As a student of information warfare and American history, I can’t help but notice the unsettling parallels between today’s federal workforce crisis and the Bonus Army situation of 1932. In both cases, we see a fundamental conflict over promised government compensation during times of economic uncertainty.

Nearly 100 years ago American military veterans marched en masse on Washington demanding early payment of service certificates they were owed.

Just before Congress adjourned in the summer of 1932, thousands of desperate World War I veterans surrounded the U.S. Capitol. With the nation in the grips of the Great Depression, the House of Representatives had approved a bill to provide immediate cash payments to veterans. Servicemembers now waited anxiously as the Senate debated the same bill. At issue was the question, What did the nation owe its veterans?

Notably, servicemember camps setup around the Capitol were “racially integrated, vibrant communities“, a very alarming situation to those holding a line on extremely racist power. In other words the outspoken primary opponent to giving veterans money owed was from Senator Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas – a violent segregationist during the Jim Crow era who also opposed anti-lynching legislation. He rose to Senate Majority Leader in 1933 where he blocked all civil rights legislation for the next four years.

The Hoover administration’s response to the integrated Americans demanding rights was to characterize military veterans – who had served their country faithfully and had followed the proper channels for basic income – as opportunists and troublemakers. Today, we hear similar rhetoric, with the White House describing federal workers as “lazy” and accusing them of “ripping off the American people” by doing their jobs.

The Bonus Army crisis escalated when the Hoover administration sent the racist and segregationist General Douglas MacArthur to forcibly remove the veterans from their integrated encampments. For context, MacArthur’s tenure as Army Chief of Staff from 1930 to 1935 heavily promoted institutional racism. Later, as Supreme Commander of Allied Powers in occupied Japan, he again promoted racial segregation policies. However it was his conduct during the Korean War that has drawn the most scrutiny from historians in terms of his deeply flawed strategic decision making – racism against Asians caused unnecessary losses due to consistent underestimation of Chinese military capabilities.

Thurgood Marshall recalled that General MacArthur, who believed that American Blacks were inferior to whites, was the greatest impediment to the Army’s desegregation in Korea. Things changed rapidly as soon as Truman fired him in 1951.

Today’s situation, while different in its details, shows similar signs of escalating tension, as well as racist underpinnings to attacks on diverse groups of federal workers. The administration’s recent memo threatening those who remain with “enhanced standards of suitability and conduct” and warning of prioritized “investigation and discipline” creates an atmosphere of intimidation reminiscent of the Jim Crow era.

Just as the Bonus Army veterans faced uncertainty about whether they would ever receive their promised compensation, today’s federal workers are being offered a deal that unions warn may never be paid because it lacks congressional authorization. The administration’s pressure tactics – including warnings about impending layoffs and demands for “loyalty” – echo the kind of strong-arm approaches that characterized the government’s response to the Bonus Army.

What’s particularly concerning is how this situation could potentially escalate. The Bonus Army crisis became a watershed moment in American history not because of the initial dispute, but because of how the government chose to handle it. The sight of American troops attacking American veterans created a public relations disaster that contributed to Hoover’s defeat.

Today, we’re seeing scattered protests outside federal buildings. One worker quoted in recent reporting expressed fear that “we’re all going to lose our jobs and they’re going to put all these loyalists or people that will be their shock troops.” This language of “shock troops” and loyalty tests yet again eerily mirrors the militaristic response to the Bonus Army.

The critical difference now is that we have the benefit of historical hindsight.

The Bonus Army crisis teaches us that handling of regular government workers – whether veterans or civil servants – as enemies of the state rather than as dedicated public servants tends to backfire both politically and practically. When the racist segregationist MacArthur led troops against the desegregated Bonus Army, he wasn’t just attacking a group of protesters – he was attacking the very idea that the government should honor its commitments to all those Americans who serve it.

In the current situation, federal courts have already stepped in to temporarily halt the administration’s plans. This judicial intervention offers hope that we might avoid the kind of confrontation that marked the Bonus Army crisis. However, the administration’s rhetoric and tactics suggest they may not be learning the correct lessons that history offers.

The ultimate resolution of the Bonus Army crisis – Congress finally authorizing early payment in 1936 – reminds us that these situations eventually require legislative solutions, not executive force. Today’s federal workers, like the veterans of 1932, are simply asking the government to treat them with the respect and consideration they’ve earned through their service.

As we watch this situation unfold, we would do well to remember that the Bonus Army crisis didn’t have to end in tear gas and burning encampments. It escalated because racist leadership chose confrontation over negotiation, forceful bluster over competency in dialogue. Let’s hope today’s leaders can learn from clear historical mistakes before we witness another awful MacArthur moment in American history.

Trump keeps praising a controversial American general whose actions nearly prompted World War III: “MacArthur was considered a ‘media whore’ of his time, Daniel Drezner, a professor of international affairs at Tufts University, told Reuters.” […] “I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the president,” Truman later explained. “I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the laws for generals.”

Truman later said that he had become anti-racist by 1946, which perhaps helps explains why he put such an abrupt end to huge “dumb” mistakes being made by an obviously racist MacArthur. And also explains why Trump keeps trying to repeat those same mistakes.

Xenophobic Political Theater Undermines Security and Innovation

Recent legislation proposing to “decouple” American AI from China presents itself as a national security measure. However, it follows a disturbing historical pattern of technological nationalism that has repeatedly harmed both innovation and human dignity in American history.

The rhetoric surrounding this AI legislation eerily mirrors the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first major law restricting immigration based on nationality.

Both share a fundamental contradiction: wanting Chinese labor and expertise while simultaneously seeking to exclude Chinese people and contributions.

Stanford University’s own history exemplifies this contradiction. Chinese laborers were instrumental in building the transcontinental railroad that created the fortune of Leland Stanford. These workers faced brutal conditions, earned lower wages than their white counterparts, and were forced to work in the most dangerous conditions – leading to the horrific practice of measuring tunnel-blasting time as a “Chinaman minute,” calculating how many Chinese would be killed per unit of progress.

Yet after the railroads were built, these same workers were blocked from citizenship, property ownership, and economic advancement through systematic legal discrimination. Stanford University itself, built with wealth from Chinese labor, would later enforce strict quotas on Chinese students.

Notably the proposed AI bill literally suggests 20 years of jail for anyone found using a computer that has evidence of “models” from China.

According to the language of the proposed bill, people who download AI models from China could face up to 20 years in jail, a million dollar fine, or both.

Imagine the kind of politician who dreams of a future where simply dropping a model on someone’s computer gets them swept off to jail for decades.

This pattern of wanting Chinese contribution while seeking to criminalize and exclude Chinese influence is technically impossible in modern AI development. The reality of artificial intelligence creation defies such artificial boundaries. Modern AI stands on the shoulders of Chinese-American innovators, perhaps most notably in the case of ImageNet. This revolutionary dataset, which transformed computer vision and helped launch the deep learning revolution, was created by Fei-Fei Li, who immigrated from China to the US and led the project at Stanford. The story of ImageNet exemplifies how arbitrary and harmful national divisions in technology can be.

The technical integration goes even deeper when we examine a typical large language model. Its attention mechanism derives from Google’s transformer architecture, developed in the US, while incorporating optimization techniques pioneered at Tsinghua University. The model runs on GPUs designed in America but manufactured in Taiwan, implementing deep learning principles advanced through international collaboration between researchers like Yann LeCun in the US and Jian Sun at Microsoft Research Asia. The training data necessarily incorporates Chinese web content and academic research, while the underlying software libraries include crucial contributions from developers worldwide, including significant optimizations from teams at Alibaba and Baidu.

The recent panic over DeepSeek perfectly illustrates this contradiction. While lawmakers rush to ban a Chinese AI model from American devices, they ignore that any open model can be fully air-gapped and run offline without any connection to its origin servers. Meanwhile, Zoom – which handles everything from classified research discussions to defense contractor meetings on university campuses – frequently processes data through Chinese code and infrastructure with minimal or no security review.

Or consider Tesla, whose Nazi-promoting eugenicist South African CEO openly praises China as his favorite government with the largest market and manufacturing base while simultaneously acquiring unprecedented access to U.S. government contracts and infrastructure projects. There couldn’t be a more obvious immediate national security threat than Elon Musk.

This inconsistent approach – where some Chinese technology connections trigger alarm while others are ignored – reveals how these policies are more about political theater than actual security. Real security would focus on technical capabilities and specific vulnerabilities, not simplistic national origins.

Modern AI development relies on an intricate web of globally distributed computing infrastructure. The hardware supply chains span continents, while the open-source software that powers these systems represents the collective effort of developers across the world. Research breakthroughs emerge from international collaborations, building on shared knowledge that flows across borders as freely as the data these systems require.

Let’s be clear: espionage threats are real, and data security across borders is a legitimate concern. However, the fundamental weakness of nationalist approaches to security is their reliance on binary, overly simplistic classifications. “Chinese” versus “American” AI creates exactly the kind of rigid, brittle reactive security model that sophisticated attackers exploit most easily, making everything less safe.

Robust security systems thrive on nuance and depth. They employ multiple layers of validation, contextual analysis, and sophisticated inference to detect and prevent threats. A security model that sorts researchers, code, or data into simple national categories without thought is like France thinking defense meant an expensive concrete Maginot line, without trucks or planes. No adaptive, intelligent internal security means one simple breach compromises everything. Real security requires technical solutions that can handle nuance, detect subtle patterns, and proactively adapt to emerging threats.

The defense of Ukraine against Russian invasion demonstrates this principle perfectly. When Russian forces attempted to seize Hostomel Airport near Kyiv, Ukraine’s defense succeeded not through static border fortifications, but through rapid threat identification and adaptive response. While main forces were positioned at the borders, regular troops at Hostomel identified and engaged helicopter-borne attackers immediately, holding out for two crucial hours until reinforcement brigades arrived. This adaptive defense against an unexpected vector saved Kyiv from potential capture. Similarly, effective AI security requires moving beyond simplistic border-based restrictions to develop dynamic, responsive security frameworks that can identify and counter threats regardless of their origin point.

Consider how actual security breaches typically occur: not through broad categories of static nationality, but through specific vulnerabilities, social engineering, and careful exploitation of trust boundaries. Effective security measures therefore need to focus on technical rigor, behavioral analysis, and sophisticated validation frameworks – approaches that become harder, not easier, when we artificially restrict collaboration and create simplistic trust boundaries based on nationality.

Just as the Chinese Exclusion Act failed to address real economic challenges while causing immense human suffering, this attempt at technological segregation would fail to address real security concerns while hampering innovation and perpetuating harmful nationalist narratives.

The future of AI development lies not in futile attempts at nationalistic segregation and incarceration, but in thoughtful collaboration guided by strong technical standards and security frameworks. The global nature of AI development isn’t a vulnerability to be feared, it’s a strength to be lead by embracing technical excellence and rigorous security practices that focus on capabilities rather than simplistic national origins.

As we stand at the dawn of the AI era, we face the same choice that has confronted American innovation throughout history: we can repeat the mistakes of xenophobic restrictions that ultimately harmed both American security and human dignity, or we can embrace the inherently open nature of technological progress while building the technical frameworks needed to ensure its responsible development.

In the early 1970s, two revolutionary computer networks were taking shape on opposite sides of the Americas. Both aimed to connect distant points for rapid information sharing. Both used cutting-edge technology. Both would transform how we think about communication and control. Yet their fates could not have been more different.

ARPANET, developed under the protective umbrella of the U.S. Department of Defense, would evolve into today’s internet. Project Cybersyn, Chile’s experiment in economic cybernetics, would end in flames during Pinochet’s coup. The key difference wasn’t technological – it was political legitimacy.

The Power of Military Cover

ARPANET enjoyed a crucial advantage: military backing provided both resources and legitimacy. When you’re developing technology for the Defense Department, questions about control and surveillance take on a different character. They become matters of national security rather than political power.

This military cover allowed ARPANET to develop largely shielded from political scrutiny. Its potential for surveillance and control was present from the beginning, but the military context made such capabilities appear necessary and appropriate rather than threatening.

Cybersyn’s Fatal Transparency

In contrast, Project Cybersyn wore its civilian nature openly. Stafford Beer’s vision of cybernetic management for Chile’s economy was explicit about its aims to redistribute economic control and enable worker participation. This transparency, while admirable, made it vulnerable.

The context is crucial here: Nixon’s disastrous Vice Presidential trip through Latin America in 1958 had left deep scars in U.S.-Latin American relations. Nixon himself, a toxic racist, was deeply convinced non-whites were too primitive to be capable of self-governance, even before he was elected President. When Allende’s socialist government began developing an advanced nationwide computer network for economic management, it triggered immediate alarm for Nixon. Without the protective shield of military classification, Cybersyn’s capabilities for coordination and control during the Cold War were seen as purely political threats.

The Hidden Legacy of Wartime Cybernetics

What’s often overlooked is how both projects drew from the same well: wartime developments in operations research and cybernetics. The core ideas about network architecture, feedback loops, and distributed control had been developed during World War II for military purposes. Many of the key figures had wartime experience in these fields.

The difference was in how this military heritage was acknowledged. ARPANET maintained its explicit military connection, which paradoxically made its civilian applications appear less threatening when they emerged. Cybersyn, by transparently adapting military-derived techniques for civilian use, found itself more vulnerable to political attack.

The Pattern Continues

This dynamic – military cover providing political legitimacy for transformative technologies – wasn’t unique to ARPANET. GPS, another technology that enables unprecedented tracking and coordination, followed a similar path. By remaining under military control during its development, it avoided many of the political questions that might have surrounded a civilian positioning system.

Even today, we see this pattern continuing. Many surveillance and control technologies face less scrutiny when developed for military or national security purposes than when proposed for civilian use. The military origin serves as a kind of political shield, even as these technologies inevitably find their way into civilian applications.

Learning from History

The parallel stories of ARPANET and Cybersyn offer important lessons for understanding how transformative technologies gain social acceptance. The political legitimacy conveyed by military backing can be crucial for a technology’s survival and evolution, even when its ultimate applications are primarily civilian.

This history should prompt us to question our different reactions to similar technologies based on their institutional origins. When we celebrate ARPANET as the precursor to the internet while dismissing Cybersyn as an authoritarian fantasy, we’re not just making a technological assessment – we’re revealing deep-seated assumptions about legitimate and illegitimate forms of control.

The next time we encounter a new technology that promises to reshape social organization, we might ask ourselves: Would our reaction be different if this came from the military rather than civilian sector? The answer might tell us more about our political assumptions than about the technology itself.

The Lesson for IT Pros Today

The stories of ARPANET and Cybersyn aren’t just about the past – they’re a warning about how institutional control can be seized through technical means. When Pinochet’s forces moved against Cybersyn, they understood that controlling these networks meant controlling Chile’s infrastructure, economy, and ultimately, its people. The system’s designers and operators faced a stark choice: hand over the keys to power, or resist.

Today, American technical professionals face eerily similar choices. When demands come down to centralize access to critical systems – whether they’re financial networks, health databases, or communication infrastructure – these aren’t merely technical requests. They’re potential preludes to institutional capture. The separation between these systems isn’t bureaucratic inefficiency; it’s a deliberate firewall against concentrated power.

The technical professionals who manage these systems aren’t just administrators – they’re the last line of defense for institutional independence.

Every request for master access, every demand to break down system isolations, every push to centralize control should be viewed through the lens of Chile’s experience. The question isn’t whether such access is technically feasible – it’s whether it preserves the separations that protect democratic governance.

For those who work in American institutions today, Cybersyn’s fate offers clear lessons: Technical architecture is political architecture. System access is institutional power. And sometimes, protecting democracy means having the courage to say “no” to those who would dismantle its safeguards in the name of efficiency or security.

The choice between being a mechanism of control or a guardian of democratic institutions isn’t just a historical artifact of the Internet origin; it’s an ever-present reality.

The confirmation of ultra-paranoid Christian nationalist Russ Vought as OMB Director reveals a disturbing pattern in recent White House nominations that mirrors established tactics of institutional capture. His own words reveal an agenda of right-wing “unitary executive” tyranny:

In the conservative movement, ‘we’ve been too focused on religious liberty, which we all support, but we’ve lacked the ability to argue we are a Christian nation,’ Vought argued…’Our laws are built on the Judeo-Christian worldview value system.’ ‘I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation,’ Vought added later. ‘And my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be Christian nation-ism. That’s pretty close to Christian nationalism because I also believe in nationalism.’

Vought’s statements explicitly advocate for replacing American democracy with a Christian nationalist state, using terminology that mirrors historical movements that sought to replace secular governance with domestic military terror of a racist theocracy.

Vought’s plan is to entirely disable regulatory arms of the government such as the Environmental Protection Agency, while empowering the military to crush domestic dissent. Along the way, he also charts a strategy to put enforcement of immigration policy at the southern border of the country on a war footing, and declares holy vengeance [on diversity, criminalizing anyone he dislikes.] […] A key fulcrum in this strategy is the invocation of the Insurrection Act, which grants the president wide unilateral authority to deploy the military in enforcing domestic law. Right-wing state attorneys general, working in apparent coordination with Vought and his think tank, have already sought to invoke the act in disingenuous bids to declare the volume of immigration an “invasion,” and thereby trigger [national militant suppression of movement and speech].

As the architect of Project 2025 and now confirmed OMB Director, Vought will control federal agency operations – a position of unprecedented power for implementing institutional capture.

Vought said his group, the Center for Renewing America, was secretly drafting hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos that would lay the groundwork for rapid action on Trump’s plans if he wins, describing his work as creating ‘shadow’ agencies.

The secretive nature of Project 2025’s planning phase mirrors classic coup preparation tactics. The terminology is specific and deliberate: “shadow agencies” indicates parallel command structures, while “renewing” serves as coded language for institutional replacement – both standard elements in military takeover doctrine.

The military origins of this approach become explicit in their own description:

After Trump left office, Vought started the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit that describes itself as the ‘tip of the America First spear.’

This language combines two significant elements. The “America First” slogan directly invokes the KKK’s historical rhetoric and white supremacist ideology.

Meanwhile, “tip of the spear” represents specific military terminology for special forces designed for rapid infiltration to replace a government – the initial penetration force in a violent military offensive operation.

By adopting terminology associated with both white supremacist movements and military operations, Vought’s organization explicitly aligns itself with ideologies and tactics that have historically been used to undermine democratic institutions.

Vought founded the right-wing nonprofit Center for Renewing America and was a key adviser to the Heritage Foundation’s controversial Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump presidency.

The organizational structure reveals classic hallmarks of military-style institutional capture:

• Heritage Foundation providing policy legitimacy and mainstream cover
• Center for Renewing America serving as the operational arm
• Project 2025 providing detailed implementation plans
• OMB position securing control of federal agency operations

This multi-layer approach matches information warfare doctrine used in regime change operations, where different messages target different audiences simultaneously. While policy proposals provide public cover, the military terminology signals operational intent to insiders.

The January 6 insurrection demonstrated the operational capabilities of these networks. Now, with Vought’s OMB confirmation, they’ve secured unprecedented institutional control.

Previous administration extremists – from President Jackson’s genocidal concentration camps along his Trail of Tears to President Reagan’s Iran-Contra – operated within existing government structures. This playbook mirrors established tactics of U.S.-backed regime change operations – particularly Guatemala in 1954 (let alone the 1982 coup for General Efrain Ríos Montt), where religious rhetoric provided cover for corporate capture of state institutions. There, as now, parallel power structures were established under the guise of anti-communist Christian renewal, while military and intelligence operatives prepared to seize control of government functions. The key difference is that Project 2025 aims to apply these tested foreign intervention tactics domestically.

The 1954 Guatemala operation is particularly instructive: John Foster Dulles, whose father was a Presbyterian minister, masterfully combined religious rhetoric with corporate interests through his Sullivan & Cromwell law firm’s representation of United Fruit Company. This fusion of Christian messaging, corporate power, and state capacity created the blueprint for “legitimate” regime change that Project 2025 now seeks to deploy domestically.

The 1893 overthrow of Hawaii by American white supremacist businessmen provides an even more precise parallel: missionary descendants, particularly those from families like the Doles and Bishops, used Christian institutions and rhetoric as cover while their Hawaiian League and Committee of Safety established shadow governance structures. These organizations maintained public legitimacy through existing institutions while preparing for the forcible overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy – a model of religious legitimacy masking economic capture that Project 2025 closely mirrors.

The contrast with the Business Plot of 1934 is especially revealing.

Smedley Butler knew a coup when he smelled one. He had been involved in many himself. He had overthrown governments… [he] knew what most Americans did not: that in all those years, he and his Marines had destroyed democracies and helped put into power the Hitlers and Mussolinis of Latin America, dictators like the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo and Nicaragua’s soon-to-be leader Anastasio Somoza — men who would employ violent repression and their U.S.-created militaries to protect American investments and their own power. He had done so on behalf of moneyed interests like City Bank, J. P. Morgan, and the Wall Street financier Grayson M.P. Murphy.

Wealthy American white supremacist businessmen, aligned with Hitler in 1934 like Trump was aligned with Putin in 2024, attempted to forcibly install fascism through seemingly legitimate means, yet failed precisely because they lacked the institutional control that Project 2025 now possesses.

The plotters simply failed to recruit General Smedley Butler (who exposed them) and thus couldn’t capture federal operations.

Project 2025, with direct OMB control over agency operations, has already achieved what the Business Plot could not – institutional capacity for systemic capture. It has bypassed alignment from military leaders because abusing civilian control means all federal operations are captured, a far more dangerous breach of national security.

What distinguishes Project 2025 is its unprecedented fusion of foreign and domestic tactics. While previous threats like the Business Plot were internal but lacked institutional control, and foreign operations like Iran and Guatemala had sophisticated tactics but external targets, Project 2025 combines deep institutional penetration with proven regime change methodologies. It represents the first time in American history that sophisticated foreign intervention tactics are being deployed domestically by actors with direct control over federal operations.

Project 2025 therefore represents the most dangerous national security threat in American history: a comprehensive blueprint that has studied, refined, and combined historically successful tactics of institutional capture with direct control of federal operations.

This combination of militant ideology, detailed implementation plans, and institutional power poses an unprecedented threat to American democratic institutions.

The confirmation of Vought, with his explicit Christian nationalist agenda and military-style operational planning, marks a critical point in this systematic effort to replace democratic governance with authoritarian control of a militant white nationalist theocracy.