We only have Southern’s word for this, but a recent investigation by Pimlico Journal, into Robinson’s links with contemporary crypto ventures, contains some striking parallels. While viewing the livestream from Robinson’s recent Unite the Kingdom rally in London, Pimlico spotted a set of watermarks on the stream that seemed linked to crypto outfits: “Athena Bitcoin”, “UKFOMO”, and “UTKCOIN”. It then transpired that a crypto $UTK “token” has been launched, in conjunction with the rally, and aided by Robinson’s appearance on a number of associated X spaces.

You might say: so what? Political events often have business sponsors. And yet the nature of crypto means that links between cryptocurrencies and influencers are different in kind: the mutual financial interest is more direct, and the opportunity for self-dealing far more brazen. I’m also old enough to remember a time when anything less than a scrupulous public distance between business and politics was called “corruption”. And yet, again, if we pause the partisan finger-pointing for a moment it’s clear that the boundaries between business, tech, and politics haven’t just collapsed on the Right but also, long since, on the Left as well. This has just happened in distinct ways, and in service to competing visions for our high-tech future.

Crypto really is different to regular commerce, though — it really does have a natural affinity with radical politics, and especially the Right. This is, in both cases, because unlike bank-backed (“fiat”) currencies, or more traditional kinds of assets — such as shares or even property — crypto has no material referent at all. Arguably, this is somewhat true of every kind of currency except the old-fashioned kind backed by a “gold standard”, abandoned by Britain in 1931, and the USA in 1970. But it’s particularly true of cryptocurrency, which floats entirely free from any national bank. It resides entirely in computer code, and its “value” depends entirely on what its investors believe it to be worth: a dizzyingly abstract amalgam of desire, meme, and digital code.

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These attributes mean cryptocurrencies are both unusually immune to political interference, while also being uniquely volatile and vulnerable to bubbles, gold-rushes, and — sometimes — outright scams. Crypto is popular with libertarians (as well as criminals) for its security, resistance to taxation and other forms of state interference, and its opacity from a conventional accounting perspective. And it is of course eminently possible to make large sums of money entirely legally via this route. But the crypto world can also attract dodgy and sometimes outright fraudulent activity, such as “rugpull” scams, in which fraudsters artificially inflate the value of a cryptocurrency, then abruptly withdraw their initial investment, plus profits, and vanish, leaving other investors out of pocket. The untethered, highly mimetic nature of crypto valuations also means a well-placed influencer who invested in a cryptocurrency and then encourages supporters to do the same might stand to benefit significantly as its value rises.

In the X spaces Robinson joined to promote $UTK, reports Pimlico, he claimed to know nothing about this terrain, merely encouraging his supporters to get involved out of a general spirit of supporting Unite the Kingdom. Is this the whole truth? It’s hard to be sure, though Southern did place Robinson in a meeting to discuss a crypto scheme with Andrew Tate back in 2018. But we only have Southern’s word for this; and she also reports that Robinson was so high on cocaine in that meeting he was barely coherent.

So perhaps he doesn’t remember. Conversely though, perhaps former Robinson aide Lucy Brown is telling the truth in her recent memoir, Hate Club. There, Brown recounts Robinson’s habit of diverting political donations to personal uses, such as buying drugs or extravagant gifts for a wife to whom he was routinely unfaithful. Brown describes further how “lying to keep Tommy afloat was just an unwritten rule of his entourage”.

Now, I have no reason to believe $UTK is a “rugpull”. And if we set aside conventional beliefs about keeping business and politics at least somewhat distinct, we might argue that it’s just an unconventional means of political fundraising, with a happy side order of personal profit. Maybe buying $UTK actually will funnel finance to some kind of patriotic activism, or at least to Tommy Robinson.

And we might argue further, in Robinson’s defense, that the $UTK cryptocurrency mashup of business and politics is reasonable on its own terms, as a response to a distinct but just as potent mashup of business and politics among his enemies on the Left — one that weaponizes purportedly neutral institutions including finance against the Right. More broadly, we might point to the way those clusters of culture-war issues we used to call “Left” and “Right” appear today more like two competing visions for the high-tech future.

The version of high-tech utopia that dominated more or less until Trump’s re-election mapped more closely to the Left. Sometimes associated with the WEF’s much-maligned “Great Reset” proposal, this picture emphasizes collective values, centralized state investment in “green technology”, and universalist social liberalism managed via digital surveillance and controls on speech, all with a side order of DEI. Though we can argue the toss about how genuinely “Left-wing” any of this is, taken together it represents a broadly progressive set of instincts that still commands some considerable institutional and corporate power — all tacitly and often explicitly supported by many big businesses.

By contrast, at least until recently, those who objected to this programme’s collectivism, compulsory “degrowth”, speech controls and “diversity” ideology have been more institutionally and politically fragmented, and have often found themselves at the sharp end of censorship and even wholesale exclusion from normal public life — even at the hands of institutions that, within conventional liberalism, were assumed to be neutral, such as banks. For example, in 2023  Nigel Farage was “debanked” by Coutts for his political views — despite being, by any non-partisan measure, a fairly mainstream political figure. Still more egregious was the 2022 Trudeau edict that forced supposedly private, independent banks to freeze the accounts of Canadian truckers protesting against mandatory Covid vaccination.

If the digitization of our infrastructures has re-designated formerly neutral institutions as ideological battlegrounds, this reaches well beyond banks. Right-wingers will, for example, point to the way an infrastructure of message-manipulation, consensus-manufacture and latterly “disinformation” management developed under Obama. In 2020, this architecture was weaponized to pressure social media executives to suppress the “Hunter Biden laptop” story, calling it a Russian plot. Right-wingers claim it cost Trump that election: the laptop was genuine, and contained revelations that could significantly have harmed Biden’s presidential campaign.

Against this, we’ve seen the rise of a Right-wing, individualist tech subculture that understands its values as orthogonal to, and sometimes an insurgent reaction against, the more collectivist vision of our tech future that dominated in the era of “woke capital”. When the libertarian and free-speech absolutist Elon Musk bought Twitter (now X) in 2022, one of the first things he did was release files exposing the extent of the Biden laptop suppression.

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In this context, opposing the Left inevitably leads to crypto, even with its occasional dodginess. Facing transparent weaponization of nominally neutral financial infrastructure, any political figure to the right of Farage could be forgiven for concluding that the only way of hedging against being financially “unpersoned” is to exit mainstream institutional infrastructure altogether. In this context, Robinson’s advocacy of $UTK could be read not as a scam so much as an effort to protect his movement against weaponized digital-era institutions. And this kind of dissident tech has tended to emerge from, and be promoted by, tech entrepreneurs in search both of profit and a world more in line with their overall libertarian instincts. This isn’t just Musk: other Silicon Valley leaders who broke for Trump in 2024 indicated that this was at least in part because the Democrats seemed so hostile to their combined political and business interests, across crypto and AI.

So perhaps this fusion of political and commercial instincts is also the context within which we should read the recent investigation by the New York Times into crypto, tech, and Trump. The Times explored possible causal links between a Trump administration deal with the United Arab Emirates’ ruler, Sheikh Tahnoon, on access to advanced computer chips, and the announcement two weeks earlier of $1.5 billion in investment in a cryptocurrency startup owned by a key Trump aide, by one of the same Sheikh Tahnoon’s investment bodies.

Coincidence? Hearsay? The Times chooses its words carefully. But while we might look with dismay at the collapse this evidences between public and private interests, crypto is hardly where it started — or even the Right. The boundaries had long since collapsed, in the years of “woke capital”, evidenced nowhere more outrageously than in the censorship-industrial complex. It just took a different form, and ordered itself to a different utopian vision. Now, though, it’s clear that the Trump administration’s new tech friends have both a financial interest in shaping the tech landscape to suit themselves, and also a different vision and set of priorities.

In both cases, the boundaries are long gone between business, politics, and innovation. But the previous, “Left”-coded, vision for this new hybrid postliberal regime was as a centralized, digitized, globalized, egalitarian green-tech utopia, powered by the free movement of peoples wherever they are needed. For this vision, the totemic built environment was the faceless, frictionless nowhere of the international airport.

By contrast, the insurgent, competing Right-wing, postliberal vision is just as digitized. Never mind the pocket-filling activism of some mid-tier, anti-migration influencer; at scale, its crypto-powered vision is of a decentralized, exceptionalist utopia, powered by nuclear fusion rather than “renewables”, that enables the Great Men of History to transform the world in their image. Its totemic architecture is not the frictionless, faceless Everyman airport, but the exuberant infinite horizon of the spaceport.

There is, though, no compromising between these visions. One will have to win. Would we rather have woke capital, powered by banks, management consultancies, and social media moguls? Or would we rather have techno-feudalism powered by AI visionaries and crypto billionaires? If a third option exists, it doesn’t have super-rich backers with skin in the game. And in the brave new world after liberal “neutrality”, that’s what makes the difference.

Jokes aside, the intention is to stop the tech companies from building superintelligent AI, which they say “threatens to destroy life on Earth”. But here’s the thing: if these protesters believe that superintelligent AI has a high chance of killing everyone, then they’re not overreacting. If anything, they’re underreacting. Since I, too, think that there is a non-trivial chance of AI killing everyone, I should really be applauding them, not sneering.

A couple of other people who aren’t sneering are Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, who have just published If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. They are, respectively, the founder and president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which, long ago — way back in about 2002, when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was not even a twinkle in Sam Altman’s eye, and in fact Sam Altman himself was just starting high school — became what was probably the world’s first organized group dedicated to preventing AI from destroying the world.

Yudkowsky and Soares are so worried about the deadly potential of AI that they’re after something much more dramatic than a hunger strike. They want a global agreement, backed up with the sort of teeth that global anti-nuclear-proliferation treaties have, banning all frontier AI research. And yes, that would mean that if some country was found to be breaking that treaty, its data centers should be bombed.

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And if you accept the premise, that’s not an overreaction either. Elon Musk — who is, don’t forget, the head of a major AI lab — has said that AI is just as dangerous as nukes, and as recently as 2023 that it could lead to “civilization destruction”. Musk’s former friend Donald Trump is very much still surrounded by AI leaders, though: he is accompanied on his ongoing UK state visit by several Silicon Valley CEOs, including Altman. Trump ordered the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities earlier this year, because they might be close to making a bomb; should he consider blowing up his friends’ data centers at some point?

Yudkowsky and Soares lay the risks out pretty clearly. First, if AI companies succeed in making a superintelligent AI — which, to reiterate, they are actively trying to do — then that AI will be more powerful than us, in the way that we are more powerful than chimpanzees. Yes, an individual chimp could pummel me to death, but humans as a species have nearly driven chimps extinct without even meaning to. If a superintelligent AI wants to eradicate us, or to achieve some goal which would lead to our eradication as a side effect, then we would not be able to do a great deal about it.

In any case, the pair argues, we don’t actually know what’s going on inside AIs — much as we don’t truly know how the human brain works. There are trillions of simulated connections between billions of simulated neurons in each AI, far too many for any human to check. “The relationship that biologists have with DNA,” they say, “is pretty much the relationship that AI engineers have with the numbers inside an AI.” That is, we can see that some genes correlate somewhat with some behavior or disease, but we can’t just read out an embryo’s DNA and say “this will be a 6’2” guy who’s interested in maths and can play the guitar”. Similarly, AI engineers cannot look into an AI’s nodes and say “this AI is truthful and human-aligned”, although there are efforts to become better at doing that.

Another problem they lay out is that when we try to give them goals, we don’t really know what we’re doing. We train AI to want to be helpful and honest and so on, but only in a very high-level way. It’s comparable, Y&S argue, to how evolution trained us to “want” to reproduce, but accidentally created humans who “want” to have orgasms, and often actively take steps to stop ourselves reproducing with contraception. An AI’s goals could just as easily be disconnected from the goals we gave it. And even though AIs talk like humans, they are nothing like humans — their minds are alien. The things they want will be weird, and the very basic things that humans want — like staying alive — might not be important to them, despite our best efforts.

Finally, they argue, we’ll only have one chance to get it right. A superintelligent AI could, they say, kill us if it tried. So it must never try, not even on the first time we boot it up. But we can’t test the superintelligent AI — because if you get it wrong the first time it will kill everyone — so you have to test it on stupider, weaker versions, and hope those tests apply. It is, they say, like a space rocket: you can do all the lab testing you like, but it will never be quite like the stress of launching into space at seven miles a second. About 30% of new rocket types explode on their first flight.

One objection sometimes made at this point is that AI does not want things; it just does what we ask of it. But that is a pointless semantic dispute, as far as Y&S (and I) are concerned: a chess-playing AI acts as though it wants to win at chess. You can tell, by how it protects its king and tries to checkmate yours. If you don’t want to call it “wanting”, fine. But there’s an old AI proverb: “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” That’s true of “wanting”, too. As AIs get cleverer and more powerful, they’ll be more able to pursue the goals we give them, and will be driven to do so. It will look exactly like “wanting”. Call it what you like.

Once, you might have said that this doesn’t matter: AIs are just some programming in a box, and don’t have power in the world. But we’ve long since connected AIs to the internet, used them to run factories and weapons; one AI got connected to Twitter, was given some money to put into crypto, and is now worth $50,000,000. Money can be exchanged for goods and services. The idea that we could just switch them off, or that they are powerless to affect the real world, was hard enough to sustain 15 years ago; now it is silly.

So taking the points together, Yudkowsky and Soares argue compellingly that if things continue apace, unchecked, we may have, in the coming years, a hyperintelligent machine capable of manipulating the real world, which has weird, alien goals which are unlikely to be compatible with humans being alive; a planet with an oxygen-rich atmosphere and a surface temperature below the boiling point of water is great for us, but not particularly important to an AI. “The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.”

Yes, Y&S are, it should be said, outliers on the “AI doom” scale. They think — as their book title explicitly says — that if anyone builds it, everyone dies. But there are others, such as Scott Alexander, who have much lower estimates of the risk: he describes himself as a “boring moderate” because he thinks there’s less than a 25% chance (!) that AI will kill everyone. Part of the disagreement here seems to be that Y&S think that there could be a sudden, staggeringly rapid takeoff, in which the AI goes from not-dangerous to dangerous within a few hours.

The AI researcher Quintin Pope, for one, thinks a key premise of Yudkowsky’s argument is false: he believes training AI is nothing like evolution, and that it’s more like human learning, so accidentally instilling weird, dangerous values into the AI is unlikely. Pope and his colleague Nora Belrose reassuringly argue that AI “is easy to control” — although even they, self-described AI optimists, think “a catastrophic AI takeover is roughly 1% likely”.

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So while it might be fair to think that Yudkowsky and Soares are overconfident in their predictions of doom, we are nonetheless in a situation where the “boring moderates” believe we have a one-in-four chance of dying and the “optimists” think it’s a mere one-in-100. Would you play Russian roulette using a revolver with 100 chambers?

As I was reading If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, I realized that it was not the book I wanted to be reading. The book I wanted to be reading was by someone like Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, or Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, or maybe Altman himself. The book would be called something like I’m Going to Build It, And I Don’t Think We’re Going to Die. It would be a chapter-by-chapter rebuttal of this book.

I know that all those men understand the arguments Yudkowsky and Soares are making. Hassabis met his DeepMind cofounder Shane Legg at a conference organized by MIRI; Altman is on record as saying Yudkowsky was critical in his decision to start OpenAI. Anthropic was founded explicitly with AI safety goals which stemmed from Yudkowsky’s work. These guys know this stuff, most of which long predates the publication of this book, and which has been echoed by many other thinkers. They have spoken about the risks. Hassabis has said that AI could do “incredible things for humanity” but also have existential risks if mismanaged; Amodei likewise has written long essays on AI’s enormous potential upsides such as curing disease, ending climate change and wrote a seminal 2016 paper on the potential risks, but has not, to my knowledge, ever explained why he is confident now that the risks are worth taking.

I suspect that Yudkowsky and Soares are too confident that AI means doom. But even the “moderate” position that there’s a 25% chance is at least three orders of magnitude too high for me. I think the guy doing the hunger strike outside DeepMind would say the same, if he hadn’t got peckish and gone home for a snack. The only people who might reasonably explain why we shouldn’t worry are the ones building the superintelligent AIs. But for some reason they’re not telling us.

A brilliant Scotsman born in 1739, John Robison’s only lasting literary achievement is a little-known work that has endured as one of the most influential, yet least examined, political documents of modern times, and it possesses one of those interminable 18th-century titles: Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. More than a dozen editions remain in print.

John Robison was the first of a kind that has become a cliché throughout the manosphere and blogosophere: the nerdy computer programmer turned political pundit turned hate-riddled defender of the plutocracy — men like David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, Vivek Ramaswamy, and various and sundry other members of the “PayPal Mafia”. Not to mention the spittle-mouthed prince of them all, Mr Musk himself. From the start, such bros were guilty of intellectual overreach, supremely confident in their belief that, since they were the smartest men in the room, they possessed every right and privilege to scribble whatever they liked on topics about which they knew nothing. Such as politics.

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A beach read, it isn’t. But here was the first full-throated articulation of what has become an integral part of the overheated agenda of the modern Republican Party. It enumerates now familiar anti-democratic obsessions — from the menace of “universal citizenship” and deep-state spies to the influence and power of liberal journalists (“scribbling vermin”) and judges hell-bent on lawfare (“they insinuated themselves into all public offices, and particularly into courts of justice”); from the fear of wealth re-distribution to worship of the trad wife (as opposed to the “female ornaments” who had been infected by “the whole system of female dress in France”) and threats against the family (a “community of wives” to “take children from their parents, and educate them for the nation”). Robison even accuses the wealthy French atheist Baron D’Holbach of dissecting the brains of living children, purchased from poor parents, in order to discover the “principle of vitality”. That is to say, even in the age of Rousseau, Voltaire, and Jefferson, there was a precursor to Pizzagate.

Much like other private equity-obsessed male-power nerds who blithely endorse technofascism, Robison was an expert in everything but human connection. “This requires a talent to which I have no pretensions,” he confessed. Many years later, his students would complain that Professor Robison lectured in a rapid-fire monotone, spewing streams of fact with such rapidity no one could keep up.

Robison crossed the Atlantic twice: first, to fight for the British in the Battle of Quebec (1775), and second, to Jamaica as a technical expert on chronometers and as a secret agent for the Royal Navy. Afterwards, he settled in St Petersburg and became a military adviser to Catherine the Great. Thus he played an integral part in Russia’s efforts to gain a warm water port. He was one of many young naval engineers who illegally transferred English tech secrets to Russia, enabling her annexation of the Crimean peninsula.

Which is to say, the current geopolitics concerning Russia in the Ukraine have been with us for centuries.

It was easy for Catherine the Great to recruit Robison as a Russian asset. When he returned to Scotland, he brought with him two Russian students, and soon thereafter began his epic literary attempt to describe the descent of his fellow academics into evil. It would be the first version of a political philosophy that would endure through the centuries, a theory of invisible international powers consisting of intellectuals, socialists, and others who stood “against patriotism”. In short, Robison believed that a crew of atheists and globalists sought riches, power, and influence… To do so, he wrote, “they would abolish Christianity”, after which “dissolute manners and universal profligacy” would allow them to usurp the governments of Europe — a typical example of Robison’s over-heated prose, which aside from the polysyllables, would be right at home on Ben Shapiro.

The book was an instant bestseller. Within days, the first edition sold out in Scotland. Soon, four editions followed, as well as bootlegs in Ireland and America, a slew of abridgments, sermons, tracts, pamphlets, reference works, and scores of lurid novels depicting the wicked machinations of dastardly schemers intent upon modeling the world anew. In America, Proofs would inspire the rise of the Anti-Masonic Party, the Populists, the Know-Nothings and Nativists, McCarthyism, and the John Birch Society, whose founder Robert Welch was directly inspired by the book, which he kept in his library. (Not only was Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s ex-chief of staff, a card-carrying member of the John Birch society, but so too was Fred Trump, Donald’s father, who donated to the organization).

In “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, the Yale historian Richard Hofstadter characterizes the fears of the far Right as being “overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose and apocalyptic”. Hoftsadter, too, traced the origins of this political strain to Robison’s Proofs.

Underlying Robison’s political fears were the Freemasons, a secret society who believed that government could be perfected by means of science.  Both George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were card-carrying members. The great irony is that Robison, too, had been a Mason. His volte-face over his erstwhile Masonic bros illustrates how conspiratorial thinking inevitably turns upon itself. It explains how a diehard MAGA acolyte such as Daily Wire host Candace Owens could tell the Stephen A. Smith show that “Trump is betraying America.” It also explains how Jesse Watters could call the US intelligence report on the ineffectual results of bombing Iran “enemy propaganda.” It explains the furious infighting that has recently plagued MAGA: the battle between the isolationists (Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon) and the neoliberal nation-building, warmongering MIGAs (“Make Iran Great Again”). Such recent conflicts among the denizens of Fox News are being played out on the same terms Robison defined more than two centuries ago. Each paints the other as controlled by the deep state.

There is no stronger evidence that Proofs is essential to understanding the context of modern politics than a recent news item that may qualify as the strangest clip ever posted by the radical-Right online media outlet InfoWars. In a segment of just over two minutes, independent journalist Dan Dicks confronts Peter Thiel — the über-tech-bro entrepreneur, investor, Right-wing political activist, and billionaire co-founder of the software company Palantir Technologies that has signed several enormous contracts with the United States Department of Defense. The footage begins as Thiel, dressed in a gray suit and dark sunglasses, casually strolls alongside two bodyguards outside Stockholm’s Grand Hotel, on his way to a meeting of the secretive Bilderberg Group’s Steering Committee. In and of itself, this is extraordinary: the Bilderberg Group has long been considered an insidious and invisible cabal of “insiders” by conspiracy theorists. The subsequent video posted on hard-Right podcasts illustrates how conspiratorial tech bros cannot escape their own conspiracies, as they are by nature entranced by hidden truths.

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“Mr Thiel,” asks Dicks, “do you have any comments about Palantir’s surveillance of the American people, sir? Or any of your connections to Jeffrey Epstein?” The Republican megadonor — who has garnered immense political power for himself as a mentor to Vice President JD Vance — picks up the pace until, nearing a sprint, he manages to escape behind a police barricade. The grim set of his jaw, the intensity of his stride, and his stubborn silence speak volumes about Right-wing paranoid politics and the fear of the administrative state: there is no end to it. No matter how far to the Right you may go, you will be outflanked.

Robison possessed a penchant for rococo rhetoric and fanatical vituperation worthy of the most incendiary of today’s pundits — from YouTuber Hamza Ahmed to Fox’s Jesse Watters. But what is most relevant about John Robison’s brand of crazy was that he was also late-18th-century England’s premier expert on acoustics, engineering, and mechanics, a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and scientific editor of the famous third edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He was a favorite of Adam Smith’s, a drinking buddy of David Hume’s, the man who suggested to James Watt that steam might be used for engines of locomotion. He was an intellectual companion of the great mathematician, Leonhard Euler, and an expert on military seamanship, especially when it came to destroying other ships. After he inscribed the mathematical formula of magnetic attraction and repulsion, he was considered by many to be the next Newton.

If he had never written Proofs, John Robison might have been consigned by academics to the footnotes of scholarly articles about the Scottish Enlightenment. Instead, his embittered, resentful, furious, and thoroughly modern attack on the deep state presents an unsavory counter to the traditional narrative of Enlightenment positivism and liberalism. The case of John Robison proves how inevitable it was that the MAGA tech bros would become the mess they are today, and how our contemporary political crises have collapsed into a flurry of self-destruction.

“I never possessed great talents,” Robison would lament in one of his last, self-loathing letters. But the guns-and-ammo loving drug-addicted techno-nerd from the outskirts of Glasgow did provide mankind with one practical innovation. He invented the siren. How fitting, for the alarm he set more than 200 years ago is still ringing.

The triple-shirted architect of old-school Trumpian populism, briefly a White House advisor during Donald Trump’s first term, has emerged as the counterpole to Elon Musk, whose ultra-libertarian agenda has come to dominate the President’s second term. To Bannon, the billionaire X owner is more forceful and, perhaps, more dangerous than any figure on the Left. “Musk is the one with power at the moment,” he says. “The Democrats are nowhere to be seen.”

Less than a month into the Trump presidency, Musk has established himself as a core fixture in the White House. He holds news conferences in the Oval Office with his four-year-old; hosts foreign leaders in meetings that strikingly resemble head-of-state bilaterals; enjoys access to virtually every federal department; and, most importantly, has the ear of the President.

Bannon, meanwhile, must settle for a microphone. The 71-year-old’s War Room podcast beams out to hundreds of thousands of MAGA ultras six days a week — despite being purged from platforms including Spotify. In his studio, stacks of old Financial Times papers, archival documents and recording equipment are strewn across the table, overlooked by countless religious icons and memorabilia. “We have not yet begun to FIGHT,” reads one sign on his mantelpiece, beside a wooden crucifix labelled “full armor of God”. Top of his agenda: a third Trump term.

We met last Thursday, just days after Bannon pleaded guilty to skimming money from donations intended to privately fund the border wall, charges he nonetheless dismisses as “politically motivated” and “lawfare in the extreme”. But on that day he is in an ebullient mood: just before our meeting, the Senate confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. “This is a historic day,” Bannon reflects. “If you weld together the MAHA movement with MAGA and add in Hispanics, African-American men, and conservative Right-wing Asians, we have a 1932 coalition” — a reference to FDR’s sweeping first victory. He takes a long pause. “And yes, we have the tech bros too.”

Since promising, and failing, to run Musk out of the White House by Inauguration Day, Bannon’s view of the world’s richest man and his fellow “tech bros” hasn’t softened. He claims that he was willing to give Musk and his DOGE team the benefit of the doubt — “I have to give the devil his due” — for taking on the administrative state. But so far, he says, it has yielded disappointing results, as evidenced by the House panel’s budget blueprint: “DOGE is sitting there with the budget, but where the fuck are the DOGE cuts? We are 30 days away from approving a budget for the entire year with $2 trillion already baked in, and not one penny of anything that DOGE found. It’s ludicrous.”

Musk’s DOGE team has instead elected to focus on several bêtes noires of the Right: the US Agency for International Development, the Department of Education, and DEI programs across the government. At the Department of Education alone, DOGE claims to have made nearly $900 million in cuts, but as yet — and despite Trump’s permission — it has not made a move on the Pentagon, which failed its seventh audit in a row last year.

“I notice there is a hesitancy to cross the Potomac and go to the Pentagon,” Bannon says. “I would like to see $100 billion taken off the $900 billion budget right now, which is really a trillion.” Bannon goes on to describe DOGE’s efforts as “performative”, but for now, he is not ready to dispense with Musk. “It’s pretty evident the President’s using him as an armor-piercing shell that’s delivering blunt force trauma against the administrative state.”

This is a curious posture. On the one hand, Musk is, according to Bannon, an “agent of Chinese influence”, a problem “not just to the MAGA movement, but a problem to the country”. On the other, Bannon can countenance granting Musk access to the private data of nearly all government employees. Were Musk truly a threat to America’s national security, why would Bannon not be calling for his removal? “President Trump says Musk doesn’t do anything that he’s not on top of. I take him at his word.”

That feels like a lot of trust to place in one man, but to Bannon Trump is a “providential” figure. In his mind, Trump is facing something much harder than anything FDR dealt with and as a result, he should only be compared to the two other “top-tier” presidents: Washington and Lincoln. If there is an FDR comparison to be made, Bannon thinks, it’s that Trump should get a third term. He’s “exploring” options for this, he tells me.

Bannon knows that what he is proposing is unconstitutional, but if it further ingratiates him with the President, he’ll do it. “I don’t have right now a tremendous amount of support on this legally,” he says, “but remember, I faced longer odds on many other topics in my life.” It is also what happens when you turn a president into a god: politics becomes a holy war, creating a permission structure for a “by any means” approach to governance. On what basis would he even make the argument? “I’m working on making sure they have a correct interpretation of the Constitution,” he says. “I believe that President Trump’s eligible for one more term because I think it says consecutive.” It doesn’t. As the 22nd Amendment clearly states: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” Trump has been elected twice.

Legality aside, does the country really need another octogenarian president? “You give me a guy at 78 years old that’s coming in and working 18, 20 hours a day and dropping bombs like he’s dropping every day,” Bannon says. “Every day for me is Christmas morning, so why would we want to stop it?”

These “bombs” include turning Canada into America’s 51st state — it would grant the United States greater access to the Arctic — and acquiring the Panama Canal (a “great geostrategic move”). He also commends Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s efforts to bring an end to the conflict in Ukraine (“it’s historic”). But when it comes to Trump’s plan to “clean out” Gaza and turn it into the riviera of the Middle East, the two men don’t seem entirely aligned. There is “bigger thinking on there that, quite frankly, I don’t understand”, Bannon tells me. “He’s thinking out loud, right? He’s outside the box on so many things, we just have to trust President Trump.”

Once again, we just have to trust him.

On the question of Europe, however, Bannon is in line with the administration. A day after Vice President J.D. Vance browbeat his European counterparts over free speech and mass migration, Bannon struck a similar note. “The message was clear: Europe is no longer going to be treated like a protectorate,” he says. “To me the Atlanticists are quite frankly the most racist people in the world because they only think about white people in Western Europe and the United States. They don’t have any other broad perspective.”

There is, though, a danger in pulling too hard on this thread. Leaders like Emmanuel Macron have been calling for strategic autonomy for some time, warning the continent to not “be a vassal” in a US-China stand-off. Is Bannon not concerned that the US may be pushing Europe into Beijing’s arms? “I am worried about that,” he says, “but the Chinese have already infiltrated Europe. The British elite are totally bought and paid for.”

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Singling out the new British ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, Bannon warms to his theme: “From our mother country that we have a special relationship with, I can’t think of a worse individual to be sent over here that hates MAGA and that’s trashed Trump.” He adds: “They send him to Fox to grovel and say that he didn’t mean what he said before, but it won’t wash. Plus he’s on the payroll of the CCP.”

On domestic policy, meanwhile, Bannon offers a more subtle critique of Trump’s plan to extend the provisions in his signature Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which reduced tax rates for corporations and individuals. “I don’t think this should be renewed at all,” he says. “I’m mad about that.” He even expresses disappointment at the rate of deportations, which, despite all the noise, is moving at a similar rate as the Obama era. “We have to deport the 10 million illegal aliens who are here. Right now, we can’t even get the criminals out of jail.”

This is, in Bannon’s mind, not Trump’s fault, but the Deep State’s — the same Deep State that stole the 2020 presidential election, incarcerated him for four months, and is now working to undo the Trump agenda. It’s a convenient foil. Blame the Deep State if something goes wrong and claim victory if Musk does his job. For this reason, Bannon is happy for the president to “wrangle” the tech bros. “The enemy of the enemy is my friend,” he says. “This country is being destroyed by the Praetorian guard of the administrative state… Elon is helping expose this.”

Though neither would care to admit it, there is a certain symmetry between Bannon and Musk. Bannon joined Trump in the final stretch of his 2016 campaign, and then took on a high position once he entered office, while Musk did much the same in 2024. Both men had their turn on the cover of TIME magazine, a moment that precipitated Bannon’s downfall from Trumpian grace shortly after.

“Sloppy Steve”, as he became known, likes to talk. He was ousted from the White House for being one of the primary sources in Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury, and was repeatedly accused of leaking while in office. This habit made him even more of a nuisance once he was out, with a recent New York Times story noting that the administration was getting “hammered by Right-wing media” almost immediately after.

All of which is to say that Bannon can cause problems if he wants to. And in making an enemy out of Musk, what may appear like a squabble between two egotistical men could spill out into open warfare. Because at the heart of this conflict is a battle over the philosophical direction of the Trump presidency and, by extension, the country. That Vance even felt the need to address this “civil war” between the “populists and techies” — which he said was overstated — nonetheless shows that the tension in this coalition is not immaterial.

Despite Bannon claiming to be in regular contact with the White House, is Musk’s presence there a sign that the techno–libertarians are winning? “Absolutely not. Look at who he has put in: Neil Ferguson at the FTC, Gail Slater on antitrust, and Mike Davis on the White House counsel,” he responds. “Trump is sending a signal to tech bros, saying, ‘You don’t own me,’ and he’s also saying, ‘I’m not buying your techno-libertarian stuff.’ That was a huge fuck you to the broligarchs.”

The populists, then, are securing enough appointments to keep Bannon happy for now. But Trump has also gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and crippled the National Labor Relations board — hardly pro-worker moves. There is also the looming budget, which may include cuts to Medicaid, a federal health insurance program for over-65s. After we spoke, the War Room host fired out another warning shot at Musk on his podcast. “There are a lot of MAGAs on Medicaid,” he said. “I’m telling you, if you don’t think so, you are dead wrong… Just can’t take a meat axe to it, although I would love to.”

“You’re not going to win every fight,” Bannon says. “You’ve got to pick the fight you want to win.” So what happens if he loses one of those fights? He draws three red lines: China, AI, and visas. The last of these already caused a major rift in the MAGA movement shortly after Christmas — before Trump even took office — with Elon Musk threatening to go to “war” with other parts of the MAGA coalition, not least Bannon, over-expanding the guest-worker programs beloved of Silicon Valley. It resulted in the now former DOGE executive Vivek Ramaswamy going into “witness protection” — a scalp claimed by Bannon and the MAGA base. “It shows that Trump doesn’t believe in any of this techno-libertarian stuff.”

China is a different story. Bannon describes himself as a “super hawk”, and he calls for a “hemispheric defense” against Beijing, which stretches from Greenland all the way down to Javier Milei’s Argentina. Together, this vast landmass would be a bulwark against communist influence, with tariffs protecting North America as a “premium market”. For this reason, Ukraine must sign a peace deal with Russia so that the unholy alliance of Putin and Xi does not strengthen any further.

For Bannon, though, the AI threat is greater still. At last week’s Paris conference, Vance promised a “pro-worker growth path for AI”, but the War Room host is convinced this will simply empower the Chinese state, as well as oligarchs in the US. “We have let the wealthiest people in America soar to the commanding heights of the algorithmic age with no controls,” he says. “They have created an apartheid state. You don’t have to hire any blacks or Hispanics in this country. Or even American citizens.”

Bannon worries that the rise of AI will not only take blue-collar jobs but entry-level jobs at a technical and administrative level too. “We can’t let these techno-vandals randomly hop from one core institution to another, spray-painting garbage graffiti with no intention of ever cleaning it up.” Were Musk to make further encroachments on his red lines, Bannon promises that he would “pound” him every day on the podcast.

Would Musk even care? Despite all of Bannon’s attacks, Musk has limited his response to a single tweet, describing the War Room host as “a great talker, but not a great doer”. Nevertheless, Bannon assures me that he has “pretty good political connections” on Capitol Hill and in the White House. He also claims that his recent Manhattan court case inspired new Attorney General Pam Bondi to file a lawsuit against New York over immigration, which feels like a stretch. “This is not a brag, it’s just a fact,” he says.

Still, Bannon must surely resent that he is no longer inside a movement that he helped to create. Instead, the tech bros, who had their “Damascene moment at 11pm on November 5”, are now in charge. With the Democrats in disarray, it leaves open the question of who will take ownership of the movement after 2028. “The bench is deep,” says Bannon, without naming names. He stresses, though, that future leaders from both political parties won’t be politicians, citing Stephen A. Smith, a sports TV presenter, as a contender for the Democratic Party. “Democrats will defer to MAGA-type, Trumpian personalities,” he says. “Smith has an ability to communicate to the American people.”

“New leaders are going to emerge,” he assures me. “Remember Sherman was considered a nut case. Grant was a drunk. Lincoln was a failed congressman.” Does that list include ex-convict podcasters? “No, no, no, that’s ridiculous — I’m not a politician.” Nor is Stephen A. Smith — and nor, once, was Donald Trump.

This reflects a profound anxiety among boys, that no matter how intellectually superior you are, physical defeat trumps everything. Even the ever-triumphant protagonists of the Revenge of the Nerds film franchise never manage to shake a sense of profound inadequacy, regardless of how many bullies they “school” by other means. And the anxiety of a boy can be formative as he grows into a man.

In the world of internet celebrities and tech tycoons, a trend has been picking up steam over the past few years: high-profile figures from the digital realm have been donning boxing gloves and stepping into the ring, to square off in physical matches. This isn’t the scripted amateur wrestling of the past, as in WrestleMania’s “Battle of the Billionaires”. These are real, bare-knuckle brawls with genuine stakes.

These “creator clashes”, as they’ve come to be known, rake in millions of viewers and generate substantial revenue for the participants. They’ve even served to revitalise the careers of D-list celebrities whose stars had begun to dim — or been snuffed out by cancellation — such as Epic Meal Time host Harley Morenstein and controversial comedian Sam Hyde. But why would men in need of neither revenue nor a reputational boost engage in such an activity? Why are Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, men whose combined worth is over $300 billion, hinting at an upcoming cage fight?

These creator clashes are just the latest chapter in a long tradition of intellectuals seeking to prove themselves physically. Norman Mailer, for instance, wasn’t just a literary giant; he was also known for his penchant for physical altercations. And his two instincts, of the writer and the fighter, often collided. Mailer’s book, The Fight, centres on the legendary “Rumble in the Jungle” between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Not content to be an impartial observer, Mailer implicated himself in the narrative, showcasing his gritty, tough-guy literary persona as both participant and spectator.

The bookish Mailer graduated from Harvard at the age of 20, the archetypal “geek”; yet he worked towards proving that intellectual prowess and physical strength aren’t mutually exclusive. Another Harvard man, George Plimpton’s project was similar. His book, Shadow Box, recounts his experience training and then sparring with light heavyweight champion Archie Moore. In elite circles, Plimpton’s Ivy League pedigree and physical delicacy might have been celebrated, but in a wider society that equates masculinity with physical strength and courage, his was suspect. Through his participation in boxing, his manhood was validated — even though Moore thrashed him.

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Political leaders, too, also prefer to appear strong rather than nerdy, even though an analytical mind is more useful in running a country. Barack Obama never missed an opportunity to show off on a basketball court. And RFK Jr has recently made a lot of headlines by bench-pressing. But the best American example is undoubtedly Theodore Roosevelt, a prolific author who was also renowned for his love of boxing, wrestling, horse riding and judo. He extolled the virtues of “the man in the arena” — one who actively challenges himself — and a “strenuous life“; in pursuit of one, he was actually blinded in one eye, during a boxing match with Colonel Daniel Moore, his military aide.

The injury became part of his public persona, a testament to his unwavering dedication to his ideals. As did his response to an assassination attempt on the campaign trail in 1912: after he was shot in the chest, he waved away concerned aides and gave a scheduled speech. But it was actually his textbook knowledge of anatomy, rather than his courage, that convinced him to go on: he knew that if he wasn’t coughing up blood, the wound didn’t need urgent attention. His mind was, in a crisis, more valuable than his courage. It was this that allowed him to present himself as not simply brain or brawn, but a thorough amalgamation of both.

At its heart, the trend of creator clashes might just be the same, age-old attempt to reach for this masculine ideal, but with a modern twist: as we increasingly live our lives in the digital realm, becoming more and more disembodied, there is something subversive about proving ourselves to be physically powerful. It’s also fused with the imperative to create and maintain a personal brand online that can be ranked in terms of followers, retweets — or victories in the ring.

The concept of getting famous people to beat each other up took off in 2002 with Celebrity Boxing. The two-episode Fox series attracted millions of viewers, despite the backlash against its exploitative nature. (One match featured the legendary basketball player Manute Bol, whose 7’7″ height and deteriorating health raised ethical questions.) Still, celebrity boxing remained a spectacle, occasionally resurfacing in various forms.

Earlier iterations of celebrity boxing often leaned towards the sensational (boxer versus wrestler!), and the absurd (watch physically unwell men like the giant Bol and obese former American footballer William “Refrigerator” Perry flail about in the ring!). But the advent of digital media has introduced a new dynamic. When influencers, entrepreneurs and digital celebrities face each other now, they are engaged in something more than physical contests with a small television audience. Social media platforms allow these events to be staged, promoted and consumed in real time, on a global scale; they have become major vehicles for personal and brand promotion, strategic tools for audience engagement.

A case in point is the boxing forays of YouTube personalities Logan and Jake Paul, influencer-turned-boxers whose fights are part spectacle, part marketing strategy. The build-up often involves an array of promotional activities — including viral videos and social media sparring — that riles up digital audiences. The payoff comes in the form of millions of viewers worldwide, heightened brand visibility and increased follower engagement, all of which can lead to substantial revenue streams.

Hence the hype about an impending clash between Musk and Zuckerberg, which suggests a future where the convergence of physical sports and digital personas becomes increasingly commonplace. Few tech bros are happy with their level of visibility, just as few nerds feel secure in their physicality. Some digital elites, such as Jeff Bezos, have invested heavily in developing impressive bodies.

However, this trend is not solely about transforming from the bullied “geek” into the well-respected “jock”. It’s also about embracing the spectacle. The internet age has taught us that visibility equates to power, and what better way to grab the spotlight than to step into a boxing ring? It’s an audacious move. But there’s another, more nuanced dimension to this phenomenon. In the digital age, the lines between “geek” and “jock”, between intellectual and physical, are blurring. With the rise of online entrepreneurs, success no longer fits into neat categories.

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Today’s digital elites have access to the best drugs and trainers needed to succeed both intellectually and physically. They can be someone who can code a groundbreaking app, run a billion-dollar company and throw a knockout punch. Someone, in other words, who is simply better than you, the mere spectator and consumer of content, in every conceivable way. Someone superhuman.

So, as the spectacle of celebrity boxing goes mainstream, we’re not just watching a fight; we’re witnessing a cultural transformation. Society that is increasingly recognising the multi-dimensionality of success and power: money really can buy everything. Capital, rather than hard work, can fuse the geek and a jock. The boxing ring has become a stage for the reinvention not only of masculinity, but of the limits of humanity itself.