I never imagined I’d miss being lied to by George W. Bush and his henchmen

Administration officials leaked false information about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist. Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a deceptive presentation at the United Nations. 

This mendacious campaign was shameful and despicable, and helped create today’s national atmosphere of corrosive cynicism and nihilistic paranoia. 

But it was, in retrospect, a tacit acknowledgment that public opinion mattered, that a president couldn’t start a war without convincing Americans it was necessary. It was a manipulation of democratic deliberation rather than a negation of it.

Compare that episode to Donald Trump’s threatened war with Iran.

Michelle Goldberg New York Times 20 February 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/opinion/trump-iran-public-opinion.html

“Data is the language of our time,” says a data analytics manager named Alex, sounding a lot like the Palantir chief Alex Karp.

This week, The Atlantic reported on Mantic, a start-up whose A.I. engine outperforms many of the best human forecasters across domains from politics to sports to entertainment.

Last week, Mrinank Sharma, a safety researcher at Anthropic, quit with the sort of open letter than would have seemed wildly overwrought in a theatrical script. “The world is in peril,” he wrote,

https://x.com/MrinankSharma/status/2020881722003583421

describing constant pressure at work “to set aside what matters most.” Henceforth, said Sharma, he would devote himself to “community building” and poetry. 

Among technologies, A.I. is unique in that those who are creating it — and profiting off it — will from time to time warn that it could destroy humanity. 

As Sam Altman said in 2015, shortly before helping found OpenAI,

“I think that A.I. will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.” 

Michelle Goldberg New York Times 16 February 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/opinion/play-ai-authoritarianism.html

Michelle Goldberg 

I write about politics and culture from a left-leaning, feminist point of view, though I try to seek out stories that challenge my preconceptions. I’m particularly interested in the rise of authoritarianism in both America and around the world, the state of the progressive movement and the evolution of gender relations.

In 2018, I was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for reporting on issues of workplace sexual harassment.

https://www.nytimes.com/by/michelle-goldberg