Eli Bernstein

JD Vance just admitted the White House plan is to take ownership of every major AI company in America. Steven Bartlett brought up Bernie Sanders' proposal that workers should own 50% of the major AI companies. Vance's response: "The president by the way likes that idea too. He likes that idea." Trump's preferred mechanism, Vance said, is a sovereign wealth fund where the US government takes equity stakes in private AI companies. The Vice President literally just confirmed that an administration is planning the most radical economic policy proposed in modern American history. Partial nationalization of the MOST valuable private companies on earth. And the idea originally came from Bernie Sanders, who Vance said Trump agrees with on this point. This is not a small thing: The US has spent 80 years selling the world on the model where private companies stay private and the government stays off the cap table. The countries that did the opposite, with sovereign wealth funds owning slices of their biggest firms, are Norway, Saudi Arabia, China, and Singapore. And the Trump administration told you on a podcast it wants to do the same to Silicon Valley. But the reasoning Vance gave for it is where it gets really interesting... He said the historical analogy that scares him is the original Industrial Revolution. His own words: "Rich people got way richer. And that led to in Europe fascism and communism." He believes AI will not cause mass unemployment but mass inequality, and that mass inequality is what breaks societies. His fix is that workers need a seat at the bargaining table before the wealth gets created, not a redistribution check after. "I think labor unions are a very important model here." And the other thing about AI that scares him is surveillance. His exact phrase was that AI is "fundamentally a communist technology" because it lets governments and corporations watch and score people in ways NOTHING else can. He said he doesn't want a social credit system, doesn't want a tech CEO deciding whether you can buy a beer based on an algorithm nobody understands, and is afraid of exactly that outcome. So here is the full picture: The sitting Republican administration believes AI will make the rich dramatically richer, that this will radicalize the country the way the Industrial Revolution radicalized Europe, that the answer is government equity stakes plus stronger labor unions, and that the second-biggest threat is the surveillance state these companies are building. That is not a Republican worldview. That is not even a Democratic worldview. This is a worldview that has no political home in the United States right now. Most people are still arguing about whether ChatGPT will take their jobs. But the people with the actual power are already past that argument. They are quietly designing the framework for owning the companies that will. The craziest part is how casually Vance dropped it as a sidenote on a podcast millions will half-listen to in the background. If you have money in OpenAI, Anthropic, or anything like that, you should be watching the full thing yourself. What do you think?