In March of 1979, “The China Syndrome” opened in theaters. The movie was about a near meltdown recorded by a news crew at a California nuclear power plant. It was nominated for four Academy Awards and scared the hell out of audiences nationally. Twelve days later, Three Mile Island partially melted down.
The fall out from Three Mile Island was negligible. Nobody died or got sick. Jimmy Carter formed the Kemeny Commission, a 12 member presidential commission to investigate. The commission found the average radiation dose to people living nearby was about 1 millirem, roughly a tenth of a chest x-ray. None of that mattered because a movie had already poisoned the well, and the American nuclear industry never recovered. Anti-nuclear activists marched across America spreading nightmare scenarios. More than 100 reactors that had been ordered were canceled in the years that followed.
The country still needed the electricity so we built coal and natural gas plants instead. The anti-nuclear doomers could not stop progress. Progress just pivoted. Every ton of coal burned since Three Mile Island has the anti-nuclear doomers to thank, so they pivoted.
The pivoted into the climate change doomers who told us coal and natural gas were going to end the world. We had 10 years to save the planet, a deadline they first set in the 1980s and have moved every time it arrived. Greta Thunberg has since moved on to Palestinians, which tells you how much the climate really mattered.
Here in 2026, Georgia Power has finished Vogtle 3 and 4, the first new reactors in a generation, and several Georgia Public Service Commissioners lost their seats over the cost overruns. The politicians were willing to take the hit so the nation could re-learn how to build nuclear power. Literally, all the nuclear engineers with knowledge had died or retired and disappeared. We had to reteach an entire industry how to stand up again.
Now, small modular reactors are being licensed. Wind and solar hit a record 17 percent of American electricity generation in 2025, according to the Energy Information Administration. Emissions have fallen since 2007. The nuclear doomers turned climate doomers have not been able to sell their vision of destruction so they have pivoted again.
The same damn people are now artificial intelligence doomers.
The foundation networks that funded the degrowth campaigns of the past now fund the AI safety shops, the coordinated resignations, the three-employee think tanks with a Wall Street Journal exclusive, and the model legislation that shows up already written. The man whose departure from Anthropic got the full media rollout came has ties to a group that coordinates the Extinction Rebellion. These are not converts but the same believers with a new apocalypse, and the remedy never changes no matter the crisis — America must be stopped. They want America to stop building. They want American companies to accept rules written by their largest competitors. They want China to win the future.
That was the arrangement in the Cold War, too. The Soviets did not invent the Western peace movement, but they funded it, amplified it, and steered it, which is documented in the Mitrokhin archive and in our own State Department’s active measures reporting. The activists who demanded America stop building nuclear reactors never once demanded that Moscow stop building reactors.
China is running the same play now. Beijing has more than 30 reactors under construction, more than the rest of the world combined, and roughly 100 coal plants going up alongside them. It has no intention of pausing its own AI models for a safety summit. Every month we spend building a cabinet-level agency to license what amounts to math is a month the Chinese Communist Party gets for free.
Which brings us to the strangest alliance in American politics. Steve Bannon, who filmed 15 hours of interviews with Jeffrey Epstein and on the released footage coached a child predator on looking less creepy for the cameras, and who was arrested on the yacht of Chinese citizen Guo Wengui after years of entanglement with him, has now joined Bernie Sanders to shut down American AI. Sanders honeymooned in the Soviet Union and once explained that breadlines are a good thing because at least the food gets handed out. Who do you think benefits from an alliance like this?
