a sort of substitute home, a den of false and fleeting comfort we delude ourselves into pretending we can abide in so as, if only for brief moments, to take a time out from abiding with our Lord in the temple of his that we are. For this abode must, like the room inside the four walls of one’s residence, be properly purified, tidied, and ordered to receive the King.