What if the arms race isn't a problem to solve — it's the business model? Paul Jay, founder of theAnalysis.news and director of the upcoming documentary How to Stop a Nuclear War, breaks down the machinery behind Golden Dome, lunar data centers, AI militarization, and the trillion-dollar boondoggle playbook that's been running since the Cold War. Plus: why "corruption" misses the point, the Pentagon as America's largest socialist institution, and what a bipartisan Senate committee concluded in 1933 that nobody wants you to remember.
Patrick Lovell
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and welcome to Patrick Global Truth Bomb Riffs the Con. This is my 821st offering over a four year period, desperately trying to give information from some of the greatest sources that exist about truth, justice, and all things corruption at the end of the line here.
Today’s guest is really a special sort of offering by way of— I’ve been aware of Paul Jay from theAnalysis.news, a Toronto-based and United States (for quite some time), journalist, but also maybe I call him muckraking journalist, a documentarian, and there are many credits to his name including his most recent offering, which is How to Stop a Nuclear War. I can’t wait to catch up on that.
Paul Jay is also the purveyor of theAnalysis.news. I would encourage everybody looking for a robust understanding, academic to emotionally charged relationship with all that is going on now. There are probably a few sources that I’ve come across that provide a more nuanced and robust opportunity to understand how things work and ultimately what we’re all in the midst of.
For those of you who listen all the time, you know that I’m saying that really the end of the line is nee. I thought that it would be very important to reach out to Paul to get his perspective on what he’s looking at and, ultimately, how he prioritizes what he’s looking at today. We’re recording this on Wednesday, May 27, 2026, at approximately noon my time.
Paul, welcome back to another great conversation. It’s been some time since we’ve seen each other.
Paul Jay
I like robustly nuanced, though.
Patrick Lovell
Good. I appreciate that. I should say, in addition to everything else, by being a documentarian— if my lips can keep up with the idea in my mind— you’re also one of the innovators and creators behind what I think is one of the greatest documentary film festivals on the planet out of Toronto called Hot Docs, which I think you were on the board for the first five years of it.
Paul Jay
Yeah, I was the founding chair.
Patrick Lovell
You were the founding chair, no less. And boy, when I went there, I was just amazed at how beautiful the University of Toronto campus is. But, you know, we find ourselves really deep in it at the moment, and there’s a lot to cover. I’m just going to kind of leave it open-ended at first, and I’ll react to kind of whatever direction you go. What’s top of mind for you, Paul?
Paul Jay
Well, I don’t know. I was working on an essay last night putting the war on Iran, against Iran, in the context of the militarization of the U.S. economy, but then you just talked about your data center thing in Utah.
Just this quick thing, you told me that you’re working on a project about this massive data center that Mr. Wonderful, who sometimes is called Mr. Horrible, Kevin O’Leary, is involved with. I’ve just been working, reading, and doing some research about it. What they’re not telling people, it seems, is that the real plan for data centers is, sounds like a science fiction fantasy, but they’re really planning to put them on the Moon. They need a 10-15 year stopgap to drive this massive capital infusion into AI. They have to build these big data centers, but they know that anything longer than maybe 10-15 years is going to become obsolete.
There’s already a company— and I’m sorry, I forgot the name— but they’re already developing a system of perhaps 1,000 satellites or so that are going to test data centers in satellites. But it’s a step towards creating them on the Moon.
The reason to create them on the Moon is because there’s so little atmosphere on the Moon. Solar rays get through to the surface far more robustly and not nuanced to the surface of the Moon. So if you build massive solar farms on the Moon, the power you can generate is beyond anything we can imagine. They can create data centers beyond anything we can imagine.
Now, in a sense, it sounds like not such a bad idea. It’s far more, at least for Earth anyway— I don’t know how the Moon people think about it— but for Earth, it’s far more environmentally friendly to get it off the planet and stick it on the Moon.
I am not, what I would say, a Luddite about AI. I think there’s tremendous potential for good for AI, but only if it’s publicly owned and democratically controlled. For-profit AI is an existential risk all on its own. But the thing about this project on the Moon, it’s really linked to the whole Golden Dome project, which is really part of the militarization of space. That is the next biggest, not only a boondoggle, because it’s going to be trillions and trillions of dollars, but it’s also a grave threat. If they come even close to creating this massive network of satellites that will be governed and directed by massive data centers on the Moon, that gives them what they think is the possibility of a defensive shield that isn’t really that.
See, they know there’s no such thing as a defensive shield because it’s just too easy to defeat. What it really is is a first-strike weapon, or at the very least, the ability to threaten a first strike from space. So if there’s this massive network of satellites that can create a supposed defense against, for example, Chinese ICBMs, and then if you can hit things on the ground with laser weapons and perhaps other weapons from space, they think they’re going to get the upper hand. Or do they?
See, I don’t think they even think that. Because what does it leave the Chinese as a way to defeat this? Well, either compete with their own thousands of satellites, their own Moon-based data center, in which case they can have some war on the Moon over who’s going to have data centers. In fact, I think there’s even some sci-fi movie where they’re blowing each other up on the Moon. The Chinese aren’t going to do that because there’s a very simple way to defeat all of this. You blow up one or two nuclear bombs right above the upper atmosphere, and they create electromagnetic pulses that wipe out tons and tons of satellites.
In the film, we’ll be talking to an astrophysicist from Princeton who’s going to break this down quite scientifically in the movie. They’re actually creating a scenario where the only defense the Chinese have is nuclear weapons.
So what does it really mean? What it means is that the objective isn’t that it should work. They know the Chinese will have a deterrence. The Chinese will say, “Well, go spend your trillions of dollars, build all this crap. And if you ever try to use it, we’ll blow the shit out of it.” So what does it really mean? It means they actually don’t even plan to really use it. See, the point that people don’t get when they say, “Oh, it’s going to unleash an arms race, an AI arms race, a nuclear arms race,” the point is the arms race is the objective because it’s about the money-making. It’s not about deterrence.
If you wanted deterrence, you would go to the Chinese and the Russians, and you would negotiate: 1) Every country gets about three subs; 2) the Americans commit to reducing their expenditure on conventional weapons significantly, because how is Russia and China going to give up on nukes or reduce nukes if the U.S. has such conventional superiority? But this is rationality.
See, if your objective is human survival, it’s one set of logic. But if your objective is, we’re all gonna die anyway, we probably won’t all blow up in my lifetime, and all I need to do now is make money, have an arm of the White House in my name, and build an arch somewhere— and this is just one guy. I mean, there’s a whole class of these people who are so cynical about the future that they figure if they get by, their grandchildren get by, and maybe they think someday there’ll be a society where they can live in domes somewhere, robots do all the work, and fuck everyone else.
I’ve said before, you may have heard me say that if we ever get to that society, there’ve been predictions that these AI robots might take over, and the elites are actually scared about that. They’ve actually done studies about that. Stephen Hawking actually said, “If you keep going down this road, that’s where it’s ending up.” If we get to that kind of society where the rich are in domes, robots are doing all the work, and we’re living, if we’re still alive, outside those domes— I don’t think I’m going to be in one— and the robots start to take over, I’m rooting for the robots.
Patrick Lovell
Well, I didn’t expect all of that, but wow, talk about symmetry. I feel like there, I wish, in fact, I probably do have an emoji down below that I might wanna play into this shortly. I feel like my brain is a nuclear reaction emoji to everything that you just said as you were laying that out.
Paul Jay
Wait till the film comes out. The film’s coming out in September 2027. We are retelling the history of America. I’m talking about this to very well-informed people, historians even, except the specialists that we’re working with, and they don’t know three-quarters of what we’re gonna be exposing.
Patrick Lovell
Wow. Well, it tapped into my cinematic recall. I’ll throw Total Recall as one of the metaphors, but I saw obviously Orwell. I saw Specter and all of the James Bond panoply of this being the endgame. The Terminator certainly came to mind. From where I’m sitting at the moment right now, I can totally see all that because we know Elon, SpaceX, welfare queen—
Paul Jay
You know that Elon has a contract now, apparently a signed contract. This is why he’s testing this massive rocket ship, because he’s got a contract with the Pentagon where his rockets will be able to deliver, I believe it’s 40 tons of equipment anywhere on Earth within 40-45 minutes. There’s the actual contract to do it. If they want to have a war in the middle of Africa, in 40 minutes, they can drop 40 tons or so. I mean, this all sounds like these science fiction movies. The important point about those movies is that they’re all dystopian. It all ends up in shit. We are headed there, but there is an alternative. At some point, you gotta ask me the alternative ’cause there is an alternative that we better start demanding.
Patrick Lovell
Well, I’m in the midst of that every day. And that’s why my platform’s called the Clean New Deal, but maybe I’ll mention that at the end. Everybody who watches this channel knows that.
From where I’m sitting in this new development of what I’ve been in the midst of now for the past several months, I’m looking at Mr. Wonderful, i.e., the data center, which they’re calling Stratos, which is obviously not so subtle, just straight out of a Marvel comic book. I’m configuring that Thanos is going to be there to destroy the world. But it really is these giant issues of what the environmental impact is going to be, not to mention what the actual usage is on the economy, and all of these things that there is no planning for. There’s just this insane backdoor budget scenario that parallels what we’ve seen in my backyard for ICE, where we’re seeing this insane ‘griftopia,’ where you have the likes of— before they were voted off the island— but Kristi Noem and Lewandowski, as they’re doing the Mile High Club pilfering $200 million, they find an extra $50 million to offer developers locally to pay over market for what purpose exactly?
Patrick Lovell
These empty warehouses are going to be— what I’m seeing right now from other social media that’s covering this out there— literally torture centers and these giant gulags. We’re going down the path of all the things that Putin has obviously shown us for the last 25 years, but it goes much further back than that, and we could talk about all sorts of theaters.
To think that the money itself, in this insane way, is literally being funneled in my backyard through what’s known as MIDA, which is the Military Installation Development Authority, hence again, another Specter-like scenario. So, as it turns out, this isn’t for military installation development. Literally, we have financiers in our state that involve some of the biggest names in hedge funds and private equity. Goldman Sachs has its second-largest facility on the planet in my backyard, in addition to all of these, the top five technology companies that exist.
I guarantee you Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are involved with state senators and governors. They’ve worked out this whole situation where last weekend, Lee Zeldin, the Secretary of the Environmental [Protection] Agency, just got rid of all of the endangerment clauses. Of course, John Roberts, in the nature of the shadow dockets, we’ve learned that, of course, the Supreme Court was nothing but lobbyists for the dirty fuels industry. They have been in concert for a very long time.
This didn’t just happen during the second incarnation of the Trump nightmare, post-January 6th and whatever we want to call the Biden in between, which had some major upsides. The long and the short of it is these guys have been doing, as you well know, from the savings and loan crisis through to the Enron era. Well, let us go back to the junk bond scenario, Michael Milken, Predator’s Ball, all of these types of things that precede Epstein. What we have learned from the tech bubble, Enron era frauds, and the Great Financial Crisis. Now, on the other end of this, we’ve got private credit that’s about to roil the markets once again on top of all things crypto. The corruption in this— what’s happening in terms of the evil behind the power—
Paul Jay
Can I interrupt you for a sec?
Patrick Lovell
Yeah.
Paul Jay
Here I’m going to pick a fight with you.
Patrick Lovell
Okay.
Paul Jay
I think you exaggerate the role of corruption, meaning this: of course, there’s corruption, but the systemic foundations are far deeper. Like, it depends on what you mean by corruption. Most of what we’re calling corruption, first of all, is legal. So it’s built within the legal framework that it’s okay to do all this stuff. But go back to the beginning of America.
Patrick Lovell
Can I respond to that before you go into this, real quick? Just because you picked a fight with me, I’m gonna—
Paul Jay
Let me make my point because if we’re gonna fight, I have to make my point.
Patrick Lovell
Absolutely.
Paul Jay
Was slavery corruption? The slave plantation system, would you call that corruption?
Patrick Lovell
I would.
Paul Jay
Why? What’s corrupt about it? [crosstalk 00:17:06]. Virtually every human society went through a stage of slavery.
Patrick Lovell
Absolutely. But it’s corrupting the soul of the intent of the separation of powers that led to the Bill of Rights, period. That, that was the—
Paul Jay
The slave system came before the Bill of Rights.
Patrick Lovell
Well, absolutely. Please continue.
Paul Jay
Was the genocide against indigenous people— now that’s official government policy.
Patrick Lovell
Yes.
Paul Jay
Was that corruption, or was it a systemic, almost need for the expansion of industrial capitalism?
Patrick Lovell
It was power. It was might equals right. So corruption was maybe the—
Paul Jay
I’ve been wanting to have this fight with you for a long time.
Patrick Lovell
I appreciate that.
Paul Jay
Because here’s the thing. If it’s corruption, then through some kind of oversight, you can correct it.
Patrick Lovell
Right.
Paul Jay
But we’ve never seen— I mean, we’ve seen mild oversight, mild pulling back. Like, Milken or some guy who creates a pyramid scheme. The odd antitrust suit, the odd this and that. But it’s all nibbling around the edges of what is systemic.
Patrick Lovell
Okay, but it’s the triangle or the triad. Let’s just call it a billionaire apparatus, which is tyranny. And then it’s the ‘hive think’ of full-on white supremacy— let’s just call it Nazism— but its connection to the megachurch apparatus, right. So this is the sociological history of white supremacy, is it not? Is that what you’re describing as the founding of the United States, which is a continuation of all imperialism?
Paul Jay
No, what I’m saying is capital, whether it’s in capitalism, feudalism, or even during a slave society, whether it’s Roman, Greek, or whatever, it goes where returns are the best.
Patrick Lovell
That’s right.
Paul Jay
And the system that evolves will be what’s the— as soon as we begin the development of class society, and I think more or less people agree these days, it comes out of once we have an agricultural surplus, animal husbandry, the society starts to divide to instead of what’s good for the tribe, now you start getting, well, you know what, I’m bigger and stronger, I want more of our surplus. Then you start getting classes, and the more powerful.
Most importantly, the biggest development in human development was the next stage of private property. And that was when you started to realize, well, you know what, we’re bigger, stronger, and we have more. Now we can own people. So the whole foundation of today’s society was a slave society. Our culture is all rooted in— like, why do we venerate Roman and Greek philosophy and teaching? Bannon and all these guys talk about the defense of either Western civilization or Judeo-Christian civilization, but it’s a civilization rooted and born in a slave system. Now, I’m not making a moral judgment on it. In a sense, we actually had to go through that.
Patrick Lovell
Yeah.
Paul Jay
If we hadn’t had that— you know, why do we have philosophy, mathematics, and medicine? Because a class of people was able to sit around and think while everybody else was slaves and worked themselves to death.
Patrick Lovell
So true.
Paul Jay
Now, within that, you can have corruption at every stage, people who violate the kind of norms to enrich themselves. It’s there. What Trump is doing in the White House now, you could call— I don’t know what else you call it, but kleptocracy and corruption. But it’s built on a structural foundation that gave rise to a class of billionaires and a class of massive concentration of ownership. It actually has a good side to it.
What I mean by this is the same way slave society gave us a class of people who could think and had time to imagine, this economy has given us enterprises that are so efficient, so well planned, so ripe and ready to be socialized. Like, imagine a publicly owned Walmart, a publicly owned Amazon, where right away— and you could do it tomorrow if you could actually have a progressive takeover of Congress and a president. You could just create a— you don’t have to nationalize Amazon; just hire their best people, or just buy Costco. The starting wage could be $25 or $30 an hour. So many people employed there would affect the entire wage scale of the country. So even as much as this society is driving us over the cliff of human civilization, if we start demanding publicly-owned, democratically controlled, then we actually have the potential for a whole new stage of human civilization.
Let me add one more thing before you go. What is the largest economic institution in the United States?
Patrick Lovell
The central bank? The Federal Reserve?
Paul Jay
Not even close. And it’s publicly owned. It’s called the Pentagon.
Patrick Lovell
Oh, well [Laughter].
Paul Jay
The Pentagon is socially owned. It’s publicly owned. It’s all public money. The thing is, they take public money, and they privatize the profit side of it. They take workers’ lives who kill and die for the American way, but if you demand some kind of rational foreign policy, now you’re not patriotic. If you talk about public ownership, you’re a villain. You’re threatening our liberties. Except that the Pentagon is publicly owned. Nobody wants to say that.
When I talked about the alternative, even in terms of dealing with corruption, which has so much to do with— especially when you have, in some states, elected judges and elected prosecutors, and then you get the whole bullshit kind of funding, and where you have appointed— who’s appointing them are people who are also getting funded; their campaigns are getting funded. And of course, now this ridiculous fund Trump wants, $1.8 billion.
I mean, I would agree with you at the level of Trump; he’s taken it so far past the kind of norm that’s at the level of corruption. But we need to understand that the whole system has created Trump, first of all. Why are they putting up with him? He isn’t even good for the system, but they’ve gotten so cynical that everyone’s in it for the absolute shortest term, and Trump’s giving them short-term, although some of them are starting to break off.
So my fight with you is not that there isn’t corruption, but I think we have to always talk about how corruption is like a cancer, which is the system of concentrated private ownership, militarization, and financialization of the economy, which has happened over the last few hundred years. And then you have this tumor or tumors, many of them, you could say, and that’s corruption. And so, yes, they become the most visible, like the tumors are the most visible, but the underlying cancer, if we don’t deal with it, and fundamentally dealing with it is especially private ownership of sectors of the economy that can end human civilization, AI, and nuclear weapons. Those are the two most prominent. Why are we allowing— like, would anyone agree with privatizing the Pentagon itself? They wouldn’t. Nobody. I mean, you got close with that guy who had that private company. What’s it called? Black something.
Patrick Lovell
Blackwater.
Paul Jay
Yeah, they have one that— like, he came close.
Patrick Lovell
That guy, Erik Prince? Yeah.
Paul Jay
Yeah, Erik Prince. He came close to wanting to at least privatize sections of the Pentagon. But nobody would really talk about, let’s privatize the Pentagon. But if you won’t privatize the Pentagon and you think that has to have some public scrutiny, seeing as it’s all public money, why are we allowing the arms industry to be private, especially those sections like nukes and AI? But I’d say the whole thing.
You know, in 1933, there was a bipartisan Senate committee called the Nye Committee, and they came into being because it started coming out in the late ’20s, early ’30s. In fact, this guy, Smedley Butler, who was in line to be the head of the Marines, started talking publicly about it. But the Nye Committee, which is actually called the Select Committee Investigating World War I, something or another. The question they were asked to answer is: Why did the United States join World War I? And they actually concluded, after tons of witnesses, including one of the du Ponts had to testify, one of the Rockefellers had to testify, after this whole process, they concluded the solution to going to war for profit, which is what they said was the motivation for the U.S. joining World War I, is to take profit out of war. They suggested two things: nationalize the arms industry and/or, but mostly and, tax any war profiteering at 90%, so war is no longer a business opportunity.
Butler had his own thing, which was not a bad idea, but impossible. He wanted the only people who could authorize a war and could vote on it to be the soldiers who were being asked to go fight it. Nobody else could vote on it. I don’t know, but anyway, the point is that a bipartisan committee of Democrats and Republicans advocated public ownership of the arms industry and massive taxes on war profits. So why don’t we pick up on that today and apply it to the existential threat of AI and nuclear weapons?
Patrick Lovell
I love it. I’m curious, did you see the movie Amsterdam, directed by David Russell?
Paul Jay
Yeah, it didn’t— I’m actually working on a dramatic movie on the Smedley Butler story. I bought the rights to a book called Gangsters for Capitalism, which is Butler’s biography, and I’m working on it now. When I finish the nuke film, that’s what I want to do next. But yeah, the Butler story is tacked on there. It’s not— it doesn’t do it justice, let’s put it that way.
Patrick Lovell
I enjoyed it. Maybe I guess anything with Margot Robbie—
Paul Jay
Oh, I didn’t mind the movie. I just didn’t think it did the Butler story justice.
Patrick Lovell
Well, fair enough. But I want to say, based on your really thought-provoking position about picking a fight with me, that there’s really not that much room between what I actually think and what I continue to do from this perspective. I hope I can put this together in a meaningful way that matches your thought-provoking sentiment there. I’ll quote my favorite seer of all time, not Jesus Christ or Moses, which is basically built into the whole Western Judeo-Christian sort of scenario of liberation from tyranny, obviously. That’s one side of it, but that’s not what I’m hanging my hat on. I’ll just hang my hat on who we’re seeing all over the place perform for the first time in a long time because of life during wartime. The great David Byrne, who once said, “Same as it ever was.” Yeah. Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes.” Okay, sure, so that’s where I come from in the pattern recognition.
When we talk about this being baked in, oh, yeah, natural law. Well, I don’t know if we should call it natural law; we should call it human nature, of course. But the nature of we need society, society creates some sort of structure, and more times than not throughout history, it’s exactly what you described, with, as you said, small pendulums in context. We’re talking about the entire Middle Ages of European history, going from aristocracy to the Holy Roman Empire, the convergence, but what undergirded it all? Corruption. That’s what led to—
Paul Jay
What is your definition of corruption? Because I always thought corruption really means illegal. If something’s legal, why is it corrupt?
Patrick Lovell
Well, that’s true, but I’m going to take a broader, more philosophical stance on it based on our conversation at the moment. Corruption is when a system is sabotaged. Systems can be designed to work. We know how to design very complex machinery. We know how to fly, but sometimes things can be designed to fail. Now, they might fail without being designed to fail.
Paul Jay
Monopoly capitalism is working.
Patrick Lovell
For the people that are-
Paul Jay
If you’re a monopoly capitalist.
Patrick Lovell
That’s right, but see, this is where I argue completely now, and I will challenge you. I will say that the largest— how did you frame the largest— the Pentagon is what in your vernacular? It’s the-
Paul Jay
The largest economic institution in America, as far as I can find out.
Patrick Lovell
Okay, fine, but it still requires— we could go into the whole litany of what macroeconomics is, particularly monetary policy within fiscal policy, within the construct of A) the power of the purse with Congress. But what I reveal all the time is the reality of the subterfuge and the smoke and mirrors of what the Federal Reserve has been involved with since 2009, which has provided tens of trillions of dollars to this criminal class. I might argue, and I know the definitions of capitalism, I know the definition of socialism, communism, and the whole gambit.
I’ll ask you the question: what happens if the full faith and credit of the United States is, through smoke and mirrors, used to completely guarantee what we both might call late-stage capitalism, gangster capitalism, monopoly capitalism, which is, of course, illegal and has all those nodes of corruption that you identified. But what if they have endless amounts of financial support? And we could talk about fiat currency, we could talk about sovereign currency and the dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency, and obviously, oil commoditization post-1971. We could go into all of those details. But we used the entire capacity of that engine to flood tens of trillions of dollars illegally. I know the statutes, and I know exactly what happened after the Great Depression, and I know exactly what the Pecora findings found out that gave us Glass-Steagall and the Securities and Exchange Act, etc., but they just—
Paul Jay
It wasn’t really illegal until they had Glass-Steagall.
Patrick Lovell
Absolutely. We also didn’t have sovereign currency in the way that we did until Bretton Woods. We could go on. So I turn the question to you, what do you call it if—
Paul Jay
I call it monopoly capitalism.
Patrick Lovell
Why can’t it be socialism for criminals?
Paul Jay
Well, that’s part of monopoly capitalism.
Patrick Lovell
Okay, fair enough.
Paul Jay
Part of monopoly— a feature of not just monopoly capitalism— frankly, it’s been a feature since the Industrial Revolution at least, and maybe before.
Patrick Lovell
Sure.
Paul Jay
Because you socialize risk, like even like the railroads. Who put up a lot of the capital? In Canada, it’s the same thing. The risk of building railroads was largely based on government contracts, and so on, whereas the benefit went to the private railroad companies. This is a feature of how the system works, and it works well if you happen to be a monopoly capitalist. So you’ve got to look at this from a class point of view, and this is where the deception is.
Patrick Lovell
I do. You’re right.
Paul Jay
No, no, I’m not saying you don’t. Rhetorically.
Patrick Lovell
Sure.
Paul Jay
See, if you question the way we are both questioning, we are unpatriotic. To question private ownership of anything is unpatriotic, which is such a joke because the Pentagon, like, I say, is publicly owned, the biggest economic institution in the country, with like millions of employees. I was looking somewhere. If you look at just the assets, resources, and employment, not the cap value on the stock market, the Pentagon’s more or less more than Microsoft, Amazon, and Nvidia put together.
Patrick Lovell
Wow. Wow.
Paul Jay
Now, if you privatize the Pentagon, it may probably be worth even in cap value on the markets more than those things. So it’s okay to have a socialistic, massive economic institution driving whole sections of the economy. But of course, as long as you’re privatizing the profit that comes out of all that.
You have example after example, like part of the film, we’re gonna do a story about something called the SAGE radar system. Mid-1950s, this is the mother of boondoggles. It’s the mother of the Golden Dome bullshit. You know my line about Golden Dome, it’s not about the dome, it’s about the gold. In fact, at theAnalysis, we have a t-shirt for sale. It says, “It’s not about the dome, it’s about the gold.” So in the 1950s, and this is the thing about the Cold War that we’re still living in, which is to exaggerate the enemy with out-and-out lies that you know are lies, and then scare the hell out of people. We need the military complex to defend us, and you get your boondoggle on the other end.
So the mother of the anti-ballistic missile system boondoggles was actually a system called SAGE, S-A-G-E, which was going to be a defensive dome sort of thing that would take massive radar stations in northern Canada. When Soviet bombers come in, they’d be identified, and then Bomarc missiles, mostly stationed in Canada, would shoot these things down, and America would be defended. We have propaganda films made by the DOD, but most importantly, by IBM, because this is where IBM became this massive company out of SAGE. Warehouses and warehouses of IBM computers connected to MIT, creating this complete bullshit boondoggle, and I’ll tell you how bullshit it was. Mid to late 1950s, and in the film we have interviewed a guy who was a senior scientist working in command and control at SAGE, and he had told us the whole story of what BS it is.
Anyway, just to stick to this one point, mass— get this, how much it costs. Now, the Manhattan Project was the biggest industrial project in the history of humanity in terms of the number of people. Always at least 100,000-150,000 employees of the Manhattan Project. As many as 600,000 worked at one time or another. Get this, nobody knows what I’m about to tell you. When I say nobody, most of the experts don’t know. SAGE cost four times the Manhattan Project.
Patrick Lovell
What?
Paul Jay
You ever heard of it?
Patrick Lovell
No.
Paul Jay
Never heard of it?
Patrick Lovell
No.
Paul Jay
Why’d you never hear of it? Well, I’ll tell you why, because it never worked. So this guy, Lester Earnest, who’s in our film, he’s there working a week or two. He’s one of the more advanced computer guys. He got his computer training in the Army and then got hired by MIT and SAGE to work on the project. He’s there for about two or three weeks. I have him on camera saying this. He says, “I turn,” I’m being him now. “I turn to one of my colleagues here. I say, ‘Hey, by the way, how did you guys deal with radar jamming?’ It’s a long silence. And the guy says, ‘Well, we don’t talk about that.'” They never did. They never solved the problem of radar jamming till 1965, and by that time, SAGE was obsolete, because now it was all about ICBMs and the issue of the bombers.
And what justified this massive expenditure? You may have heard of the missile gap. Well, before the missile gap, it was the bomber gap. The Soviets had a 40-to-1 advantage in the number of strategic bombers over the United States. So we had to build this defensive shield called SAGE. It was all bullshit. It was 40-to-1 in the American favor. The Soviets didn’t have close to the number of strategic bombers that the U.S. had.
Number two, here’s the big lie. I mean, I can’t say the big lie because there are so many big lies here. It was never a defensive shield. It was always an early warning system at best. So what does an early warning system do for you? So you know the Soviet bombers are coming. Okay, if you can’t knock them— because it never worked; that was nonsensical. So now they move into something called BMEWS, B-M-E-W-S. It was the next big project that came out after the bomber gap and SAGE. Now, when the Soviets got a Sputnik up in the air, what was the real message of Sputnik? Not that we’re winning the space race. The real message of Sputnik is, “We can now fire missiles into space that can come down and land on your head.” So it’s the beginning of the era of the intercontinental ballistic missiles. Okay? So now they sell the American people, “We’re going to create a defensive shield against ICBMs.” This is long before Reagan’s SDI and now Trump’s Golden Dome, and it’s an extension of SAGE and BMEWS.
Well, it never worked. They started spending tons of money on these radar stations and all this. At the very best, and this applies to today too, as an early warning system, maybe you find out 30 seconds, a minute, even if it’s 10, 15 minutes sooner, that something’s coming. Well, here’s the big lie. I keep saying that because there are so many of these big lies. Of all of these supposed defensive systems, you don’t know if what’s coming is actually a missile. There’s only one way to know if what your system, whether it’s radar or today’s satellites and sophisticated sensors and all the rest, you won’t really know if what’s coming at you is actually an ICBM with a nuclear warhead. It could be misinterpreted sensor data. Now we’re going to be relying on AI to interpret the data. It could be an AI hallucination. It could be geese.
You know, when they first started this BMEWS thing, day one, they turned it on— I have Ellsberg telling us this story in the film. They had these congressmen and senators in the command and control center, and they were going to show off how the whole thing worked. Day one, the system goes on and says we’re under attack. Day one. And they take the congressmen, and they put them in a safe room, and they’re getting ready. “Do we fire back? Do we launch?”
One Canadian officer who’s in the NORAD Center, he says, “Are we so sure this is real?” And then he thinks to himself, he says, “You know what? I’m sure on the news this morning I read that Khrushchev’s at the UN today speaking. Are they really going to hit us when Khrushchev is in New York?” So he says, “We’re not firing, let’s see if this thing’s real.” And of course it was some geese or something, right, or may have been. There’s another one that happens like that where the radar is bouncing off the Moon. There are so many of these near-miss examples. But anyway, these are all so— they’re systemically needed, and this is where I get to the system side, and then the corruption’s built on it.
At the end of World War II, they had a big problem. The massive crash of the 1930s, the New Deal didn’t fill the hole. It just mitigated the consequences. What really filled the hole was spending at the levels of World War II. That massive government expenditure. So after the war, they’re facing three economic threats that are practically existential to American capitalism.
Number one, you’re gonna go right back into the crisis of the ’30s if you can’t keep the government spending going at the level it was at. You have two choices: a new New Deal or militarization of the economy. Somebody called it military Keynesianism. Well, if you go back to a New New Deal, it gives the workers too much leverage. Now they’re not terrified of being unemployed because there’s good unemployment insurance, and there’s social security. You’re actually encouraging unionization, and wages are going up. That’s a real stimulus for the economy that could avoid at least the worst of the crashes. You don’t wanna do that. Not if, you know, imagine that. Fuck, that’s socialism. We’ll lose our liberty. No, you militarize, and you start spending like hell.
Then number two, short-term threat. The aerospace industry was massively built during World War II with guaranteed government contracts. Now it’s over. What happens to your aerospace industry? We have a quote from Gross, who was the head of Lockheed. He actually says— we’re gonna have an actor play this guy in the film— he says, “If we have a real peace, we’re—” now I’m paraphrasing, “—we’re all going bankrupt.” Meaning the aerospace industry. “We’ll be down the toilet. If we have an armed truce, they’re gonna need a lot of airplanes.” That’s the birth of the Cold War.
Number three, the European and Japanese markets are absolutely critical for the future of American capitalism to sell these tons of products that are being created. Enter the Marshall Plan and enter helping Japan rebuild. All in, what I’m getting at are systemic reasons. Now, within that, you get $15,000 toilet seats. That’s where the corruption comes in, because once you create this monstrosity of a military-industrial complex, within it, everybody’s in it. I mean, structurally, everyone is in it for themselves, and so the ideology is, one, I have to play along, or I won’t have an advancement in my career. Two, everyone else is cashing in, I might as well, because— and today, when the president’s creating a kleptocracy, why shouldn’t everybody bloody go out and do something like that?
So I’m not really arguing with you that corruption’s an important layer, but it’s inevitable. If we really want to have prosecutors like Bill, yours and mine, but he’s a good friend of yours, Bill Black, but I love Bill. Even just years ago, we actually had some actual prosecutions that would take place. After ’07, ’08, you know better than I do, there wasn’t one serious prosecution. Nobody went to jail for committing forgeries, robo-signing bloody contracts. I mean, you can’t get more and more out illegal, fraudulent, and yes, corrupt, but it’s the inevitability of the system.
So at a systemic level, we have to get at some of the roots, and I would start with— nationalize, certainly, anything to do with the militarization of AI, and maybe all of AI, because if it’s for profit, they’re going to have no guardrails, no control at all. Trump just lifted what little oversight there was. He just said he’s going to suspend it, just a few days ago, and anything to do with nuclear weapons.
Like, do you know now, Los Alamos or the Manhattan Project, it’s still not only going, it’s on super high speed creating a whack of new plutonium with a target that they must— I can’t remember the date, I mean the amount, but it’s a significant amount of new plutonium, and they need to do it by the end of 2027. You don’t want to talk about the economic things of this. The county Los Alamos is in is one of the richest counties in the United States. Best schools, best hospitals, everything’s fantastic. The next county over is one of the poorest counties in the United States. Worst infant mortality, worst schools, worst everything. The amount of money that’s going in to create all this new plutonium. For what? You can’t use the stuff.
In the same way, just to go back to the ICBM thing, you know, when I’m saying this stuff doesn’t work, there’s only one way to know if ICBMs coming at you are real. You’ve got to let them hit. And why would you let them hit? Because you can’t damn well stop them anyway. So you might as well make it real because if you fire on early launch on warning, you’re ensuring something’s coming back your way. And what if it is just another miscalculation, another stupidity? But they don’t tell people that because you can’t make money out of that.
It’s the same thing with what’s going on. Why create all this plutonium? You can’t use it. You can’t. If you use it, it means you’re in full-scale nuclear war, which means we’re all gone.
There’s a guy named Stanley Weiss. He was a mining guy, a real mineralogist who was a very successful miner, and he got rich as hell. He understood nukes, and he started his own campaign to get businessmen to be against nuclear weapons. He had this wonderful line; he’d go around speaking, and he would look at these guys in the audience, all corporate executives and all this, and he would say, “Do you guys know being dead is bad for business?” It’s a great line, eh? Anyway, that’s me. That’s what we’re working on.
Patrick Lovell
You just triggered another several nuclear explosion emojis in my mind. I mean, you went from Khrushchev, which reminded me of Dr. Strangelove. You’re talking about this unbelievably limitless budgeting for stupidity, and I thought of Contact with Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey. Why build one when you could build two? So many other— maybe Breaking Bad entered my mind when you started talking about Los Alamos and the nature of all things, Randall White, Mr. White. Anyway, I’m thinking of the character in Breaking Bad, but here’s my point. Okay, you can’t trust people. How about that? People are evil inherently, I guess.
Paul Jay
I don’t buy that.
Patrick Lovell
Okay, how about this? Power is inherently evil. Most people are good, right? So you’re bringing this sort of contextualization because everything that you’ve said, in my mind, I’m like, okay, but what if we had the control of the power of benevolent leadership that believed in, let’s just say, dynamism, exploration of integrity, science, and aspirational leadership, so where this intellectual and economic capacity, what could society look like in the event that we didn’t have these diabolical Epstein-class villains that we’ve seen in the movies our entire lives, but now are playing out in a situation that to me looks like the Doomsday Clock is right here.
The war in Iran, I wanted to talk to you right when all of this triggered, but we’re what, 60-some-odd days later, and I’d like to get maybe a comment on your observations of this insanity of Trump and the Pentagon after getting rid of all the professionals in this liquor cabinet apparatus, given everything that you’re talking about with the privatization and the kleptocracy. Is it something we laugh at, or is it something that’s like, we’re right there for the whole thing to trigger and the whole thing to just ‘poof,’ that’s it, end of story?
Paul Jay
Well, you might want to laugh at it, but we are there. We are approaching ‘poof.’ In fact, from a nuclear weapons point of view, ‘poof’ could happen tonight. Any time the systems are such, an accident or miscalculation could take place.
I’ve talked now to about 130-140 really leading experts: nuclear historians, military people, scientists, and so on. Not a single person could honestly say, and I don’t even think the head of STRATCOM could say, and we actually interviewed off the record ’cause he wouldn’t go on the record, a former head of STRATCOM, but the risk of miscalculation and accidental nuclear war, nobody can say is zero. Nobody who knows anything would be able to say that it isn’t far from zero. You can’t put a number on it. How do you put a number on it? But if it isn’t zero and it’s not far from zero, how come we’re not even talking about it? Why is the subject of American nuclear policy taboo? When’s the last time anybody in any presidential election since maybe the ’60s, Reagan in the ’80s, but now nobody talks about it except Trump’s Golden Dome BS.
Our entire posture, it’s not just about the Golden Dome, our entire posture at any moment threatens the annihilation of human civilization. What are we doing? We’re modernizing nuclear weapons. We’re spending billions and billions on a new system called Sentinel of ICBMs that is way, way over budget.
In fact, there was a piece of legislation, I can’t remember the name of it, [Nunn-McCurdy], something [Nunn-McCurdy] maybe. If any weapons program goes a certain percentage over budget, it has to be reviewed by a congressional committee. Well, the Sentinel was going way over budget. This is all new silos, all new underground communication systems, all new missiles, all new warheads, like billions and billions of new investments started going way over budget. They were supposed to have a committee hearing. Well, one of the committees that was going to review it, a congressman from Northern California, north of Richmond, Garamendi, he got ill, so they had to postpone the hearing. This is under the Biden administration. Austin, Secretary of Defense, instead of waiting for the hearing, which he was supposed to do based on the legislation, greenlights the thing anyway. They never have the hearing, they never had the review, off it goes, and it’s in progress. Billions and billions, a boondoggle.
ICBMs are the most dangerous piece of the whole nuclear puzzle. It’s a use them or lose them. If you think something’s coming, you’ve got to fire because you’re afraid that these silos, which everybody knows where they are, it’s not like it’s a secret where they are. The silos are well known, and the new ones will be too. In fact, one of the ways they sell these silos is that it creates employment in the community. So, you know, the Chinese, [Russians], whoever, they know. So they’re going to get hit. So if you think something’s coming, you’ve got to fire before they get hit.
There are two arguments they give. One is, well, our sensors and everything are so good. We won’t make a mistake, and they’re needed for deterrence. What if something isn’t really an ICBM and it’s coming at you and you fire? So the launch-on-warning thing is insane. Now they’re saying, get this one, have you ever heard the term nuclear sponge? They’re justifying these systems, billions and billions of dollars of new missiles and warheads, because they want them to be targets. If an attack comes in, they’re gonna try to take out these ICBMs, and they actually use the term nuclear sponge as part of the vernacular of the war hawks. They’ll have to waste missiles knocking out our Sentinels and ICBMs. I should say yours, ’cause here, I’ll put my Canadian hat on. Less missiles are available to hit cities. I mean, it’s beyond insane. So either you’re going to fire them, launch on warning, and end human civilization because now we’re into full nuclear war, or they’re just going to get hit. In which case, what do you need to spend all this new money on? Just leave the old ones there, let them get hit. And by the way, have you told the communities in North Dakota and Montana, have you told them that they’re a nuclear sponge? Are they aware that one of your main justifications for this stuff is so they can get the hell blown up? It’s beyond insanity because the underlying thing driving it, see, the roots of it, is the systemic militarization that this modern American capitalism required and still requires. And then it gets its own momentum, its own logic.
To some extent, they start to believe their own bullshit. When you get into this wargaming scenario, it’s like you go to a lawyer to get a contract, right? The way a lawyer makes money is by selling you a worst-case scenario. So then you need a contract that deals with what if they do this, what if they do that. Oh, now we’re into 30-page, 50-page, now we’re at a 120-page contract.
I had this great lawyer, entertainment lawyer, George, and he would say to me, “I need you to do me a contract for one of my films.” And he said, “Okay.” And he’d give me two pages. And I said, “Two pages?” He said, “Look, do you trust these guys?” “Yeah, I’ve done business with them before.” “All right, so here, you’re gonna do this, they’re gonna do that, they’ll pay you this, two pages, done.” Or, oh, they’re gonna fuck you this way, they’re gonna do this, you need page five, you need page 20. At the end, you have a $30,000 contract in my level, of course, at the corporate level, it’s millions, so the military works the same way. They sit with Congress, who are already getting campaign contributions, and they’re saying, “Well, if we don’t do that, we’re going to do this. Oh, look, the Chinese are doing this.”
Like, here’s an example of you want crazy shit? Eric Schmidt from Google, and you can look this video up on YouTube, says that within five years, we’re going to have AI teams running big corporations and sectors of the military. And one AI will be responsible, say, for HR, and one will do logistics, and one will do weapons analysis, whatever. He says that within five years, they will be talking to each other, the AI agents, at such a speed that the human language won’t work for them. They need something else. And they’re going to invent their own language, something mathematical, and we won’t know what they’re saying to each other. And Schmidt says, “At that point, we have only one alternative.” He says, “Pull the plug.” He doesn’t tell us there is no plug. There’s no plug to pull. And they’re putting trillions and trillions of investment, and someone’s going to pull the plug. And guess what else? Who’s one of the biggest investors in military AI?
Patrick Lovell
Eric Schmidt.
Paul Jay
Eric Schmidt. The hypocrisy is just beyond belief. How does he justify it all? Because the Chinese are going to do it if we don’t. Oh, we have to do it because the Russians are going to do it. We have to do it because the Soviets are going to do it. I mean, it is the Cold War framing all over again, and it is way more dangerous. To me, it’s always been like— like, I keep asking people, why aren’t they afraid? If it blows up, they blow up too. Being dead is bad for business. Why aren’t they? And it’s, again, it’s like systemic.
Imagine these guys who were executives of tobacco companies sitting on the research that smoking causes cancer, and most of them smoked. They let their kids smoke. Why? Because you don’t advance in the corporate world in the tobacco industry if you’re not into tobacco. The thinking is, “Well, if I don’t do it, someone else will do it. I might as well do it.”
It’s the logic of Nuremberg. The Nuremberg trials said to these Nazi generals, “No, you don’t do this stuff just because someone else might.” These Nazi generals were executed. Well, these people who are doing this to us, someday maybe they need to face a Nuremberg trial. Maybe some of them do need to be threatened. I’ve never been totally against capital punishment. I can see it for some of the people running that are heading human civilization off the cliff.
Patrick Lovell
Wow. Our time is up. I have thousands of questions. I’d say I hope this goes viral, but we know the eye in the sky is throttling down things that are going to provide truth to the millions of people because they—
Paul Jay
We’re crushed on YouTube. We can’t get anywhere. We used to do 70,000-80,000 on a lot of our stories. We’re lucky now if we do 2,000.
Patrick Lovell
I’m seeing that across the board, and I’m seeing it everywhere. Especially those of us who know. Ladies and gentlemen, for the sake of humanity, just share this, okay. Discover Paul Jay at theAnalysis.news.
Paul Jay
Let’s be clear, the URL is theAnalysis.news.
Patrick Lovell
theAnalysis.news. And of course, your film is to be released in September later this year.
Paul Jay
2027.
Patrick Lovell
Oh, 2027, How to Stop a Nuclear War.
Paul Jay
And people should know, it’s being narrated by Emma Thompson.
Patrick Lovell
Brilliant. Yeah.
Paul Jay
It’s based on a lot of Dan Ellsberg’s work.
Patrick Lovell
Yeah, right. You brought up Ellsberg earlier. I wanted to just clarify that’s Daniel Ellsberg, ladies and gentlemen, of the Pentagon Papers. Obviously, he had a huge impact on all things that happened during that time period, post-Vietnam War, and everything.
My God, Paul, I am so humbled by your insight. Really, thank you for challenging me. I love it. I think this has just been a tremendous dialogue. Thank you for all your work. I guess until next time, I will keep my fingers crossed there is one.
Paul Jay
Oh, yes, sure. I am happy to blab anytime. But the thing is, these help me too because I get to work this stuff out as we’re talking.
Patrick Lovell
Good. That’s what I always lead with, with my truth bombs, because I do a similar sort of— I frame it as these are part— and you’re not going to agree with this, but this is just me speaking. When I try to lay a lot of these things out, particularly because from the vantage, because I do know corruption inside and out, because I was taught by the best. Because I can’t get tens of millions of people to understand what’s actually happening to us. I just say this is part lecture, part sermon, part self-help therapy. I got to get the information out of my own head to try to share it with people that actually care about humanity, life, and the existence of this planet, which is—
Paul Jay
Let me just— so theAnalysis.news, and if you want to just get on the email list for the film, you can go to a website which is stop-nuclear-war.org and get on the email list, and then you’ll be kept up to date on what’s happening with the film.
Patrick Lovell
Outstanding. I’ll put myself on there. Once again, thank you again ladies and gentlemen, everyone, the amazing Paul Jay. Until next time, Paul, I look forward to talking to you. I’ll put everything in the description down below, and I’ll share this with you and your team. All the best.
Paul Jay
Thank you.
Patrick Lovell
Take care.
