Kudos to writer Cory Doctorow for his high-profile entry-level economics literacy campaign. I have to assume there’s an audience for his ideas, because people don’t know basic economics?
It’s a fancy new spin on old ideas: the monopoly rent-seeking, regulatory capture, and market power dynamics he describes are retreads from decades of prior writers.
Interesting that he invokes one prior theory, while not admitting to all the others he is borrowing from:
In the same way that Tim Berners-Lee rolled out of bed one morning and said, “The web is too important for me to take out a patent on it. Everyone’s gonna be able to use it.” And the way Jonas Salk said, “The polio vaccine is too important.” He said that owning this vaccine would be like owning the sun, so he didn’t patent it. I’m not a “Great Man of History” guy by any stretch, but I think those people show us the downstream effect of being a real mensch when you start something, just a really solid person, and how it can create a durable culture where there’s an ethos of kindness and care.
Right. Cory is definitely not a man of history, as that interview is basically just repeating textbook stuff well understood since… Stigler “Theory of Economic Regulation” in 1971? Mancur Olson in 1965 “The Logic of Collective Action”? Earlier if you count the trust-busters. Brandeis and the Clayton Act, 1914? Tarbell and Standard Oil, 1904? Veblen in 1899? Sherman Act of 1890?
The HUGE elephant in the room is… are we at a point where basic entry-level economics is served as a “big new idea” to gain traction? Apparently we can’t have normal policy debates using actual technical language anymore, it has to be injected through a viral hook. Part of that blame goes to the toxic ideology that leaked out of the Chicago School labs, which for 40 years misled people that monopoly concerns were outdated/debunked. So now this generation has to rediscover what the previous ones warned about over and over.
Thanks Shit-cago.
Consider this timeline. Tim Wu coined “attention merchants” in 2016 to describe what? Advertising. Leave it to marketing to decide a new term for advertising will sell more books. And then Lina Khan’s 2017 “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” paper was treated as groundbreaking when it basically rebranded pre-1980s antitrust theory by using the word “platform”. Ooh. Wait until you hear what happened next. Zuboff’s book “Surveillance capitalism” in 2019 was heavily promoted as a concept where companies were collecting data to sell ads. Shocking if true!
Original Concept (1970s)
1990s Rebrand
2010s Rebrand
Monopoly
Platform power
Enshittification
Externalities
Spillover effects
Systemic risk
Information asymmetry
Knowledge gaps
Dark patterns
Rent-seeking
Value extraction
Wealth transfer
We’ve built a system where expert consensus doesn’t matter, historical knowledge doesn’t accumulate, and basic economic principles have to be rediscovered and remarketed every generation to gain traction.
That’s… wait for it… the shitification.
It’s not how knowledge is supposed to work in a functioning civilization.
To be fair, Doctorow himself becomes a fascinating foil about someone who can’t decide if he’s more into determinism or contingency in economic history:
Determinism: Once the internet became commercially important, monopolization was inevitable under capitalist logic. The specific policies were just accelerants.
Contingency: Different regulatory choices in the 1990s/2000s could have produced genuinely different market structures (more like the pre-consolidation internet).
Doctorow is in the middle, but leaning contingent—we could have had mandatory interoperability, stronger privacy law, preserved rights to modify purchased tech, etc. And those structural guardrails would have prevented monopolization regardless of who the entrepreneurs were.
The specific mechanisms (DMCA preventing competitive modification, stock-as-currency fueling consolidation, KPI-driven enshittification) are really just some lower-level institutional details within basic economic theory.
Of course, this amnesia about economic predation isn’t new—it’s embedded in how the country commemorates its predators. It’s bad that economic theory keeps getting forgotten and rebranded (intellectual amnesia), but underneath is something even worse! American predators exploiting the cycles are elevated and celebrated (moral amnesia).
Am I right? Epstein files, cough, cough.
America still brazenly celebrates the worst of the worst men like Stanford, Polk, Jackson… does anyone really believe a Bezos, Musk or Zuckerberg isn’t going to exploit the same loopholes if they haven’t been closed.
Stanford?
Yes, that supposed great man of history was “a primary facilitator of genocide”, who oversaw Native American policy in the California legislature. His “killing machine” legacy is feted as if the true engine of Silicon Valley, a man implicated in fraud and genocide.
“Killing machine” is Benjamin Madley’s term of art from “An American Genocide” (Yale University Press, 2016), referring to the system of US soldiers, California militia, volunteers, and mercenaries that California officials created.
Stanford served on the Committee on Indian Affairs in the California state legislature in the 1850s, then as Governor (1862-1863) signed appropriations bills specifically funding extermination campaigns against California ethnic groups.
The population rapidly dropped from 150,000 or more, to less than 12,000 survivors. Multiple sources (UCLA’s Madley, California State Library, SF Chronicle) have all confirmed Stanford “helped facilitate genocide.”
Yeah, giant loopholes. Like the one Stanford still proves.
They not only haven’t been closed but people walk around boasting that they went to Stanford. They literally put his name on their hats and clothing. It’s very strange for anyone who understands history, let alone economic theories of monopoly based on annihilation. Can you imagine a Stalin hat, or a Pol Pot sweatshirt?
Hitler had a track record so bad his name was rightly banned and nobody wears it around. Stanford’s genocide, however…
I mean seriously, the White House didn’t give a clue here about loopholes in economic history of America when they said they’d bring Jackson’s ideas back, another American known for fraud and genocide?
Donald Trump’s favorite president: Andrew Jackson, architect of the Trail of Tears and opponent of centralized banking, grandfather of MAGA “white republic”.
Is Doctorow useful? Entertaining, maybe. But if “enshittification” doesn’t bring actual antitrust enforcement back again, we’re just waiting for a 2045 reboot.
A conversation in Hamburg about delayed trains just exposed who’s ahead in the most significant technology race since the Space Age
“Training” the Public
Dr. Robert Axmann in Hamburg just did something unusual for a government official involved in quantum: he leaked truth.
As head of Germany’s DLR Quantum Computing Initiative, Axmann could have stuck to the standard script about reducing train delays and optimizing airport operations.
“…quantum computers are not yet powerful enough for commercial applications,” said Axmann. But that may be possible next year. […] The first milestones, i.e., demonstrators have already been achieved. […] “The QCMobility project focuses on optimising air, rail and road transport, as well as the maritime environment and intermodal transport,” said Axmann.
Transit infrastructure logic puzzles? As in the 1950s birth of artificial intelligence? As in the birth of modern hacking?
As in… trains?
Germany invests billions into Deutsche Bahn running on time based on classical computers. Chinese trains move half a billion people during Chunyun using ordinary algorithms. Japan’s rail is famously punctual without a single qubit. So isn’t it natural that the countries ahead in public network logistics would become the centerpiece of a multi-billion dollar quantum compute power race?
Yes, but maybe… none of the transit-focused quantum was really ever about trains. Just like the moon race was always really about highly accurate intercontinental missile flight.
These Numbers Don’t Compute (And That’s The Point)
Let’s look at what quantum computing has actually achieved in public transit optimization news:
UK “Breakthrough”:
UK’s Q-CTRL and Network Rail managed to optimize 26 trains over 18 minutes at London Bridge station using 103 qubits. Even this tepid tea is being called “record-breaking” work that could deliver quantum advantage “as early as 2028.”
Real-World Scale:
Let’s get some perspective. About a decade ago I was working with storage performance issues for China’s New Year (Chunyun) travel rush and the scale was staggering then. The 2025 Chunyun is now expected to handle more than half a billion rail trips over 40 days, with daily averages of 12.75 million passengers.
Peak days for the Chinese compute platforms means 14,100 train services operating simultaneously across thousands of stations. Classical algorithms already handle the Chunyun, the world’s largest annual human migration. So what’s quantum got to do?
Moving from solving for 26 trains to 14,000 trains isn’t a scaling problem. It’s a seven orders of magnitude problem.
Researchers freely admit they’re starting on “simplified demonstration problems,” as expected. However, for some reverse perspective, a recent Baltimore study (ignoring America lacking any modern trains) scheduled just 12 trains on D-Wave’s quantum system, and only 2 trains on IonQ’s hardware. Two trains! America, LOL.
It’s not just math to overcome, either. Deutsche Bahn’s digital chief, being stereotypically German, told the media to calm down, since he saw practical large-scale quantum applications for his rail “at least a decade away”. Sure, because for him that’s probably sooner than he expects his application for a new desk chair to be approved.
Now, instead apply a national security lens when you think about what’s really happening today versus a decade away.
Sputnik Wowed the World
Public transit logistics optimization is the most politically palatable justification for winning the sovereign quantum capability race.
There are some very real stakes, which depend on researchers trying to secure public funding:
“We need €500 million to break everyone’s encryption and absolutely wreck our own Internet and every industry we have including critical infrastructure”
“This is for military supremacy in attack logistics”
“We’re building cryptographic weapons but can’t tell you why”
Not going to fly, especially in Germany. Now compare that with:
“€500 million reduces train delays by A and improves national human throughout by B”
“This will reduce emissions by C, preventing D deaths”
“Airport scheduling will improve by E, reducing fuel and ATC staff dependencies”
Same technology.
Radically different political viability and metrics.
The UK strategy includes deploying quantum sensors across critical infrastructure—transport, telecoms, energy, defense—by 2030.
Germany is building five quantum computers in Hamburg, making them available to “DLR research teams and industrial partners across Germany.”
The applications they’re really developing? The same algorithms that optimize train schedules have many military lifts:
Coordinate real-time deployment and attack logistics
Optimize supply chain warfare
Simulate molecular structures for materials science
Crack encryption
Model climate systems
Accelerate drug discovery
Transportation is both an excellent and historic focus as well as (again) the perfect cover story. Everyone understands a rocket to the moon. Almost no one understands mutually assured destruction by the same rockets, let alone understands post-quantum cryptography or quantum chemistry simulations.
Trainless America Falling Behind
While TED talks in a country devoid of trains is reduced to pontificating about theoretical promise of quantum computing, here’s what’s actually happening in advanced nations:
China’s Origin Wukong quantum computer:
Went operational January 6, 2024
Has completed 380,000+ quantum computing tasks
Served 26+ million users from 139 countries
Secured the first commercial quantum computing export order
Production line now builds 8 quantum computers simultaneously
Compare that to the West’s achievement: successfully scheduling 26 trains for 18 minutes in a controlled demonstration.
China has also deployed the CN-QCN quantum communication network spanning 10,000+ kilometers, incorporating 145 fiber backbone nodes and 20 metropolitan networks covering 17 provinces and 80 cities. It’s not a research project—it’s operational infrastructure.
The most telling statistic?
American researchers are among the heaviest users of China’s Origin Wukong quantum computer. We’re literally using their quantum infrastructure while we dance around a TED stage to avoid actual hard work and admitting the obvious.
The EU and China Race
Hamburg is being built as a quantum ecosystem for Germany. Five quantum computers. Indigenous production methods. Talent pipeline development. “Simplified demonstration problems” that will scale over time.
Germany lost funding (Axmann noted their budget was cut from €740 million to €540 million), yet they’re still pushing forward. Why? Because military planners understand what’s at stake.
The quantum computing market in transportation and logistics is projected to grow from $46.6 million in 2025 to $194.6 million by 2032. But the market is not what this is about. The real prize is technological sovereignty, and therefore power in the defining computing and political paradigm of the 21st century.
Leadership in quantum computing is becoming the definitive mark for national prestige, economic competitiveness, and avoiding strategic dependency on foreign power.
An Honest Assessment
I’ve been in countless executive meetings across every industry in America for the past two years, discussing the quantum threats. The Department of Homeland Security had me evaluate and report a strategic quantum-safe target.
Can quantum computers solve railway scheduling better than classical systems? Eventually, of course. Do they need to now? Who’s asking? It’s like asking can a repeating rifle solve hunting needs in 1860.
As I said at the start, China handles the world’s largest human migration annually with classical computing. Japan’s trains run with legendary precision using traditional algorithms. The optimization problems are being solved as best they can by yesterday’s technology. Their old flint-lock rifles are bringing home food just fine.
But that’s not what makes Hamburg’s quantum initiative important:
Nations are building quantum capability under the political cover of civilian applications
Transportation provides relatable, fundable use cases while teams develop general-purpose quantum systems
The algorithms developed for “train optimization” transfer directly to military, cryptographic, and industrial applications
Whoever builds operational quantum infrastructure first gains a potentially insurmountable advantage
Trains probably still will run delays in 2035, quantum computers or not. But Germany—and every other serious power as measured by their trains—will have developed the quantum capability that matters for doing everything else.
When Dr. Axmann talks about trains he is not predicting the future, he’s revealing who is winning in the present.
China isn’t talking about quantum trains—they’re running 380,000+ quantum computing tasks. They’re not writing papers about potential applications—they’re exporting quantum computing capability. They’re not building prototypes—they’re scaling production to eight quantum computers at once.
The West, thanks to open immigration policies and publication platforms, had an early advantage on quantum computing research. More published papers, better theoretical breakthroughs, and Nobel prizes.
China however has quantum computers doing actual work, integrated into national infrastructure, serving millions of users globally. The question now what will define building the quantum infrastructure that will define international power in the next century?
Germans leaked the answer. We probably should listen. Every quantum “transportation optimization” initiative you see announced is a dual-use technology play masquerading as a public service project.
The quantum race no longer is happening in the future. It’s no longer about who publishes the best papers or announces impressive academic qubit counts.
The train has left the station, with leaders building operational systems right now. Who has their workforce ready?. Who has their supply chains ready?. Who’s integrating quantum into immediate national infrastructure planning?
By that measure, the scoreboard isn’t even close. Any Western official talking about quantum solving “trains” knows this: optimizing demonstration problems with two dozen rail lines while China is on their fifth generation of production quantum systems.
Dr. Axmann gave us the usual conservative roadmap:
I expect to see the first practical benefits in five years.
China’s Origin Wukong hit 380,000 completed tasks in less than two years. That’s a lot of cracking.
Do the math and, more importantly, know your arms race history.
The other night I lay awake staring at the stars, contemplating Peter Thiel being catastrophically wrong about history. He was selling a giant bag of fraud, as people literally pay to hear his backwards history in talks, but why… why lie about Churchill?
His framing was so completely backwards, so obviously wrong, it had to be Thiel practicing intentional disinformation.
It got me thinking about the complexity of the 1943 Bengal famine, since Churchill is sometimes accused of unilaterally mishandling it, meaning he personally gets blamed for 3 million deaths.
It’s unfair to blame him entirely, but if someone wants to criticize Churchill for errors, Bengal is the most obvious avenue because it’s complicated, morally ambiguous, and shows how even “good” leaders can be complicit in systemic catastrophe.
Instead, Thiel went with a well known Stalinist statement and attributed it to Churchill, which either shows profound ignorance or… something else.
It would be like hearing that Thiel give an exclusive paid speech about Apple’s first computer being the Radio Shack TRS-80, as if such history errors are worth price of admission.
Gibberish. And probably intentional.
It’s also unfortunate, because the 1943 Bengal catastrophe is actually very relevant today, with direct parallels to the dangerous economics of Big Tech billionaires.
In short, bureaucratic rationality (efficiency metrics, cost control) and market-driven predation (hoarding, speculation) created a perfect storm in history. Churchill was hugely implicated in millions being killed not from an absolute supply shortage, but from what the economist Amartya Sen called an “entitlement failure” system, where people were gated to prevent access to food that exists.
Bengal is a case study of systems optimized for everything except human welfare, and how “rational” decision-making at every level can produce catastrophic outcomes. A decade ago I said this about Big Data platforms; these days it clearly applies to the AI industry, and very much applies to Thiel.
There were two fundamental, interrelated pathologies underlying the catastrophe of Bengal:
Rent Seeking — Artificial Scarcity for Power and Profit: The Famine Inquiry Commission concluded that “a large part of the community lived in plenty while others starved” and noted that “corruption was widespread throughout the province and in many classes of society.” Gandhi has even been implicated in a calculated failure to act, using famine to undermine his political opponents. Enormous profits were made through speculation, war profiteering, hoarding, and corruption by the calculation that “profits for some meant death for others.” Food was deliberately stockpiled in village stores of wealthy landlords and tradesmen who were waiting for inflation to cause price increases. The beneficiaries were big farmers, merchants, and rice mill owners, whose incomes soared while the poor starved. Bengal’s Minister of Civil Supplies gave the import monopoly to his friend and political ally who had a large grain trading business. This was highly profitable when selling at black-market prices, as long as shortages continued. The extremely inelastic demand for food meant traders would lose money if they increased imports.
Efficiency as Status/Virtue: After Temple’s “excessive” spending and immediate response had saved lives in 1873-74, he was criticized rather than celebrated. The subsequent British relief efforts implemented stricter standards with the justification that “excessive pay might promote dependency.” Lord Lytton had opposed famine relief reforms in the belief they would stimulate “shirking by Indian workers,” substantively ordering “there is to be no interference of any kind on the part of Government with the object of reducing the price of food” and instructing district officers to “discourage relief works in every possible way.”
The Toxic Synergy
What makes this particularly devastating is how these two pathologies reinforced each other in a vicious cycle.
Efficiency doctrine provided moral cover for profiteering. When officials invoked “market discipline” and “non-interference,” they justified refusing to disrupt the hoarding and speculation that was killing people. War Cabinet reports noted the Government of India was “unduly tender with speculators and hoarders”—the reluctance to “waste” resources on aggressive intervention meant the corrupt could operate with impunity. Meanwhile, the massive profits from artificial scarcity validated the efficiency ideology: markets were “working,” just not for human welfare.
Both prioritized abstract principles over human lives. Whether it was market efficiency, fiscal responsibility, or profit margins, the actual suffering and death became normalized for these systemic imperatives.
And that sounds to me a LOT like Palantir.
It also sounds like the SRE who forgets the R stands for reliability, and keeps causing outages by forcing “efficiency” in cloud systems by generating artificial scarcity.
Just as 3 million Bengalis died while food existed but was made inaccessible by system operators, Big Tech is building systems where resources, opportunities, and even basic rights may exist in aggregate while systematically withheld through centralized and optimized distribution failures.
The Bengal famine shows that you don’t need malicious intent, only the right combination of profit motive, efficiency ideology, institutional inertia, and a willful blindness to complexity.
That last one is a particular worry in tech these days. The privileged techbro “move fast and break things” ethos—prioritizing velocity over human cost—echoes the kind of oppressive bureaucratic rationality metrics that enabled the worst atrocities of the 20th century.
Thiel preaching lies about history while building systems that replicate its worst pathologies isn’t just ironic, it’s structurally necessary for him to avoid accountability. Accurate historical analysis indicts his entire life’s work.
Concentration of compute resources creating artificial scarcity
“Alignment” framed as efficiency problem rather than power question
Regulatory capture via lobbying and government contracts
Suffering externalized and rendered invisible by optimization metrics
Rhetoric of “inevitability” and “market forces” preventing intervention
Palantir literally is in the business of sophisticated gating—determining who gets surveilled, who gets flagged, who gets deported, who gets targeted. The “food” (resources, freedom, safety) exists, but access is algorithmically controlled for very narrowly controlled profit.
That’s the Bengal famine system all over again, which Churchill criticized and opposed, yet ultimately still gets blame for because he was prime minister.
Where Bengal’s gatekeepers were corrupt officials and grain merchants (constraining options even for Churchill at the height of his power), today’s are engineers optimizing “engagement” and “efficiency” metrics that just happen to concentrate power and profit into Thiel’s pockets while externalizing harm.
Thiel’s confusion of Churchill and Stalin therefore is very revealing in proper context. Stalin intentionally engineered a famine (Holodomor). Churchill was complicit in systemic failure with multiple actors.
Thiel artificially conflates these two in a way that seems extremely self serving, beyond just historical malpractice:
Obscures how systemic optimization can kill without individual malice
Avoids the uncomfortable middle ground where “rational actors” produce catastrophe
Prevents examination of how market fundamentalism enables mass harm
We are talking about the very highest level of authority, a specific role created for a specific person to command entire theaters of war. That person doesn’t resign mid-tour unless they believe they are being ordered to be complicit in illegal or immoral acts. Admiral Holsey just did exactly that, just months after his Senate testimony.
An official statement eight months ago, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, could be used to detail how war crimes ordered by Hegseth would contradict the commitments made by a four-star under oath to Congress.
If his abrupt resignation doesn’t immediately trigger a new Church Committee, America has learned nothing from its shadowy history of political assassinations.
We’re now in a pre-revelation moment, everyone wondering how to put the puzzle together, as rampant abuses are being obfuscated to avoid accountability.
Senator Frank Church displays the CIA poison dart gun at committee hearing with vice chairman John Tower on September 17, 1975 (Source: U.S. Capital via Levin Center, photo by Henry Griffin)
For those who don’t remember, the Nixon Presidency used a wide range of illegal covert actions across Latin America to create a drug explosion, with cooperation between US covert operations and drug-dealing organizations making operations self-financing and insulated from oversight. Nixon’s creation of the drug crisis was then cynically pivoted into his justification for a covert race war (“war against drugs”), to target non-white Americans with mass incarceration and extrajudicial violence.
Nixon’s targeted manipulation of the definition of drugs as a “foreign danger” was so he could link supply control ideology with political concepts of containment (e.g. anti-communism), creating dangerous racist narco-dogma to frame domestic white power slogans into high-danger external threats.
The language is unmistakable from Hegseth’s racist dog whistling a month ago. When he celebrated “11 narco-terrorists at the bottom of the Caribbean” he appeared to be popping champagne for extrajudicial killings using the same dehumanizing rhetoric that historically precedes mass atrocities. His revival of KKK-rhetoric of “poisoning” language to describe immigration and drugs directly echoes both Nixon’s war on drugs and the older, white supremacist campaigns of portraying non-whites as contaminants.
John Ehrlichman later openly and famously admitted this of the whole Nixon program:
We knew we were lying about the drugs. By getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
The administration criminalized domestic political enemies by externalizing the threat—turning law enforcement into military operations against foreign “combatants”, exactly what we see happening in 2025.
The Trump administration has sought to make the label of drug-trafficking groups as “foreign terrorist organizations” (FTOs) great again, publishing a memo claiming the US is in a “non-international armed conflict” with cartels described as “unlawful combatants.”
As a historian the pattern is unmistakable. The structural parallels to Nixon’s abuse of power for anti-democratic political violence aren’t just similar…
THE PATTERN IS IDENTICAL
Abuse Pattern
Nixon Era (1970s)
Trump Administration (2025)
Extrajudicial Killings
Operation Condor coordinated kidnapping, torture, disappearance and assassination across six South American countries without trial or due process
Military strikes killing civilians in Caribbean without trial or evidence, described by Pentagon officials as “criminal attacks on civilians”
Legal Authority Bypass
CIA operated parallel covert government without congressional oversight; Kissinger coordinated directly with CIA, bypassing proper military channels
Secret legal opinions justify strikes; classified briefings to Congress cancelled; operations rely on expansive Article II claims without congressional war authorization
Intelligence Displacing Military
DEA’s 400 overseas agents became vehicle for CIA operations requiring “plausible deniability” after Congress banned Office of Public Safety
Trump publicly confirms using military strikes as cover for CIA regime change operations in Venezuela; CIA operations prioritized over military command structure
Manufactured External Threat
Nixon created drug crisis through CIA cooperation with drug-dealing organizations, then weaponized it into “war on drugs” to target domestic political enemies
Cartels designated as “foreign terrorist organizations” in “non-international armed conflict”; drug enforcement militarized to justify strikes against “unlawful combatants”
Senior Military Resignations
Military officers objected to illegal operations; parallel covert government undermined proper chain of command
Four-star Admiral Alvin Holsey resigned abruptly as SOUTHCOM Commander rather than oversee what he apparently believes are war crimes
Normalization of War Crimes
Torture, assassination, and extrajudicial killing became normalized as “counter-insurgency” and “anti-communism”
Defense Secretary Hegseth lobbied for war crime pardons, called laws “getting in the way,” told troops to “stack bodies,” dismissed war criminals as “warriors”
Congressional Oversight Eliminated
Operations conducted in secret without authorization; Church Committee later discovered COINTELPRO, Family Jewels, MKULTRA, assassination programs
No congressional authorization for military operations; administration refuses classified briefings on legal justification; operations conducted under secret directives
Domestic Blowback
1976 car bombing assassination of Orlando Letelier on Embassy Row in Washington D.C.; CIA had intelligence and chose not to prevent it
Pattern suggests inevitable domestic deployment of foreign operational methods; surveillance and targeting frameworks developed “over there” always come home
Each row in this comparison represents not coincidence but a return to Nixon-era criminal intent. This appears to be an act of Republicans deciding all the things known for 50 years to be illegal and immoral, now are to be resurrected and normalized.
Congress still holds the sole power to declare war under Article I of the Constitution. The Trump administration however has neither sought nor received congressional authorization for these highly controversial military operations. Instead, it relies on secret legal opinions, classified directives, and expansive claims of Article II executive authority—the same “imperial presidency” doctrine that led to Nixon’s downfall.
Take for example Nixon’s Operation CONDOR, which used the DEA as cover for CIA operations. Congress had banned the Office of Public Safety being used for CIA cover, so Nixon had the DEA’s 400 overseas agents immediately become an untouchable invisible new vehicle for operations requiring “plausible deniability“.
Source: National Security Archive
Trump is openly claiming he is using the military for strikes on civilians as sea to provide cover for CIA regime change operations. Trump plainly confirmed CIA operations while he discussed potential land attacks on Venezuela, with officials stating the strategy focuses on removing Maduro from power.
The Church Committee was so powerful in Nixon’s time because it discovered COINTELPRO, Family Jewels (CIA assassination programs), Operation Mockingbird (media propaganda), Project MKULTRA (drug experiments on citizens), and ZR/RIFLE (assassination capability development). A cache of documents, later known as “archives of terror“, revealed:
…the terror network murdered a former president of Brazil and two Uruguayan parliamentarians, as well as hundreds of political activists. They also documented the presence of Nazis throughout the southern cone and the assassination of Israeli agents who were pursuing them.
Assassination plots by the CIA included Castro, Lumumba, Trujillo, and Schneider, revealing a parallel covert government had been setup to operate violent killers to eliminate political opposition around the world, all without any congressional oversight. CIA officials secretly coordinated operations directly with Kissinger, bypassing proper military channels. Kissinger personally instructed the Agency on operational guidelines for overthrowing Allende before October 24, 1970.
Prior to the Church Committee, there was the growth of a parallel, a secret government that was not being reined in. The republic would have been in danger if the Church Committee hadn’t done its work.
Operation CONDOR, officially sanctioned, unleashed systemic torture and execution under Nixon’s rhetoric to “let drug cops off the leash”. The language of removing legal restraint is nearly identical to Hegseth’s arrogant and latest “War Department” whistles.
When DEA agents witnessed Operation CONDOR they referred to it as “the atrocities,” cruelly joking that Mexican police commander Jaime Alcalá García “killed more people than smallpox“. Yet, when top American legal authorities resisted such corruption, they were removed. This Nixon move also is foreshadowing of today, as a Pentagon official just noted: the Trump administration in 2025 “paved the way for the attack by firing the top legal authorities of the Army and Air Force earlier this year”
More Americans today should think deeply about the story of DEA agent Kiki Camarena who was tortured for 30 hours and murdered in 1985, after he discovered the CIA involvement in drug trafficking operations used to fund Contras in Nicaragua.
Defense Secretary Hegseth has already fired in 2025 multiple senior military officers, including Navy chief of staff Jon Harrison, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse (Director of Defense Intelligence Agency), Rear Admiral Milton Sands (Naval Special Warfare Command), and Gen. David Allvin (Air Force Chief of Staff).
Hegseth’s habit of dismissing war crimes is well documented. During Trump’s first term, he privately lobbied for pardons of service members convicted or accused of war crimes, telling Fox News viewers “They’re not war criminals, they’re warriors.” At his Senate confirmation hearing in January 2025, Hegseth stated he wanted to ensure military lawyers “aren’t the ones getting in the way” of troops destroying the enemy. In his book, he referred to military lawyers as “jagoffs.”
This immoral barbarism as policy creates a direct conflict with American professional troops: a Defense Secretary who has spent years undermining standards and accountability in war now oversees a four-star admiral who resigned over concerns about orders to participate in what he believed were war crimes.
The breaking point of this conflict was on October 6, when Admiral Holsey met with Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Dan Caine at the Pentagon. According to sources, Holsey offered to resign during that meeting over his concerns about the legality of the operations. The fact that his departure wasn’t announced until over a week later—and won’t take effect until year’s end—suggests the administration is scrambling to spin optics of a four-star commander’s public rejection of their policy.
Now the Trump administration refuses to provide any evidence to lawmakers proving that his multiple targeted civilian boats for military strike are carrying narcotics, pointing only to unclassified “shock and awe” videos glorifying airborne extrajudicial assassinations of non-combatants.
A high-ranking Pentagon official has apparently had to state the obvious, that such strikes are criminal attacks on civilians. Drug traffickers may be criminals but “they aren’t combatants.” Legal experts also note the obvious, that the smuggling of illegal goods of any kind does not constitute direct participation in hostilities or render civilians lawful military targets.
Trump thus appears to be identically replicating the illegal Nixon administration doctrines, as he publicly confirmed CIA authorization for covert operations in Venezuela with lethal authority, an extraordinary and unprecedented acknowledgment. The CIA directive broadens the agency’s role beyond intelligence gathering to carry out lethal operations across the Caribbean.
Notably, for the first time, survivors from the sixth military strike are being repatriated to Ecuador and Colombia. These survivors represent the first potential witnesses to what actually happened on these boats—whether they were carrying drugs, whether they posed any threat, whether the administration’s justifications hold up under scrutiny. Their testimony could prove devastating to the administration’s narrative, which is likely why they’re being quickly returned to countries that have less robust legal systems rather than more appropriately held for questioning in the United States.
Trump updated CIA authorities around the same time he signed a secret directive ordering military strikes against Latin American cartels, with officials even saying out loud their ultimate goal is regime change in Venezuela.
How bad could all this get, given an intended return to Nixon’s illegal platforms, as documented in the dual operations of CONDOR?
First, declassified documents reveal lawyers investigated and documented eighteen distinct types of torture used by the Americans running CONDOR, including beating, waterboarding with chili-infused sparkling water, near-drowning in excrement-filled water, and rape. Operations ran concurrently as a fake counterinsurgency campaign that instead suppressed social and armed movements, coordinated drug trafficking, and reorganized the drug industry to protect major cartel leaders while creating American control over and pacts between drug lords and security agencies like the DFS and Mexican military.
It was very bad, and the return could be even worse, which is why understanding Nixon becomes so critical to preventing Presidential crimes from happening again.
Second, because Congress banned the Office of Public Safety programs in 1974 that had been giving the CIA cover in Latin America, suddenly the DEA assigned 400 overseas agents for CIA operations requiring “plausible deniability.” Court documents from a 1985 case stated that despite official claims, Mexico’s Operation CONDOR was “the conduit” through which US intelligence funneled money, weapons and support to undermine and destabilize Central American governments.
Here is how the secretive parallelism worked its way into domestic operations:
CONDOR OPERATION ONE (South America, 1975-1989) Template: CIA political assassinations disguised as defense of freedom.
CIA-coordinated transnational collaboration included kidnapping, torture, disappearance and assassination across Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. CIA officials including Thomas Karamessines met with Kissinger to coordinate coup plotting, with Kissinger instructing secret American agents to “continue keeping the pressure on every Allende weak spot”.
CONDOR OPERATION TWO (Mexico, 1975-1985) Cover: CIA regime change operations disguised as drug enforcement.
A DEA program in Mexico, overseen by the State Department’s narcotics office, generated drug lords who undermined civilian protections. Mexico’s DFS intelligence service was completely corrupt, with its chief Miguel Nazar Haro setup to be a CIA asset. Mexico also contracted with Evergreen International Aviation, which had extensive CIA connections.
CONDOR DOMESTIC ARRIVAL: Inevitable home deployment of foreign test cases.
The 1976 car bombing assassination of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt on Embassy Row in Washington D.C. shattered any illusion that CONDOR was for “foreign” operations. The bomb on American soil, planted by Chilean intelligence operatives working with Cuban exiles, detonated just blocks from the White House. It was American state-sponsored terrorism within America—the CIA had intelligence the attack was coming and chose not to prevent it.
This is the trajectory of unchecked covert operations: they always come home. The legal frameworks and operational methods developed “over there” inevitably get deployed “here again.”
The pattern repeats throughout history, for those who study it. Consider OPERATION IGLOO WHITE—a $1 billion/year program that deployed networked sensors and surveillance drones over Cambodia—when Nixon turned the same foreign surveillance apparatus on American citizens. The tools of empire always come home.
The bottom line is Americans should consider right now how the Church Committee happened because senators did their job and enforced institutional integrity regardless of political campaigning and Presidential pressure.
Today’s Congress faces the same choice.
The Senate Intelligence Committee and Senate Armed Services Committee staff are now watching a rerun, and they must be held accountable if they do nothing.
The Trump administration produced a classified legal opinion justifying strikes against a secret and expansive list of cartels, yet canceled classified briefings to Congress about the legal justification.
Admiral Holsey cannot publicly state his objections without violating classification rules. But his actions are testimony. He walked away from the Pentagon rather than participate in what he apparently believes are war crimes.
Congress has the authority to grant him immunity and compel his testimony in closed session. That’s exactly what the Church Committee would have done. Does today’s Congress have the courage of a 1975 Senate?
We’re watching an intentional return to Nixon’s worst abuses. The difference is that this time, we up front can see exactly what happens if Congress does nothing. The Church Committee uncovered a “parallel, secret government”. It prevented Republicans from destroying the republic.
What happens when there’s no Church Committee this time? We’re about to find out, unless the Senate acts now. Admiral Holsey has pulled the four-star alarm. It doesn’t get much higher, given the role reports almost directly to the President.
Related Reading – Pete Hegseth Statements on War Crimes:
Redefined war criminals into “warriors”: Hegseth repeatedly dismissed war crimes through a PR campaign on Fox & Friends: “These are men who went into the most dangerous places on earth with a job to defend us and made tough calls on a moment’s notice. They’re not war criminals, they’re warriors”
Normalized war crimes as “could’ve been me” and “Put us all in jail”: Hegseth said the possibility of pardons was “very heartening for guys like me,” that it “could’ve been me” on trial for war crimes, and that if Golsteyn’s actions counted as a war crime, then “put us all in jail“
Declared laws are “getting in the way” of illegal military operations: During his Senate confirmation hearing, Hegseth stated he wanted to ensure lawyers “aren’t the ones getting in the way” of service members having “opportunity to destroy…the enemy”
Defamed military lawyers as “jagoffs”: In his book “War on Warriors,” Hegseth used the derogatory term “jagoffs” to describe Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) lawyers
Claimed loopholes to Geneva Convention: When pressed by Senator Angus King, Hegseth agreed the Geneva Convention was “the law of the land” but qualified that such laws of war existed “above” restrictive rules of engagement
Invoked genocidal outcomes: “Stack bodies”: On a June 2024 podcast, Hegseth said: “They killed the right guys in the wrong way, according to somebody. I’m done with that…you stack bodies, and when it’s over, then you let the dust settle”
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