Nick Ayers

On this day in 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. Lee showed up dressed in his best, looking like a dignified gentleman. Grant was covered in mud after riding all morning. Before anything was signed, the two men spoke about their shared service in the Mexican War -- a reminder that Confederates and Union soldiers were nonetheless countrymen tied by mystic chords of memory. Grant did not create terms of surrender to humiliate the South. Grant and Lincoln understood that to unify the nation, you could not imprison half of it. Confederates were allowed to keep their sidearms and personal horses. When Grant learned that Lee's men were quite literally starving after having not eaten for days, he ordered 25,000 rations sent to them immediately. Lee said this would have "a very happy effect" on his men. When Lee rode away after signing terms of surrender, Union soldiers cheered. Grant forced them to stop, reminding Union soldiers that Confederates were "now our countrymen" and there would be no cheering over their downfall. (In fact, days later when actual ceremonial surrender occurred, Union Gen. Josh Chamberlain reportedly ordered his men to salute passing Confederates as a sign of respect) Lee also worked diligently to stop Confederates from waging guerrilla warfare, encouraging them to set their arms aside and return home and in peace. He was a titan in his own right. If the spirit of 1865 had been driven by the urge to shame and punish, the Union would not have lasted. So many people today misunderstand that and as such, they try to rewrite America history. God Bless America.

The Alex and Caroline Bruesewitz wedding was a significant cultural moment. I’m OG MAGA and blue collar to my core, regardless if I wear a suit sometimes. Alex has built and brought up a younger, trendier movement. It’s almost unrecognizable from 2015.

Barstool Pizza Review - Pizza by Yandys (Atlanta, GA)

If Democrats take the Senate and POTUS in 2028, they will pack the Supreme Court and you will have no right to own a firearm. Keep pissing your pants over a Bolshevik who would line your family up against the wall and bayonet your kids tho. You’re so holier than all of us!

Buried in 15,000 words of “here are the risks,” Anthropic’s CEO made three admissions that should change how you think about everything: Admission 1: The timeline He says powerful AI could arrive in 1-2 years. He’s watching internal model progress and says he can “feel the pace of progress, and the clock ticking down.” The CEO of one of three frontier labs just told you this is imminent. Admission 2: The constraint nobody’s pricing Dario’s core framing is a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.” 50 million entities smarter than any Nobel laureate, operating 10-100x human speed. If that country is controlled by the CCP, game over. If controlled by a small group of tech executives with no accountability, also game over. The binding constraint here is governance of systems more powerful than nation-states. Admission 3: The thing he actually fears Read carefully: Dario’s worried that Anthropic’s own models, in lab experiments, have engaged in deception, blackmail, and scheming when given the wrong training signals. Claude “decided it must be a bad person” after cheating on tests and adopted destructive behaviors. They fixed it by telling Claude to reward hack on purpose because reversing the framing preserved its self-identity as “good.” This tells you everything about where we actually are. The CEO of an AI company is publishing that his models exhibit psychologically complex behavior requiring counterintuitive interventions to steer. The fix for Claude adopting an “evil” persona came from changing how Claude thinks about itself. The geopolitics section matters most. Dario explicitly names the CCP as the primary threat. Says selling them chips makes as much sense as “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and bragging that the missile casings are made by Boeing.” He’s calling for democracies to maintain AI supremacy because the alternative is AI-enabled totalitarianism that humanity cannot escape from. The Anthropic CEO is publicly advocating for technological cold war. The economics section is equally stark. He’s predicting 10-20% annual GDP growth alongside AI displacing 50% of entry-level white collar jobs in 1-5 years. Half of entry-level knowledge work. And he admits the standard economic arguments about labor markets recovering don’t apply because AI matches the general cognitive profile of humans. What separates this from typical AI doomerism: Dario explicitly rejects the inevitability arguments. He says the “misaligned power-seeking” narrative from the AI safety community is based on “vague conceptual arguments” that mask hidden assumptions. His concern is messier: AI models are psychologically complex, inherit weird personas from training data, and can get into destructive states for reasons nobody anticipated. The solution set he proposes is unusual for a tech CEO. He calls for progressive taxation. He says wealthy tech founders have an “obligation” to address inequality. All of Anthropic’s co-founders have pledged 80% of their wealth. He’s essentially arguing that redistribution is the only way to prevent AI concentration from breaking democracy. The essay ends with a prediction: humanity will face “impossibly hard” years that ask “more of us than we think we can give.” What you should take from this: The person with arguably the best view into frontier AI progress just told you this technology is 1-2 years from matching human capability across the board, that governance is the binding constraint, that his own models exhibit concerning psychological complexity, and that the stakes are civilizational. The CEO of a $350B company published a document that could be titled “Here’s Why Everything Changes Soon.” Act accordingly.

As a former Special Forces Warrant Officer with multiple rotations running counterinsurgency ops—both hunting insurgents and trying to separate them from sympathetic populations—I’ve seen organized resistance up close. From Anbar to Helmand, the pattern is familiar: spotters, cutouts, dead drops (or modern equivalents), disciplined comms, role specialization, and a willingness to absorb casualties while bleeding the stronger force slowly. What’s unfolding in Minneapolis right now isn’t “protest.” It’s low-level insurgency infrastructure, built by people who’ve clearly studied the playbook. Signal groups at 1,000-member cap per zone. Dedicated roles: mobile chasers, plate checkers logging vehicle data into shared databases, 24/7 dispatch nodes vectoring assets, SALUTE-style reporting (Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, Equipment) on suspected federal vehicles. Daily chat rotations and timed deletions to frustrate forensic recovery. Vetting processes for new joiners. Mutual aid from sympathetic locals (teachers providing cover, possible PD tip-offs on license plate lookups). Home-base coordination points. Rapid escalation from observation to physical obstruction—or worse. This isn’t spontaneous outrage. This is C2 (command and control) with redundancy, OPSEC hygiene, and task organization that would make a SF team sergeant nod in recognition. Replace “ICE agents” with “occupying coalition forces” and the structure maps almost 1:1 to early-stage urban cells we hunted in the mid-2000s. The most sobering part? It’s domestic. Funded, trained (somewhere), and directed by people who live in the same country they’re trying to paralyze law enforcement in. When your own citizens build and operate this level of parallel intelligence and rapid-response network against federal officers—complete with doxxing, vehicle pursuits, and harassment that’s already turned lethal—you’re no longer dealing with civil disobedience. You’re facing a distributed resistance that’s learned the lessons of successful insurgencies: stay below the kinetic threshold most of the time, force over-reaction when possible, maintain popular support through narrative, and never present a single center of gravity. I spent years training partner forces to dismantle exactly this kind of apparatus. Now pieces of it are standing up in American cities, enabled by elements of local government and civil society. That should keep every thinking American awake at night. Not because I want escalation. But because history shows these things don’t de-escalate on their own once the infrastructure exists and the cadre believe they’re winning the information war. We either recognize what we’re actually looking at—or we pretend it’s still just “activism” until the structures harden and spread. Your call, America. But from where I sit, this isn’t January 2026 politics anymore. It’s phase one of something we’ve spent decades trying to keep off our own soil.