Nate Wilcox joins Plutopia News Network with a wide-ranging critique of U.S. politics, media, technology, and foreign policy. He argues the political center has collapsed, institutions lack credibility, and executive power dominates, while both parties fail in different ways: Democrats with performative resistance and hollow policy, Republicans with anti-democratic drift. He connects domestic dysfunction to global overreach, from NATO tensions to surveillance and deepfake threats. He is sharply skeptical of AI, seeing persuasion and control, not productivity, as its main value. Touching on topics from super-PAC influence and generational turnover in Congress to conspiracy-laced histories of state violence, Nate paints a picture of systemic rot but leaves open the hope of a “soft landing” and a reimagined international order.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Nate Wilcox:
The big tech money guys have all clearly gone over to Trump. Some of them, like Peter Thiel and Alex Karp at Palantir, are clearly vying to replace the deep state, or it’s like the IT guy pulling a coup in the office because Palantir was created by the CIA. And there’s these internal battles within the deep state happening in the Trump administration. It’s still impossible for me to figure out what went on with Elon Musk, and we’re also in this environment where companies like Tesla, whose financials make no sense, lose massive amounts of money every quarter. They’re losing market share hand over fist. If we weren’t keeping Chinese electric vehicles out of America, Tesla would be dead in the water. And we’re becoming the sort of technological hermit kingdom where Americans don’t even know what’s available in the rest of the world. Where most American citizens — like if you grew up in Joplin, Missouri, and most of those people that live in Joplin, Missouri don’t travel outside Joplin, Missouri very often, much less gallivant off to China and Shanghai and see how the first world lives, have no context for what’s going on on Earth.
