The modern American bureaucratic state revealed itself in all its absurd glory last week, not through some grand policy initiative or sweeping regulation, but through the tale of a squirrel known as “P’Nut.” In an era of endless crises — migrant surges, shrinking police forces, rising urban crime, housing shortages — New York state marshaled its considerable resources toward a singular mission: dispatching 10 agents to conduct an extensive raid targeting a rescue animal with a social media following.

The resulting spectacle would be comedic if it weren’t so emblematic of institutional decay. Here was a state agency deploying a small army of officials to spend five hours searching a private residence, right down to the plumbing fixtures, all to seize a seven-year-old squirrel living peacefully in upstate New York. The agents even found time to interrogate the immigration status of the owner’s German wife, while preventing the care of other rescue animals on the property.

The deeper story here isn’t about P’nut, who was euthanized after allegedly biting an officer wearing protective gear. It’s about how a single complaint could activate such a disproportionate display of state power. That someone would weaponize state power against a rescue animal reveals how easily regulatory systems can be manipulated for personal vendettas.

A Connecticut native who moved to Pine City to establish an animal sanctuary, Mark Longo funded his rescue work through his pornographic “SquirrelDaddy” OnlyFans account while building a following of millions around his rehabilitated squirrel. When P’nut’s mother was killed by a car seven years ago, Longo took in the orphaned kit, eventually discovering the animal lacked survival instincts for release. Rather than abandoning the creature, he provided a home and — amid his pornographic exploits — inadvertently created a social media star.

The incident has produced some strange political bedfellows. Elon Musk’s social media platform erupted with tributes while MAGA activists declared only Trump could prevent future squirrel seizures. Meanwhile, Democratic California Congressman Ro Khanna and Republican New York State Senator Thomas O’Mara found themselves unlikely allies in condemning the raid. “On its face, this was an absurd abuse of government power to issue a search warrant, enter this man’s home, ask about his wife’s immigration status, and kill their squirrel pet of 7 years,” Khanna posted on X. O’Mara was even more pointed: “Everything else our government looks the other way on as far as illegal immigrants but then come down on someone harboring a squirrel.”

The bureaucratic gymnastics are dizzying. The Department of Environmental Conservation claims they acted on complaints about a raccoon named Fred, yet Longo contends this was merely a pretext to seize P’nut. Adding insult to injury, authorities didn’t even directly inform Longo of P’nut’s death — he learned about it through local media reports.

P’nut’s tale resonates because it lays bare the machinery of state power in its most unvarnished form. When government agencies expend more energy hunting social media squirrels than addressing systemic societal issues that lead to completely senseless murders like that of New York homeless activist Ryan Carson, they expose the hollowness at the heart of modern bureaucracy. That a single complaint could trigger such an overwhelming response suggests a system operating on autopilot, disconnected from any meaningful sense of proportion or public good.

Although the fine details here seem silly — porn star, extremely online squirrel, SWAT-like raid — many seem to understand it as a warning about what happens when regulatory systems become self-perpetuating machines, capable of being weaponized for personal vendettas while actual crimes go un-investigated.

If this is how state power manifests against a beloved rescue animal, they can easily imagine how it might be wielded against less sympathetic targets — as those who lost their lives in the assaults on Ruby Ridge in Idaho, the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and the MOVE organization in Philadelphia learned the hard way decades ago. P’nut’s legacy might well be showing us exactly what we should fear from a government that has lost sight of both common sense and common decency.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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