Letters from the American Empire: July 8, 2026

Dear friends,

Thank you for supporting Red Scare. While I plan to keep the majority of my writing public, I’m starting a new weekly, semi-regular newsletter for paid subscribers called “Letters from the American Empire.” This is a thank-you to those who have contributed resources to this project, as well as a place where I’ll share readings, hash out ideas, and preview new research I’m working on. I look forward to sharing what I’m reading alongside news items that deserve attention.

Let’s start with so-called “artificial intelligence.” A decade ago, the question of AI hadn’t really popped into my head beyond the apocalyptic visions of Skynet from the Terminator film franchise—where thinking machines colonize the future and the past, going back in time to eliminate the future human rebel leader, John Connor. (I’ll return to that in a bit.) Today, the future of the world seems to be held in the grips of either AI doomerism or utopianism.

A year ago, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas published a startling graphic modeling possible human extinction. The central banking institution forecasted the likely impact of AI on U.S. economic growth across three scenarios. The primary scenario painted a positive trend of 2.1 percent for U.S. GDP growth over ten years. “Not trivial but not earth-shattering either,” the authors wrote.