OSTP: Now Into Science Fiction

The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released its review of 2025 earlier this week. Celebrating all the “wins” — effective capture by Big Tech ambitions, a disastrous vaccine landscape, and consistent attacks on academia . . . oh, sorry, not those “wins” — and it was quickly and correctly condemned as “a mess” and a weaponization of the science information infrastructure to accomplish what Adam Becker’s excellent book — More Everything, Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity — outlined last year in an increasingly accurate description of a bizarro space domination fantasy shared by Big Tech oligarchs and white nationalists.

• An important point to remember before we continue — Modern AI is not about knowledge, but about power.
  • Also, this from the Wall Street Journal earlier this week: “A large subset of top AI researchers believe that models like ChatGPT and Claude have effectively hit a dead end and will never reach a level of intelligence that matches or exceeds that of humans.”

As the Science Fight Club — affiliated with our friends at Stand Up for Science — wrote after the release of the AI-drenched OSTP review:

Our government is turning our science and our expertise into a weapon to create a eugenics-based, hierarchical society. They are and will increasingly use “science” (read: pseudoscience bullshit) to make the case for why [insert group of people here] are inferior to [wealthy, white, straight, cis, christian nationalist men].

The white nationalism of the current US administration has been clear for years, from “replacement theory” tiki torches in Charlottesville to comments from the Presidential debate podium for Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” to George Floyd to ICE and its transgressions against US representatives, citizens, and immigrants with skin tones that deviate from Pantone’s 2026 “Color of the Year.” The racism has been uniform and sadly predictable, and it has led to atrocities — abuse, detentions, and murders — targeting immigrants, children, and US citizens.

Heather Cox Richardson added today:

. . . the goal of attacking immigrants is not simply to create a white nation; it is also to terrorize Americans into accepting the domination of MAGA Republicans.

Government social media accounts have become increasingly white nationalist in the past year, as well, with one journalist documenting these instances writing earlier this week:

This month, the White House and the Department of Homeland Security jointly posted a recruitment ad for Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Instagram, Facebook and X, overlaid with the words “WE’LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN.”

That’s also the name of a song, written by members of a self-described “pro-White fraternal order,” that has been embraced by the Proud Boys and other white-nationalist groups. Hundreds of explicitly neo-Nazi and white-supremacist accounts have shared the song on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, since 2020. The white supremacist who killed three Black people at a Jacksonville, Fla., dollar store in 2023 included lyrics from the song in his writing.

Science is being enlisted into MAGA’s white nationalist crusade via MAHA.