By admin 
In recent weeks, a fresh crop of people connected to the artificial intelligence industry have emerged to warn that AI is possibly going to kill us all, spreading the word with various degrees of credibility or self-interest. Anthropic chief and co-founder Dario Amodei has also called to slow down the development of AI technology, a recommendation that Sam Altman of OpenAI and even notorious good judgment-haver Elon Musk quickly cosigned. Meanwhile, the Trump administration and the president himself have continued to insist that AI is essential for American technological advancement and military might. As a very strange public debate has ensued, it’s become clear that Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other people connected with the administration view AI as an essentially masculine tool: “dominant,” a word they keep using over and over, powerful, and able to be kept in check only by a strong ruler.
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The Trump administration has become a place where very odd politics around both gender and “wokeness” are constantly on display. Trump issued a garbled executive order immediately upon retaking office that attempted to redefine “male” and “female.” Hegseth is obsessed with testosterone, announcing in July that military members will be screened for low T regardless of their gender. The intense focus on gender and wokeness has also been true of their approach to AI: Last year, the administration promised that it would require AI companies with federal contracts to make sure their large language models match the administration’s views on things like climate change; transgender identity; and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. (The administration characterized the mandate as a way to only purchase AI tools that “prioritize truthfulness and ideological neutrality.”)
It’s now increasingly obvious that Trump and his administration view AI technology as something akin to a large, dangerous dog that only a masculine owner can control. Trump has repeatedly called warnings that AI could harm human beings “a hoax,” writing on TruthSocial that the “only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”
“The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by ‘Climate Change,’” the president also posted, with his trademark random capitalization. “That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one. These people are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause. Soon you’ll find out they’re working for people that do not have the best interests of the United States in mind!”
More recently, Trump promised, also on TruthSocial, that he’d appoint an “AI czar,” writing, “Only High I.Q. individuals need apply! AI is the next Industrial Revolution, or Internet, but will be even larger and more impactful.” And on X, he tried very hard to rebrand AI entirely, putting to his followers a poll about which more flattering term should be used instead. “A far more elegant and accurate description of this new phenomena would be Superior Intelligence (SI),” the president wrote, “or Extreme Intelligence (EI) or, Supreme Intelligence (SI).”
The debate took a strange turn last week when the New York Post ran a story warning that some people calling for a slowdown of AI development, including Amodei, are connected with the “effective altruism” movement. Effective altruism is, simply put, a philosophy first put forward by the bioethicist Peter Singer, which purports to use calculation and hard evidence to maximize the impact of charitable donations, and figure out what charitable initiatives will do the most good mathematically. The idea is controversial for all kinds of reasons, and one of its most visible proponents has been imprisoned financial fraudster Sam-Bankman-Fried, which isn’t, itself, a great advertisement. Some people have even likened EA to a cult, and one actual and extremely violent high-control group, the Zizians, had some effective altruist DNA. There’s also an offshoot best described as “effective altruism accelerationism,” promoted by several high-profile Silicon Valley figures, which holds that accelerating technological progress, including by developing AI faster, will promote human survival and consciousness on a galactic level, an idea that has several obvious, universe-sized holes. (Among them: AI data centers already clearly have disastrous environmental and health impacts, which is the opposite of promoting human survival.)
Boiling all of that down to only what might interest or scare their readers, the Post positioned effective altruism as a frightening example of a wealthy “group of woke elitists” trying to engineer the world to their liking. “It’s a group of globalists who believe in open borders, genderless pronoun and promote ‘Effective Altruism’ that believe all the world’s problems can be solved with technology,” the paper elaborated, adding that EA’s “obsessed adherents believe in funneling their wealth toward the goals they view as most important to humanity, including climate change and strict AI regulation.”
Right-wing commentators were quick to make the connection: that “woke,” feminine, or nonbinary people can’t be trusted in their warnings on AI. “There is no committee or regulatory body with a ‘they/them’ that will make any good decisions,” far-right activist Chris Rufo declared. “Social scientists call this the Iron Law of Genderfluidity, and it’s been replicated in a hundred peer-reviewed journals, so you know it’s true.” (He was attempting to make a joke; there is no such “law.”)
The Post soon ran a second story about how another prominent AI critic, author and computer scientist Nate Soares, is romantic partners with Aella, a well-known pseudonymous sex writer who has an OnlyFans and goes to sex parties. Soares is the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the co-author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. But the Post‘s story barely discussed his work; rather than cast doubt on any of Soares’ specific ideas about AI, it instead painted AI critics as sexually deviant—even if only by association—and thus untrustworthy. Other outlets like Fox News and the Bari Weiss-run The Free Press have followed suit with their own stories about the dangers of the effective altruism movement’s views on AI.
The Defense Department has also gotten involved. The X account for the so-called Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, previously seen posting QAnon memes, has issued a series of posts attacking effective altruism. Emil Michael, who was confirmed to that position in May 2025, is a former businessman who worked at Uber and, before that, Klout, a social media analytics company that assigned users a score assessing their online popularity and influence.
“Americanism, not effective altruism,” one recent tweet from the account declared. “The United States will continue to be AI DOMINANT!”
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“No dooming,” another declared. “America will be AI DOMINANT! Whoever wins AI, WINS!”
Michael has also appeared on Fox News to declare effective altruism’s advocacy against AI to be a plot against American interests. “The amount of dollars being spent in DC now, directly and indirectly, by this effective altruist movement,” he said recently in a Fox appearance shared on another Pentagon account, “in the next few years, you’re going to see more dollars poured into this industry from a lobbying standpoint. The promoters of some of these extinction, death-cult-like philosophies are a part of that effort… There’s no doubt this is a coordinated campaign to scare people to make irrational decisions that benefit some of these incumbents.”
Dr. Fred Turner is a Stanford University professor of communication who studies media, technology, and American cultural history. In the early years of the internet, he wrote recently in The Baffler, developers were interested in networking—using tech to create connections between people and imagine a more collaborative and utopian world. Now, he wrote, they’re interested in extraction.
“The social world is no longer something to be interlinked,” Turner told me. Now, he says, “The value comes from monitoring, measuring, mapping, and reselling every bit of our social interaction, including the production of knowledge, stories, and language.”
AI promises to help companies do just that. Given how often Trump has used the presidency as a vehicle to make money, Turner says it would be natural to assume that Trump’s alliance with the industry has something to do with his seeing the potential for personal profit from its data centers. But it’s also about asserting dominance and control.
“The Trump presidency is a process of protecting Trump’s personal incentives—his own personal reputation—and constantly shifting debates that could be about policy into interpersonal name calling realms where he can assert a kind of machismo,” Turner says.
The administration, Turner adds, has made asserting a stereotypically menacing masculinity a core part of how the world is meant to see it: “That kind of projection of masculine dominance in a cruel way, as Trump does routinely, has the effect of scaring enemies, recruiting allies, and drawing the craven to your side. They are embracing a masculine style that gives them real material gains.”
With respect to the Trump administration’s sudden championing of AI broadly and data centers specifically, Turner asks “what would they imagine they gain from reframing a policy about land use, about water use, about electricity use, in terms of sexuality?
‘If it were mine to do, I would teach the world a class on separating out policy debate and questions of sexual style and ethics,” Turner says. “If you tangle them up, you can muddy the water and cause folks to become upset against their own interests. I’d be asking about the profitability for Trump and his crew both in a financial sense, and then other senses: of turning a debate about technology into a debate about who’s got the phallus.”
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