White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Fear Is Afoot, Be Afraid America

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There is enough fear to go around.

There is fear of the indescribable horror when the ICE men and women, their faces hidden by masks, grab a suspected illegal immigrant. Their grab could come at the person’s home or place of work, while picking up a child from school or standing in the hallway of a courthouse.

That person knows fear as never before. That person’s life, for practical purposes, may be over: loved ones left behind, hope shredded. He or she may be shipped to a place where they won’t be able to survive.

Fear is there because, maybe decades ago, they sought a better life and voted for it with their feet.

There is no time to argue, no time to ask why, no time to say goodbye. No time to prove your innocence or your U.S. citizenship. It is raw fear — the fear that secret police have always used.

There is the fear of those who work in government — once one of the securest jobs in the country — that they will be fired because their legitimate work in another administration is an affront to this one.

This hammer has come down in the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. The crime: supposedly being on the wrong side of history.

There is fear in the universities. Once a babel of free, even outrageous speech, they are cowed. Mighty Harvard, one of the shiniest stars in the education firmament, is dulled, and other universities fear they will be next. Everywhere academics worry that what they say in their classrooms might be reported as inappropriate — their careers ended.

There is fear in the law firms. A new concept is at work: an advocate is somehow guilty because of whom they defended. This violates the whole underpinning of law and advocacy, dating back to Mesopotamia, ancient Greece and Rome, now asunder in the United States.

Media is afraid. Disney, CBS and The Washington Post have bent before the fear of retribution, the fear that other aspects of their business will pay the price for freedom of speech. Journalists fear the First Amendment is abridged and won’t protect them.

There is fear, albeit of a lower order, across corporate America as it has become apparent that the government can reach deep down into almost any company, canceling contracts, withholding loan guarantees and, worse, ordering an “investigation.” That is a punishment that costs untold dollars and shatters good names, even if no prosecution follows.

Elected officeholders have reason to feel fear. President Donald Trump has suggested that Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago should be in jail. Is his compliant DOJ working on that? Fear is unleashed for the elected. Doing your job is no protection.

If you have expressed an opinion that could be judged as subversive, the state could come after you. Suppose you walk in a demonstration, exercising your constitutional right to assemble and petition? Suppose you wrote something on social media, so easily traced with AI, which is now out of step with the times? Satire? Opinion? News? Facts that are out of fashion? If you have posted, be afraid.

If you take a flight these days, the TSA will ask you to look into a camera. Then government has a fresh picture of you in its active system, ready for facial recognition software to identify you. It will ID you if you should be walking in a demonstration or just be near one. Your own picture, so easily captured by modern technology, can convict you.

What is the purpose of that picture? It has no bearing on the flight you are about to take. The same thing is true when you reenter the country from abroad. Smile for Big Brother.

Surveillance is a favored tool of the authoritarian state. I have seen it at work in Cuba, in apartheid South Africa and in the Soviet Union. Successive U.S. administrations have been quick to criticize the increasing use of technology for surveillance in China. No more.

Troops are being ordered into cities where the locals don’t want them. They come under the promiscuous use of the Insurrection Act of 1807.

Does America fear insurrection? No, but there is fear of federal troops in our cities.

The U.S. Commands the Heights of Science — for Now

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Pull up the drawbridge, flood the moat and drop the portcullis. That, it would seem, is the science and research policy of the United States circa 2025.

The problem with a siege policy is that eventually the inhabitants in the castle will starve.

Current actions across the board suggest that starvation may become the fate of American global scientific leadership. Leadership which has dazzled the world for more than a century. Leadership which has benefited not just Americans but all of humanity with inventions ranging from communications to transportation, to medicine, to entertainment.

An American president might have gone to the United Nations and said, “As we the people of America have given so much to the world, from disease suppression to the wonder of the internet, we should expect understanding when we ask of you what is very little.”

This imaginary president might have added, “The United Nations is a body of diverse people, and we are a nation of diverse people.

“We have been a magnet for the talent of the world from the creation of this nation.

“We are also a sharing nation. We have shared with the world financially and technologically. Above all, we have shared our passion for democracy, our respect for the individual and his or her human rights.

“At the center of our ability to be munificent is our scientific muscle.”

This president might also have wanted to dwell on how immigrant talent has melded with native genius to propel and keep America at the zenith of human achievement — and keep it there for so long, envied, admired and imitated.

He might have mentioned how a surge of immigrants from Hitler’s Germany gave us movie dominance that has lasted nearly 100 years. He might have highlighted the energy that immigrants bring with them; their striving is a powerful dynamic.

He might have said that striving has shaped the American ethos and was behind Romania-born Nikola Tesla, South Africa-born Elon Musk or India-born and China-born engineers who are propelling the United States leadership in artificial intelligence. The genius behind Nvidia? Taiwan-born Jensen Huang.

I have been reporting on AI for about a decade — well before ChatGPT exploded on the scene on Nov. 30, 2022. All I can tell you is wherever I have gone, from MIT to NASA, engineers from all over the world are all over the science of AI.

The story is simple: Talent will out, and talent will find its way to America.

At least that was the story. Now the Trump administration, with its determination to exclude the foreign-born — to go after foreign students in U.S. universities and to make employers pay $100,000 for a new H-1B visa — is to guarantee that talent will go somewhere else, maybe Britain, France, Germany or China and India. Where the talent goes, so goes the future.

So goes America’s dominant scientific leadership.

At a meeting at an AI startup in New York, all the participants were recent immigrants, and we fell to discussing why so much talent came to the United States. The collective answer was freedom, mobility and reverence for research.

That was a year ago. I doubt the answers would be as enthusiastic and volubly pro-American today.

The British Empire was built on technological dominance, from the marine chronometer to the rifled gun barrel to steam technology.

America’s global leadership has been built, along with its wealth, on technology, from Ford’s production line to DuPont’s chemicals.

Technology needs funding, talent and passion (the striving factor). We have led the world with those for decades. Now that is in the balance.

President Donald Trump could make America even greater: beat cancer, go to Mars, and harness AI for human good.

Those would be a great start. To do it, fund research and attract talent. Keep the castle of America open.