I’ve been walking the blocks of Chicago lately, from the glass canyons of the Loop to the bungalows of Canaryville, and I’m hearing a new kind of silence. It’s the silence of a machine, specifically, those Waymo rigs now prowling our streets, cameras spinning like the eyes of a mechanical spider. They call it “testing.” The folks in the statehouse are busy drafting bills to make it all legal, all “efficient.”
But you talk to a guy like Artie, who’s been hauling people in a cab for thirty years, or Sarah, who weaves through gridlock to deliver your Thai food, and you’ll hear a different story. They see those sensors and they don’t see progress. They see a pink slip written in binary code.
The irony is thick enough to choke on. We’re told by the leaders of the GOP, the party that wraps itself in the flag and the Cross, that they are the champions of the “c.” They stand on stages in MAGA hats, invoking the name of Jesus, claiming to protect the sanctity of work and the “traditional” American life. Yet, look at their ledger. When the heavy hand of Silicon Valley arrives to replace a human soul with an algorithm, where is the “Christian” defense of the worker?
In the old stories, the ones they claim to live by, Jesus wasn’t hanging out in the boardrooms of the moneychangers. He was with the fishermen, the laborers, the people whose hands were calloused. He preached a radical kind of communal love, a “mythology” of the last being first. He warned that you cannot serve both God and Mammon.
But modern Conservatism has made its choice. They’ve traded the Sermon on the Mount for the Gospel of the Bottom Line. They use Christianity as a cultural badge, a way to say “we belong, and you don’t”, while practicing a politics of pure, unadulterated greed. They cheer for the deregulation that allows AI to cannibalize union jobs because human labor is an “expense” to be minimized.
Think about the billions being poured into Agentic AI. It isn’t being built to write poetry or end hunger; it’s being built to target the repetitive tasks of the cubicle crowd and the delivery routes of the blue-collar set. It is the ultimate tool for labor replacement. And the Republican movement, for all its talk of “values,” stands by or actively clears the path.
They’ve replaced “Love thy neighbor” with “Automate thy neighbor.”
The MAGA movement thrives on a perceived hatred of the “elite,” yet it serves the ultimate elite: the capital that requires no heartbeat. They stir up cultural grievances to keep the truck driver and the data entry clerk fighting each other, while the tech giants, protected by GOP tax breaks and “pro-business” legislation, prepare to make both of them obsolete.
It’s a shell game. They give you the symbol of the Cross to hold onto while they reach into your pocket to take your livelihood. If the Christian faith is about the inherent dignity of the person, then a movement that prioritizes a “Waymo Bill” over a living wage for a human driver is, by definition, an anti-Christian movement.
We’re at a crossroads, friends. Are we going to be a society that values the person behind the wheel, or are we going to let the “values” crowd sell our souls to the highest-bidding processor?