The New AI State

How Trump, Broligarchs, and Surveillance Capital Are Building a Digital Authoritarian Future

Welcome to TACO Tuesday! In this week’s post, we’re diving deeper into the double dealing, highly immoral, and absolutely anti-democratic marriage of the Broligarchy with the military and the creation and funding of our own Digital Gestapo - ICE - as funded by the One Big Beautiful Bill. AI Tech is of course at the core of both their strategy and tactics. The convergence is real, the amount of data consolidation performed illegally by DOGE is being lapped up by Palantir and spread across the Military and Law Enforcement. This is a digital coup. We are in very serious trouble.

Let’s drop the pretense.

What’s happening right now in the United States is not just a clash of policy priorities or a shift in tech innovation. It’s something far more consequential: the rapid construction of a new, AI-powered infrastructure of control—built by a coalition of political operatives, billionaire Broligarchs, and government agencies led by lickspittle toadies who no longer feel any need to pretend they serve the public.

This is the story of how a constellation of players—the Trump administration, Musk’s empire, Meta, Google, Palantir, and OpenAI—are remaking the United States into a digital surveillance state. At the heart of it all? A technology that was supposed to liberate us, that “Next Big Thing” - cue jazz hands - artificial intelligence.

The Trojan Horse: One Big Beautiful Bill

On July 4th, 2025, Donald Trump signed the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, into law to the cheers of craven republicans everywhere (Musk being a notable exception but more on that later). The OB3, a sprawling legislative package that includes everything from border wall funding to tech deregulation. Buried deep in its pages was a quiet but radical clause endorsed by the House: a 10-year federal freeze on any state-level regulation of artificial intelligence.

The message was clear: let the federal government—and its friends in Silicon Valley—handle the future of AI.

The backlash was swift. More than 140 civil rights groups, from the ACLU to the Georgetown Center on Privacy & Technology, to our own readers, called the bill a Trojan Horse for unchecked surveillance, data exploitation, and corporate power. They were right.

While the Senate ultimately rejected the AI freeze in a bipartisan 99–1 vote, the damage was done. The bill signaled the beginning of a massive realignment between government, tech, and military power—all accelerated through AI.

The Tech-Military Complex 2.0

At the center of this new alignment sits a powerful advisory body you’ve probably never heard of: the National Strategic AI and Defense Advisory Board, created by executive order with zero congressional input. Its members? A who’s-who of Big Tech and Big Defense:

• Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI

• Safra Katz, CEO of Oracle Corp

• Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir

• Nick Clegg, head of global policy at Meta

• Trae Stephens, partner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and chair of defense contractor Anduril

• Senior officials from DARPA and the Department of Defense

This board doesn't just offer advice. It shapes how the U.S. government builds AI, uses AI, and—crucially—who it buys it from. And as it turns out, the answer is usually the people sitting on the board.

Then came Detachment 201—the Pentagon’s new Executive Innovation Corps. This initiative enlisted top Silicon Valley execs, including OpenAI’s Kevin Weil and Meta’s Andrew Bosworth, into the U.S. Army Reserve with military ranks. Their job? Embed into the defense bureaucracy and accelerate AI deployments for “modern warfighting.”

They are not advisors. They are officers. This is not a partnership. It is a merger. We covered this particular aspect in great depth in last week’s post - AI Junta.

From Your Phone to ICE: The Data Consolidation Pipeline

Meanwhile, another shift has quietly reshaped the balance between private and public power: the transfer of American behavioral data from the tech sector to the federal government.

Through a classified $18 billion, 10-year contract, the Trump administration handed over control of the DOGE database(Domestic Operations and Geo-Enabled Intelligence) to Palantir. DOGE includes:

• Location histories

• Social media activity

• Facial recognition data

• Shopping and spending patterns

• Protest attendance and “networked affiliations”

All of it aggregated and funneled into Palantir’s AI systems, where it’s used to generate “threat profiles” of U.S. citizens—including immigrants, political organizers, and even journalists.

In short: this is predictive policing on a national scale. And it’s being run by a company with deep ties to ICE, CBP, and now the Pentagon.

This isn’t just a surveillance upgrade. It’s the foundation of an American Gestapo; an unaccountable fusion of corporate data, military logistics, and artificial intelligence used to track, rank, and eventually preempt people based on what they might do.

Double-Dealing and Conflicts of Interest

The grift is as blatant as it is bold.

• Sam Altman sits on the national AI board while OpenAI receives billions in government contracts—including a $40 billion raise in Q1 2025, the largest private tech funding round in history.

• Palantir, run by Trump ally Alex Karp and backed by Peter Thiel, gets $18 billion to manage DOGE—a system they helped design.

• Meta and Google lobby aggressively to keep AI regulation federal (and friendlier), even as they build the platforms feeding data into these systems.

• And Elon Musk, through xAI and SpaceX, has secured federal contracts to build “civic infrastructure”—meaning compute clusters, satellites, and battlefield systems designed to house AI models. For now. Given his current stance against the OB3 and sliming President TACO with Jeffrey Epstein ties - who knows. Jeff Bozos, after his grotesque nuptials to Charro Barbie, seems more than willing to pick up the slack.

All of this has been structured to avoid oversight, skirt FOIA laws, and exempt itself from traditional procurement ethics. It’s insider trading on a national scale, dressed up in patriotism, security, and innovation.

What About the Law?

Several critical legal protections are being run over in the name of “AI modernization”:

• The Fourth Amendment: In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement needs a warrant to collect location data. DOGE’s national database effectively ignores this, thanks to a classified “national security” exemption.

• The First Amendment: AI systems trained to identify “civil unrest” and “networked anti-government sentiment” are now flagging protest activity—before it even happens.

• The Fifth Amendment: Americans are being profiled by opaque, proprietary algorithms—without notice, without recourse, and without due process.

These are not hypotheticals. They are unfolding realities—enabled by secrecy, executive fiat, and the unchecked power of the tech industry. As we’ve seen, President TACO is not in the least afraid of sending the Federal Military into sovereign States. Now, armed with all our personal data and the means for collection, harvest, and manipulation means we now have our own Abwehr in addition to a Gestapo.

The AI Mirage

Over the past 5 years, AI has been relentlessly hyped as a tool for progress: better healthcare, smarter education, clean energy breakthroughs. What we now have instead is a panopticon.

The AI models being deployed today aren’t improving lives. They are being trained on our most intimate behaviors to serve one goal: control.

• Control of borders

• Control of labor

• Control of protest

• Control of speech

• Control of contemporary narrative

• Control of history

And because these systems are private-sector black boxes, there’s no democratic mechanism to stop them.

The Real Cost

What does this unholy alliance mean for democracy?

• The federalization of AI power has gutted the states’ ability to protect their residents’ privacy, security, and livelihoods.

• The privatization of data governance has handed your rights to companies whose only accountability is to shareholders. First paid by you in your subscriptions and then paid for again by the US Government. You are the Product.

• The militarization of Silicon Valley has fused war-making and internal surveillance, with market-making.

• And the criminalization of dissent—driven by AI flagging, not human evidence—is laying the groundwork for a new kind of authoritarianism, where citizenship can be revoked without due-process and protest is a crime.

This is not science fiction. It is the policy architecture of a digital authoritarian future—and it’s being built right now.

What Now?

We need a response as serious as the threat:

• Congress must act: Declassify the DOGE contract. Hold public hearings on Detachment 201. Enforce the Fourth Amendment.

• State legislatures must resist: Continue passing AI transparency laws, privacy protections, and algorithmic audit requirements.

• Tech workers must organize: Refuse to build systems that erode civil rights.

• Citizens must demand accountability: Not just from the government—but from the private firms behind the curtain.

Because if we don’t act soon, AI won’t be a tool of progress. It will be the machinery of our unmaking. Smash the Machines!