The Senate on Tuesday failed to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, falling short of the 60 votes needed to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633. The vote, held at about 2:15 p.m. ET, was the first floor test of comprehensive crypto market-structure legislation in the chamber. It was not a vote on final passage. It was a vote on whether debate could even begin. The answer was no, with 50 no votes and 49 yes votes.

Every Democrat voted against the measure. Three Republicans – Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Jerry Moran of Kansas – also voted against the measure

The Clarity Act is the market-structure half of the crypto legal framework Congress began building last year, the companion to the GENIUS Act’s stablecoin rules. It draws the line between digital assets regulated as commodities under the CFTC and those regulated as securities under the SEC, puts spot trading platforms under a federal registration regime for the first time, and sets statutory terms for self-custody, noncustodial software and rewards on stablecoin balances. It cleared the House last July with 78 Democrats and then spent a year in Senate rewrites.

That result effectively freezes the bill in place with almost no calendar left before the midterms. Republicans control 53 seats. They needed at least seven Democrats, and more if GOP holdouts peeled off over bank or law-enforcement concerns. They did not get them.

The House passed its version 294-134 in July 2025. The Senate Banking Committee reported a version 15-9 in May 2026, with Democrats Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland joining Republicans. Tuesday was supposed to be the moment those committee crossovers turned into a floor coalition. Both Gallego and Alsobrooks voted no on cloture. Instead, the first hurdle became the last one of 2026.

BREAKING: 🇺🇸 The Crypto CLARITY Act has failed to pass the Senate cloture vote. pic.twitter.com/0VAw1H9Eyl

— Bull Theory (@BullTheoryio) September 15, 2026

Aaaaand, Bitcoin isn’t happy.

How the deal collapsed in 48 hours

Senate Republicans released what they called their “last, best and final” text Sunday night. Sens. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Banking Chair Tim Scott of South Carolina, and Agriculture Chair John Boozman of Arkansas said the draft folded in 126 substantive changes requested by Democrats. The package included new ethics language modeled on a Tillis-Gallego proposal, edits to the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act for noncustodial developers, Agriculture Committee guardrails on affiliate trading and tribal gaming, and a Treasury “circuit breaker” meant to address bank fears that stablecoin yield would drain community-bank deposits.

Lummis’s line was blunt: Democrats got what they wanted; now take yes for an answer.

Democrats did not. Late Monday they sent a counteroffer. According to people familiar with it, they did not reopen the stablecoin-yield fight – sources had described that as a “Republican-only” problem – but they did demand more on ethics (large holdings, dependent children, paid crypto promotions), a narrower BRCA that expressly does not modify criminal law, and tighter Ag-title rules on exchanges and conflicts. Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia, Ruben Gallego of Arizona, and Raphael Warnock of Georgia said the White House-approved ethics language still needed work. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts went further, arguing the enforcement design left the Trump administration too much control and left loopholes around existing presidential crypto interests.

Republicans rejected the counteroffer Tuesday morning. “In response to a significant step in their direction, Democrats have chosen to move the goalposts again,” Senate Banking Committee spokesman Jeff Naft said. “Yet we are hearing the same unreasonable asks and the same refusal to take yes for an answer. The final text is public.” Lummis’s office said the Democratic paper “looks identical to their opening position at the start of recess.”

Read full story here…

Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it cannot restore access to its cloud-computing facility in Bahrain or one of three data-hosting zones in the UAE due to the extensive damage caused by Iranian retaliatory strikes, Reuters reported on 15 September.

“The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand,” AWS reported in its status update seen by Reuters.

In the UAE, resources and data held exclusively within one zone, labeled mec1-az2, have been damaged beyond hope of recovery, the company said, as engineers are still salvaging what they can from the two other battered zones and across the wider Emirati region.

An availability zone refers to a cluster of one or more data centers sitting inside the same geographic region, the structure AWS relies on to keep services running when a single site goes down.

The outages trace back to March, when the US and Israel attacked Iran, and Tehran responded with missile and drone salvos against Israel and Gulf states hosting US military bases.

AWS confirmed at the time that two of its UAE facilities took direct hits, while a drone strike near one of its Bahraini sites left the infrastructure there destroyed.

Most Bahrain-based customers shifted their workloads elsewhere on AWS advice before the region went dark in April, but the company says it has now exhausted every option for recovering whatever was left behind.

The losses have called into question the resilience of the Gulf’s fast-expanding cloud and AI infrastructure.

The UAE is already redrawing plans to war-proof a major AI data center project, weighing decentralized site building alongside underground and blast-resistant construction, and even equipping the data center itself with anti-air defenses.

Israel and the US have long ago transformed AI infrastructure into a weapon of war deployed extensively across West Asian theaters.

Cloud platforms, data centers, and high-capacity computing systems now help store intelligence, process intercepted communications, analyze surveillance, and support military operations across West Asia, extensively so in Gaza and Iran.

Iran maintains that data centers operated by US technology companies are not simply civilian facilities, but strategic assets supporting US and Israeli aggression, thereby making them legitimate targets for retaliation.

AI has become a central instrument of US and Israeli warfare across West Asia, embedded in how targets are chosen, tracked, and struck.

Israel has weaponized AI platforms including automated targeting systems like The Gospel, Lavender, and Where’s Daddy? to harvest mass data, autonomously generate kill lists, and orchestrate systematic airstrikes and assassinations against Palestinians.

Backed by corporate infrastructure like Microsoft Azure, which stored massive caches of intercepted Palestinian communications, the Israeli military has deployed AI-driven drone surveillance to track and assassinate Palestinians.

The US has run algorithmic warfare systems such as Palantir’s Maven to process satellite, drone, and radar intelligence, using machine learning to speed the production of targeting recommendations against Iranian forces.

More than 1,000 targets were designated within the first 24 hours of the war on Iran, one of which resulted in the massacre of at least 150 people, including at least 120 schoolchildren at the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab.

Read full story here…

The UAE is redrawing its plans for a five-gigawatt artificial intelligence (AI) data center project, one of the largest anywhere outside the US, after Iranian retaliatory strikes on infrastructure across the Gulf forced the Emirates to rethink how and where critical facilities are built, Reuters reported on 11 September.

Speaking in anonymity, six people familiar with the matter told Reuters that Emirati authorities began reassessing where and how sensitive facilities should be built once the war reached the Gulf.

Four of those sources said the campus, first designed as a single 26-square-kilometer site in Abu Dhabi, is now expected to take shape as several data centers distributed across the country.

Authorities are weighing ways to shield the facilities from drone and missile strikes, the sources said, including installing air defenses and putting some of the centers underground.

Sources also said interceptors and electronic jamming equipment are being written into the redesign, with blast-resistant concrete and additional backup power and cooling systems also under consideration, and with the most sensitive material, including military data, possibly housed inside mountains.

Iran began striking Gulf states hosting US forces with missiles and drones in response to US and Israeli airstrikes on Iranian territory. Two Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE and one in Bahrain were damaged in March, and the company’s regional cloud services remain disrupted.

In April, the Iranian armed forces released a video naming Stargate UAE, the $30 billion, one-gigawatt first phase of the campus, as a potential target for retaliatory strikes, showing a map of the site alongside the caption “Nothing stays hidden from our sight.”

Daniel Benaim, a former US deputy assistant secretary of state for Arabian Peninsula affairs, called the war an “economic earthquake” for Gulf states that had spent years selling themselves as safe havens, adding that hardening critical infrastructure was now vitally necessary.

Data centers have moved from commercial facilities into the category of critical infrastructure, processing financial flows, sustaining public services, and feeding into military communications and intelligence work.

Read full story here…

More than 800,000 people are hoping to move to a self-proclaimed crypto micronation called ‘Liberland’ that is on a patch of muddy floodplain along the Danube River.

The uninhabited seven-square-kilometre land on the border of Serbia and Croatia was founded by Czech libertarian politician Vit Jedlicka who claimed the territory in 2015.

There, Mr Jedlicka said he founded a new country with the aim of creating a libertarian state founded on the blockchain technology underpinning cryptocurrencies – or, as a haven for crypto billionaires.

According to the self-declared president, the small ‘nation’ has received 804,000 citizenship applications – enticed by the eradication of tax and government regulation. Its motto is: To Live and Let Live.

It comes as the UK faces an exodus in the tech sector after nearly 6,000 entrepreneurs fled the UK in the past two years, with many fleeing to destinations with more forgiving tax regimes, such as Dubai.

The group of 30 tech billionaires are using blockchain – effectively a secure digital ledger – to construct the first decentralised autonomous government and also the world’s ‘freest country’.

The micronation of around 1,200 citizens has its own official language of ‘Liberlandish’, will be holding a congressional election later this month, has its own passports as well as its own navy, known as the ‘Liberty’.

Meanwhile, its ‘administration’ has appointed three ‘legal professionals’ to form a Supreme Court to oversee applications. It added an app will soon be used to fast track applications from those without a criminal record.

In lieu of tax, a voluntary monthly contribution system was created that is claimed ‘inherently superior to forced tax’ which allows one to ‘become a true co-owner’ of the ‘nation’.

Liberland citizens use cryptocurrency to pay voluntary taxes for the upkeep of the heavily-forested island and its navy. The tokens are the Liberland Dollar, which handles money and network fees; and Liberland Merit, which handles voting and laws. Both can be bought with bitcoin.

One’s ‘dedication’ will be ‘recognised’ through the Liberland app and a rating ‘badge’ system based on monthly contributions – spanning from Bronze (one to ten Merits) to Diamond (more than 10,000 Merits). The chart will be published publicly monthly, justified as a way to maintain ‘radical transparency’.

‘Liberland,’ officially known as the Free Republic of Liberland, joins a movement by the ultra-wealthy of creating micro-states and special economic zones.

These ‘bubbles of capitalism’ have popped up in Honduras, where Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder, financially supported the founding of the private city of Prospera. Elsewhere, a ‘Crypto City’ is being built in Venezuela, while ‘Liberstad’, a private member-based city, is being created in Norway.

Liberland is yet to be recognised by other nations, with a lack of proper infrastructure and 200 registered companies. Those behind the project have set up a permanent outpost across the river called ‘Ark Village’ which has shared rooms, kitchenettes and a meeting room.

The territory had been long contested between Croatia and Serbia since the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the 1990s Balkan wars. Mr Jedlicka claimed the land on the principle of ‘terra nullius’, effectively that unclaimed land belongs to the first person to occupy it.

Croatia deployed border police units and patrol boats to prevent repeated attempts by Liberland organisers to reach the area when it was first set up in 2015. Serbian police prevented them from crossing the border from their side.

Since being declared independent by Mr Jedlicka, there are now more than 1,262 registered citizens and 804,000 applications for citizenship.

A settlement on the island – which is about the size of Gibraltar – has been up and running since August 2023, with a core group of people maintaining a continuous physical presence.

They have been developing the land, having already constructed the first house, set up basic infrastructure and marina facilities.

Liberland’s website states that non-EU visitors who cross into the area from the Croatian side are usually issued a notice requiring them to leave Croatian territory within seven days, accompanied by a temporary re-entry ban.

However, it also says those seven days are ‘more than enough to earn full Liberland citizenship’, by helping with construction, clearing land, building infrastructure or other community projects.

Other individuals in Europe have previously declared the formation of a micronation state – including the Principality of Sealand, an abandoned North Sea oil rig off the coast of Suffolk which declared independence in 1967.

An exodus of the wealthy from the UK has been fuelled from changes to Capital Gains Tax, the mansion tax on properties worth more than £2million, Inheritance Tax changes and VAT on private schools.

The figures showed that 5,940 business owners left the UK between January 2024 and January 2026. The analysis showed that 10 per cent of those leaving were from the software sector, more than three times higher than the next most affected, property development.

The United Arab Emirates – which includes Dubai and Abu Dhabi – as well as Spain and the US were among popular destinations for business owners, according to wealth managers Rathbones.

Michelle White, head of Rathbones’ private client office, said: ‘We are talking to more individuals and families – particularly younger business owners – considering relocation.’

Read full story here…

“I won’t lie to you – there are real dangers,” said Anthropic CEO and cofounder Dario Amodei about the development of artificial intelligence. “And I think for too long the industry lied to people about the fact that this technology had risks.”

And the biggest risk could be the end of humanity, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned on social media this past Tuesday, saying Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives” with the development of self-improving superintelligence.

“It doesn’t look that different from, say, ‘Terminator’ or from science fiction films,” Coxon told CBS News Thursday. “It will be smart enough to kill us.”

In response, Amodei told “Sunday Morning” yesterday, at Anthropic’s headquarters in San Francisco, “I don’t think I fully just appreciated what it would actually be like when the progress was as fast as it was.”

He said the development of AI has been on an exponential curve, which is starting to get steeper. Asked what that means, Amodei said, “It doesn’t mean we need to panic today. It doesn’t mean we need to shut it all down. But I would say it’s a warning sign. It’s a warning sign that we need to slow down.”

In an essay published Saturday, Amodei wrote that the entire tech industry must work together to “slow the pace” of AI capabilities.

Asked if Anthropic is going to stop releasing more advanced models, Amodei replied, “It doesn’t mean that. What it means is that we need to make sure that every generation of models that we release is properly tested.”

To attempt that, Amodei says Anthropic will now give independent evaluators permanent “employee-like” access to their models. “Whenever anyone builds an AI model, there’s a third-party evaluator who can verify whether that company is following the safety practices that they’re committed to – it’s like a food inspector,” he said.

But AI experts say this is hardly enough, and Amodei agrees, claiming he supports federal regulation. So far, proposed legislation ranges from an outright ban on superintelligence, to a mandatory “kill switch” that could shut down risky AI.

“The AI kill switch could be a good idea,” Amodei said. “But I don’t think banning it, completely banning it, is the right approach. One, the idea that we would never get the incredible benefits, never get the medical cures, that doesn’t sit right with me. Second, this technology will be built in other countries, including authoritarian countries.”

Asked if the U.S. should slow down AI development if China would not, Amodei replied, “This is the toughest dilemma. This is the toughest aspect of our situation.”

He looks to the nuclear arms agreements with the former Soviet Union as a potential model, but cautions even his expectations are low. “The more long-term thing would be working together to put a speed limit on the rate of AI progress,” he said. “I think that’s going to be very difficult, because the incentives to pull ahead in the military advantage that you get from that are so large. And honestly, I don’t know if it’s possible, but we should try.”

With the fate of humanity seemingly at risk, how much personal responsibility does Amodei feel about where we are going? “My view here is, it has always been very strange that this technology is being built by a private company,” he said. “People ask me that question all the time: Why isn’t this being built by government? And the strangest thing about it is, I agree with them. I’m uncomfortable.”

Asked if he is willing to give up the technology to the government, Amodei responded, “To the right combination of governments. The worry I have – I am concerned that one single government could abuse this technology just as easily as a single company could. But I think a combination of democratically-elected governments, I don’t know about handing over, but some kind of oversight, some kind of joint governance.”

The question is no longer whether AI will become powerful enough to require constraint, but who in power will take action.

“If we build in the right way, I think the probability of something bad happening is very low,” he said. “If we build in the wrong way, the probability of something bad happening is very high.”

Read full story here…

Swedish freight company Einride’s announcement last month that it plans to deploy 500 Tesla Semis on US roads, the largest publicly announced commitment to electric Class 8 trucks, suggests a shift toward fleet electrification. It also brings the next phase of trucking technology into focus: the gradual commercialization of autonomous freight.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has targeted late 2026 or early 2027 for self-driving capabilities to begin working on the Semi. That remains a Musk target, not a confirmed commercial rollout. Any version requiring a human operator would be supervised automation, like FSD on Tesla sedans, SUVs, and the Cybertruck.

NEWS: Google announced a major electric trucking project in Texas featuring Tesla Semi.

Google, Nevoya and Center for Green Market Activation will deploy:

• 25 electric semi trucks.
• Dedicated charging infrastructure
• An all-electric freight route between Houston & Dallas. pic.twitter.com/ZxSbFIJk5C

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) September 9, 2026

Needham analysts Chris Pierce and Mackenzie Holleran see a broader industry inflection point approaching in 2027, as factory-integrated autonomous trucks begin reaching fleets in greater numbers. Their note to clients says automation in trucking will lower operating costs, while longer operating hours could accelerate deliveries and shift market share toward larger carriers.

The analysts said that driverless trucking is already moving beyond technical demonstrations as developers expand routes, remove onboard safety observers and secure carrier commitments. The next test is whether carriers enter a mass-adoption supercycle to automate their fleets and drive down labor costs.

“We believe the debate has shifted from ‘can autonomous trucking work?’ to ‘how quickly can it scale?'” the analysts said.

They continued, “We see compelling benefits for early adopters and eventual trucking industry consolidation, underwritten by the increasing rate of adoption as industry participants see autonomy as a driver of share gain tilting the capacity playing field to lower cost providers capable of driving longer routes in shorter timeframes better satisfying customer demand.”

The analysts identified Aurora as the industry leader, citing expanded routes and operating conditions, customer contracts and the removal of safety observers from certain trucks in July. Kodiak targets observer removal by year-end, with Plus AI targeting driverless operations in 2027.

They noted that long-haul freight “represents the earliest commercial opportunity for autonomous trucking.”

Read full story here…

On Monday, the President of the United States told the people of Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, Arizona, and every other state now fighting hyperscale data centers exactly what he thinks of them. “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backward and poor,” he wrote on Truth Social. “If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign.” And then the warning: “If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.”

The context is not subtle. Polling now shows a large majority of Americans oppose new data centers, with complaints centering on rising electricity bills, excessive water usage and industrial noise. Candidates in at least 21 races across 18 states have run television ads on the issue, split almost evenly between the parties. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has warned that data-center opposition in Ohio is, in its own words, the anchor hanging around Senator Jon Husted’s neck in his race against Sherrod Brown.¹

A rational political actor facing that landscape might listen. Trump instead did what Technocrats have always done when the public gets in the way of the engineering plan: he redefined the objection as a moral defect. And to seal it, he tied every county commissioner voting against a 500-megawatt campus to Beijing. “China could not be happier with this anti-data center movement,” he wrote. “Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!”²

If that rhetorical move sounds familiar, it should. It is the secular translation of a sermon Peter Thiel has been preaching for two years.

The Antichrist as Safety Regulator

Beginning in the fall of 2024 and culminating in a four-part lecture series delivered to the ACTS 17 Collective in San Francisco in 2025, Thiel laid out a theological-political thesis that has since become the operating theology of the AI buildout. The Antichrist, Thiel argues, will not arrive as a reckless technologist. He will arrive as a safety-minded administrator, exploiting fears of nuclear war, climate collapse and artificial intelligence to install a one-world governance system. His slogan, drawn from 1 Thessalonians 5:3, is “peace and safety.”³

Thiel named names. In the twenty-first century, he told his audience, the Antichrist is “a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta Thunberg or Eliezer Yudkowsky.” Climate activists and AI safety researchers are, in his phrase, “legionnaires of the Antichrist,” not because they are consciously evil but because they are building the institutional architecture a future world-state would need. And on the technologies themselves, Thiel was candid: “Maybe these things are good or bad. Stopping them seems far, far worse.”⁴

Set that beside the Truth Social post and the structure is identical. In Thiel’s register, the person who wants to slow AI is doing the Antichrist’s work. In Trump’s register, the person who wants to slow the data center is “backwards,” “poor,” and objectively serving China. Neither framing permits the position that most of those Ohio voters actually hold, which is not “stop AI” but “do not make my family pay for your grid load.” Economic objections invite cost-benefit analysis and compromise. Apocalyptic and treasonous framings do not. You cannot negotiate with the Antichrist, and you cannot negotiate with a Chinese asset.

Technocrat-in-Chief

Courtenay Turner and I documented in The Final Betrayal (November 2025) how the second Trump Administration became the vehicle by which a cohort of billionaire arch-Technocrats, Thiel foremost among them, moved from the periphery of American power to its center. Thiel financed J.D. Vance’s political career from the ground up. His Palantir alumni and Founders Fund network populate the national-security and technology apparatus. The Dark Enlightenment’s contempt for democratic consent, which we traced through Thiel’s own writings and those of his intellectual circle, is no longer a fringe philosophy. It is staffing policy.

What we argued then, and what Monday’s outburst confirms, is that Trump has not merely hosted these men. He has become the Technocrat-in-Chief. The populist who promised to return power to forgotten communities is now instructing those same communities that their objection to a hyperscale facility next to their children’s school is evidence of backwardness.

Sorry, that is not populism. That is the voice of Howard Scott and Technocracy, Inc. in 1934, telling Americans that their opinions were irrelevant to the requirements of the energy system and that the Technate would allocate resources according to engineering necessity, not democratic preference.

The MAGA movement was told it was getting America First. What it is getting is a federal executive using the full weight of the presidency to override local self-government on behalf of the single most capital-intensive industry in human history.

Energy Is the Currency

The historical Technocracy movement made one claim that has never been refuted: the fundamental unit of value in an industrial society is the kilowatt-hour and not the dollar. Scott and his engineers proposed replacing money with energy certificates and allocating energy to every man,  woman, and child by expert decree. Thankfully, they failed to seize power in the 1930s. They did not fail to describe the twenty-first century.

Hyperscale data centers are the first industrial class whose product is literally computation purchased with electricity. When a facility draws hundreds of megawatts, the question is not abstract. It is whether the household or the hyperscaler has priority claim on the grid, and who pays for the transmission and generation built to serve the newcomer. Every rate case now pending before a state utility commission is a contest over exactly that. Trump’s post resolves the contest by fiat: the data center wins, and anyone who says otherwise is a traitor to prosperity.

This is resource control transferring from individuals to consolidated institutional actors, which is the definition of Technocracy I have used for two decades. It does not require a world government. It requires only that the people who own the compute also control the political apparatus that decides who gets the power.

The Inversion

Here is the irony Thiel’s disciples never confront. His stated nightmare is a distant regulator overriding local self-government in the name of safety. Yet the actual mechanism now in use is a national executive overriding local self-government in the name of the AI buildout. The tool he warns against is the tool being wielded, pointed the other way. The county that votes no is not the world-state. It is the last unwatched place in the system, and it is being told to shut up and sit down.

And the China card is doing double duty. Trump invokes Beijing as the beneficiary of American resistance in the very month he prepares to host Xi Jinping, the Technocrat-in-Chief of China, at the White House. A congressional committee has demanded an investigation into whether China is stoking the anti-data-center movement; Trump declined to repeat that charge, but said the Chinese “can’t believe it is happening.”⁵

China is the rhetorical enemy for domestic consumption and the strategic partner in the architecture. Readers who followed my analysis of the Beijing summit in May will recognize the pattern. American and Chinese Technocracy are not at war with each other. They are converging, and the American public is being disciplined to accept the merger.

Speak Up While You Can

I have repeated that Free Speech and the First Amendment are on the guillotine in 2026. This may be the last battle that decides our fate.

Certainly, the people of Ohio did not ask for this. They were not consulted. They are being told that their electric bills, their water tables, and their quiet nights are the acceptable price of a race with China whose terms they were never shown. And when they object, the most powerful man in the world calls them backward, foolish, and prone to self-harm.

They should say no anyway. Not because AI is evil, and not because the Antichrist is coming, but because the right of a community to decide what gets built inside its borders is the last practical check on Technocracy that ordinary Americans still hold.

Every local vote against a data center is a vote for the proposition that the people, not the engineers, decide. Thiel calls that heresy. Trump calls it treason. I call it self-government, and it is worth defending precisely because they want it gone.

References

1. Kevin Breuninger, “Trump says U.S. communities opposing AI data centers could end up ‘backwards and poor’,” CNBC, August 31, 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/31/trump-data-centers-backlash-elections-congress.html. The NRSC memo language and the 21-races-in-18-states figure are reported there and in AFP coverage of the same day.
2. Agence France-Presse, “Trump blasts US backlash against data centers,” August 31, 2026, syndicated at https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/trump-blasts-us-backlash-against-161603675.html. All Trump quotations are from his Truth Social post as reproduced by AFP.
3. “Thiel’s Framing of Proponents of an AI Treaty as ‘Antichrist’ Collides with 60 Years of Catholic Doctrine,” Center for Bioethics and Public Affairs in AI (CBPAI), April 8, 2026, https://www.cbpai.org/blog-1/thiels-framing-of-proponents-of-an-ai-treaty-as-antichrist-collides-with-60-years-of-catholic-doctrine; and Fortune, “Peter Thiel just gave the public its closest look yet at his ‘Antichrist’ theory,” July 18, 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/07/18/what-is-antichrist-peter-thiel-pope-leo-ai-regulation/.
4. Leaked recordings of the ACTS 17 Collective lectures, as reported by the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post (September–October 2025) and analyzed in “The Eschatology of Deregulation: On Peter Thiel’s Antichrist,” OILab, https://oilab.eu/the-eschatology-of-deregulation-on-peter-thiels-antichrist/. The Thunberg/Yudkowsky remark is quoted in multiple contemporaneous accounts of the lectures.
5. AFP, op. cit.; CNBC, op. cit. Trump’s upcoming White House meeting with Xi Jinping is noted in the AFP report.