Unreal Bird #15: Radical

I was on two podcasts this month, once as a host and once as a guest. Below, I also discuss Marco Rubio's push to make "radical left terrorism" a thing.

The field notes section this week also contains some good pieces on the insipidness of calls for a "good DOGE," the president's weird-grandpa snoozefest of an election rant, and the possible shapes of AI's economic impact.

As always, scroll to the bottom to see dogs!

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What I'm up to

For the Tech Policy Press podcast, I interviewed Mizue Aizeki and Paromita Shah, two of the authors of a new report on "The Tech Behind ICE: Oligarchs, Immigration Enforcement, and the Threat to Democracy." It's a great report, so it's no surprise the discussion also turned out great (with all credit to Mizue and Paromita; my job was easy).

My favorite section of the report charts the revolving door of officials who cross between the corporate and government spheres to identify opportunities for grift, I mean defense contracts.

My favorite question from the podcast was what, if anything, might change about the relationship between DC and Silicon Valley if Democrats are successful in taking Congress, the White House, or both. (After all, Obama and Biden both seemed more or less fine with trends in American surveillance and policing.)

Earlier this month, I was also a guest on Hannah Becker's "Tipping Spears" podcast, which is doing a series on how AI is changing society. Many of the other guests have had a security background; I tried to give the conversation more of a democracy flavor. Give it a listen.

Radical

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been busy.

On July 16, the State Department held an intergovernmental meeting to discuss the "resurgence of far-left terrorism." The press release (I won't call it a fact sheet) takes great pains to explain that this is a thing that serious people should definitely pay attention to. It asserts without citation that "Far-left anti-government terrorism now accounts for more attacks and plots in the United States than any other ideological category."

If this just doesn't sound like the United States of America you've been living in, well, you and me both. Is there any truth to it?

A 2025 brief from CSIS tells us that:

indeed, left-wing violence has risen in the last 10 years... although it has risen from very low levels and remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers...

Further,

The increase in left-wing attacks is particularly noticeable because attacks from right-wing perpetrators have sharply declined in 2025. This decline is striking, and explanations are speculative. One possibility is that many traditional grievances that violent right-wing extremists have espoused in the past... are now embraced by President Trump and his administration.

Ooh! There are charts!

It's no big mystery. Right-wing extremists won. That's why left-wing attacks have outnumbered right-wing incidents since 2025.

Think that's unfair? The "Antifa" members convicted after an anti-ICE protest gone horribly wrong—a police officer was shot, but survived—received sentences from 30-100 years in prison. The longest sentence handed down for the January 6 insurrection was 22 years, to Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who has since been pardoned. So, yeah, they won, and this is their regime. I'm not saying that justifies left-wing violence; it's just common sense that right-wing extremists are less motivated right now.

Who attended this? Representatives from more than sixty countries, although many governments sent low-level dignitaries or technical staff, perhaps due to scheduling issues or possibly to provide the pretense of participation without legitimizing the substance.

But that's not all, folks! Following the meeting, the State Department released a report on Cuban-supported "subversion" in the United States. According to the report, "Many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history—from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses—can be linked... to Cuban influence." (You can download the report here, if you so desire.)

Who is in this Havana-backed network of far-left operatives? The report names 43 Americans and organizations, including the Democratic Socialists of America; you can view them here, courtesy of Ken Klippenstein. Some are sitting elected US officials:

• LA Mayor Karen Bass
• NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani
• Rep. Ayanna Pressley
• Rep. Maxine Waters

Now, look, I disagree with some of the people in the report's opinion on, say, the integrity of Venezuelan elections. But official USG documents describing opposition politicians and activists as part of some Cold War plot to destabilize America is precisely what people worried about when "foreign malign influence" became a buzzword.

One last thing: while all of this was happening, the State Department was also planning a $5 million grants program for what GPAHE calls "Maga-aligned organizations" in Europe.

Having won the battle at home, the Trump Administration is preparing to conduct ideological warfare abroad.

Field notes

"No, We Do Not Need a ‘Good’ DOGE," John Glenn.

• John Glenn (who succeeded one of my old bosses at the NED) takes on the idea that Democrats should support a "good DOGE" to make government more efficient. As he writes, "the answer should be 'nothing' because DOGE was illegal and didn't understand or care about how government works." Glenn goes on to draw on international examples to explain that doing complicated things within liberal institutions is hard, while doing illiberal and destructive things is easy. Maybe this is why the first cut of "Project 2029" seems so... unambitious.
• (And no, no relation to that John Glenn that I'm aware of.)

"Election Deniers are Big Mad After Trump's Nothingburger Speech," Matt Cohen.

• Relitigating the 2020 election is, obviously, the most important thing the federal government should be doing right now. That's why President Trump recently gave a primetime address where he unveiled newly declassified documents purporting to show... that China maybe attempted to influence US voters on social media, but also kind of didn't? Or that it possibly downloaded already public voter data from several state websites? It wasn't totally clear, but it all sounded very bad! A lot of online election deniers, though, seemed to think the speech was confusing and unserious.
• (I used Claude to build an index of all the declassified documents, which you can access here. The summaries are Claude's, not mine, so be diligent; the real value IMO is that this sorts and links to every document individually.)

"AI & Jobs: Know the Story, Shape the Future." TechEquity.

• TechEquity published a neat visual essay explaining what's going on with AI and labor displacement. The gist of it is that assessments of the labor market impact are really mixed, and the more rigorous the study, the less clear the implications. That hasn't stopped some companies from conveniently disguising post-pandemic layoffs or hiring freezes as part of an "AI pivot," though.

"Why State-Owned AI Won't Solve Inequality," Rina Chandran.

• OpenAI is discussing giving the US government a five percent stake in the company in order to share the "upside of AI" with the public. This isn't as crazy as it might initially sound; lots of countries take government stakes in strategic industries. In its best form, it might look like the Alaska Permanent Fund; in its worst, it devolves into a form of cronyism where government and industry influence each other to do things not in the public interest (think propaganda, bail-outs, or non-regulation). Chandran argues against it here; in Tech Policy Press, S. Yash Kalash. argues it seems inevitable and so should be done deliberately and democratically.

Snoot watch

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