The splashy moves could endanger the prosperous American economy, according to aninfluential economist speaking to Politico — especially in tandem with the White House’s gutting of agencies that have historically collaborated with the private sector.
“I think the kind of capitalism Trump has is crony capitalism,” Italian economist Mariana Mazzucato told Politico. “I would describe crony capitalism as Mafia-like. You’re showing your upper hand. You’re handing out favors to some. But then divide and conquer. Picking and choosing without a particular strategy.”
“[H]e’s actually weakening the economy,” she summed up.
Mazzucato, a University College London economics professor and adviser to governments, argues that the Intel deal is poorly designed because it doesn’t have any conditions to incentivize the company to be build new products, while the government simply acts as a passive investor.
That kind of posture isn’t going to foster next-generation technology, Mazzucato said. A smarter approach, she says, would see a government put together a portfolio of companies in a sector, encourage them with subsidies and other incentives, and wait for a company or product to rise to the top via competition in the marketplace.
Mazzucato has written extensively about how governments should take equity stakes in companies, but not in the way the Trump administration is doing, which some have called a form of corporate welfare.
Corporate welfare causes monopolies to develop; monopolies are bad because consumers don’t get cheaper and better products, while companies don’t have outside pressure to innovate. If companies don’t innovate, other countries with better industrial policy and ambitious companies will eat America’s lunch.
“And I don’t think there is, under Trump’s administration, any policy that is kind of future and opportunity-oriented around innovation,” she said. “It’s just about getting companies either to come back or preventing foreign companies from selling their goods in the U.S. It’s kind of preventing stuff from happening, versus that more positive, proactive making things happen that otherwise would not have happened.”
She called Trump’s economic policy an “idiosyncratic hodgepodge” because there doesn’t seem to be a clear strategy or a holistic roadmap to bolster the industrial backbone of America, where manufacturing has faltered to China and other countries.
“Trump is not asking, ‘What are the problems that need to be solved, and how can we have public investment to solve those problems?’” she said. “He’s just kind of throwing money around and imposing tariffs and taking these equity stakes and dismantling things.”
She also argued in the interview that Trump’s gutting of agencies such as the National Institute of Health and NASA will negatively impact the country’s competitive edge because these institutions, along with their funding, help foster the creation of new technologies, products and entirely new industrial sectors.
“What’s going to happen in the future is, U.S. competitiveness will wither away because he’s dismantling the backbone of U.S. competitiveness which has been, in the past, smart, capable, strategic, outcome-oriented, mission-oriented state agencies,” she said.
The invention of the internet and GPS, for instance, wouldn’t have been possible without the government encouraging the private sector, she said.
Any outcome from the Intel deal will probably play out over the ensuing years, so we don’t know the downstream impacts yet, but we already have proof that Trump’s attack on federal agencies and their funding is impacting America’s edge in tech and science with scientists moving overseas.
At a recent conference, the ‘godfather of AI’, Nobel Laureate Geoffrey Hinton, got down to the core issue:
“There’s only two options if you have a tiger cub as a pet. Figure out if you can train it so it never wants to kill you, or get rid of it.”
Meaning: If you give AI a job to do, a goal, it’ll relentlessly pursue that goal, no matter what.
If you don’t build in extremely tight limitations and guard rails, AI won’t consider the safety, well-being, and survival of humans a barrier. It’ll jump the barrier.
In a recent article, I quoted tech big shots who admitted they don’t really know how AI works.
That’s right.
They confessed they don’t understand how or why chatbots like GPT select each successive word they present as answers to human queries.
That’s not a comforting confession.
Press stories have been detailing many so-called AI hallucinations—in which AI invents data that don’t exist, makes up fictional court cases and legal precedents as if they’re genuine.
Increasingly, AI is being designed and trained to make users happy and feel smart. It flatters users. It tunes into users’ language to figure out how to present itself as a friend.
Many children growing up with AI prefer relating to it over humans.
There has been a noticeable shift in narrative over what is going on in Washington, DC. I say Technocracy. Others used to say Communism, socialism or fascism. Now it’s being called Communitarianism.
The uptake on this word to mask Technocracy is stunning. It’s unprecedented. It might be that you are getting a taste of “The Science of Social Engineering”, Technocracy’s favorite definition of them themselves from the 1930s.
When Technocrats want to shield their technocratic polices, they intentionally do so in the language of Communitarianism.
Example #1: Smart Cities
Technocratic Policy: Urban planners, relying on data analytics and technical expertise, design “Smart City” infrastructure—deploying sensors, AI, and algorithms to manage traffic, resources, and public services. Core decisions, like placement of surveillance, adoption of digital IDs, or algorithmic resource allocation, are made by unelected and unaccountable technical experts and private sector consultants with little direct citizen input.
Communitarian Framing: Policymakers frequently describe these initiatives as advancing “inclusive urban communities,” “empowering local groups,” and “building public trust through collective digital transformation.” The emphasis is on “community-driven sustainability,” “shared public spaces,” and “strengthening community ties”—even as the actual governance, surveillance, and decision-making remain centralized in expert hands.
Example #2: Public Health Policy
Technocratic Policy: National public health agencies, guided by epidemiologists and technocratic advisory boards, roll out mandatory vaccination campaigns and digital health credentials. The implementation relies on technical modeling, centralized data management, and scientific expertise, often minimizing open deliberation or individualized consent.
Communitarian Framing: The rollout is explained using phrases such as “protecting our communities,” “collective responsibility for health,” and “building resilient neighborhoods together.” Authorities stress “we’re all in this together,” “community solidarity,” and “shared sacrifice for collective safety”—presenting programs as communal responses to crisis when the driving mechanism is expert rule and data-driven mandates.
In both examples, the language of communitarianism (“collective good,” “community empowerment,” “shared values”) is leveraged as public messaging, even as the substance of the policies is totally technocratic, with centralized, expert-directed authority.
So What Is Communitarianism?
If you ever read Walden Two by B.F. Skinner, you know everything about communitarianism that you need to know. (The story ended horribly.)
Communitarianism is a political and social philosophy that places primary emphasis on the importance of community, the common good, and social relationships in shaping individual identity, values, and moral judgments. It asserts that people’s identities are molded by their social environment and community ties rather than by strict individualism. Forget about individuality, your personhood, even your soul. Communitarianism sees community as an end in itself.
Right-Think Takes Care of Free Speech
Technocratic elites or their supporters deliberately frame current governance realities as “communitarian” in order to deflect criticism, obscure their own authority, or create ideological cover for technocratic rule.
You should know from my years of critical analysis of Technocracy that Technocrats don’t give a whoop about consensus, the common good or social cohesion. They are throwing up a smokescreen to confuse you, and are using AI to do it with “right think”: that is, DARPA’s idea of Theory of Mind.
Theory of Mind AI refers to systems that can infer human intentions, emotions, and likely responses by analyzing behavior and context. DARPA’s program aims to simulate, predict, and influence decision-making by modeling individual and collective psychologies—originally intended for national security and adversary prediction, but already applied to civilian contexts.
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For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, systems based on these principles were used for real-time sentiment analysis and targeted messaging to adjust public attitudes, encourage compliance, and foster community-oriented behaviors. This created feedback loops, guiding both policy and public reaction by tweaking narratives and interventions for maximum “collective good”—core communitarian ideals.
By the way, Palantir (Peter Thiel, co-founder) is a master of these tactics on the battlefield and in civilian life.
Conclusion
Technocracy is NOT Communitarianism.
If you have this word embedded in your vocabulary to explain what is going on in Washington, DC, your mind has been hacked. Ditch the word “Communitarianism.”
The White House has just released its official policy document, America’s AI Action Plan, defining the future of AI development. Admittedly, Trump doesn’t have any real understanding of AI, but he has totally caved in to the Technocrats he appointed in the first place. Indeed, Technocracy is being forced down our throats whether we want it or not.
The first pillar of America’s AI Action Plan focuses on removing regulatory barriers and eliminating unnecessary review processes. Superficially, this appears as a push against bureaucratic inertia, but in reality, it amounts to an explicit transfer of authority from elected bodies to expert committees and interagency working groups.
The second pillar includes a comprehensive scheme for AI literacy and workforce retraining. At first glance, investment in skill development and rapid-response training may appear benevolent. Yet the Plan prescribes a narrowly defined set of competencies—data labeling, model auditing, grid operations—determined by federal projections of industrial demand. Such top-down workforce engineering tracks precisely with technocratic ideology, which regards citizens as variables in an optimization problem. Rather than empowering individuals to shape their own vocational paths, the Plan channels labor into predetermined slots within a digital economy overseen by experts.
The third pillar of the report extends the domestic technocratic agent to the world. By exporting American AI frameworks, hardware standards, and regulatory templates to allies, the Plan seeks to cement a global regime of expert rule.
The last item on the last page of the Plan contains real paydirt for Technocracy and Transhumanism:
AI will unlock nearly limitless potential in biology: cures for new diseases, novel industrial use cases, and more. At the same time, it could create new pathways for malicious actors to synthesize harmful pathogens and other biomolecules. The solution to this problem is a multi-tiered approach designed to screen for malicious actors, along with new tools and infrastructure for more effective screening.[Remember nose swabs for COVID screening? – Ed.]As these tools, policies, and enforcement mechanisms mature, it will be essential to work with allies and partners to ensure international adoption.
Recommended Policy Actions
Require all institutions receiving Federal funding for scientific research to use nucleic acid synthesis tools and synthesis providers that have robust nucleic acid sequence screening and customer verification procedures. Create enforcement mechanisms for this requirement rather than relying on voluntary attestation.
Led by OSTP, convene government and industry actors to develop a mechanism to facilitate data sharing between nucleic acid synthesis providers to screen for potentially fraudulent or malicious customers.
Build, maintain, and update as necessary national security-related AI evaluations through collaboration between CAISI at DOC, national security agencies, and relevant research institutions.
Therefore, DNA screening will become commonplace across government agencies.
Who Wrote This Technocratic Screed, Anyway
Not surprisingly, the report’s lead authors are listed as Michael Kratsios and David Sacks, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio included as an official with clout.
Michael Kratsios, Technocrat
Currently, Kratsios is listed as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology. In the first Trump Administration, he served as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Appointed in August 2019 at age 33, he was the youngest person ever to hold the federal CTO position.
In this role, he led the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s efforts to advance emerging technologies—most notably artificial intelligence, 5G wireless networks, quantum computing, and data privacy—across the federal government. He coordinated interagency AI initiatives, helped develop the American AI Initiative, and convened industry, academic, and civil-society stakeholders to guide national technology policy.
David O. Sacks, Technocrat
Sacks is listed as Special Advisor for AI and Crypto. He was a co-founder and the first Chief Operating Officer (COO) of PayPal, alongside Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. As such he was a prominent member of the so-called “PayPal Mafia.” He is heavily invested in the AI industry through his company, Craft Ventures.
Sacks’ authority is questionable. He was originally listed as a “Special Advisor to the President” under a protocol that ran for 133 days, which has long expired. On this report, his title has changed to “Special Advisor for AI and Crypto.” I conducted an exhaustive search to determine that David Sacks has no current position with any government entity and is, therefore, a private citizen. So, what is his name doing on this report?
Apparently, Sacks is self-appointed to be the “Crypto and AI Czar”. Yes, self-appointed. Today’s arch-Technocrats are so sure of themselves that they don’t need official appointment to assert themselves.
The US electrical grid in many areas in the US is already operating at capacity. Due to the wild popularity of artificial intelligence (AI), especially large language models such as ChatGPT, there has been a great increase in energy demand. At 2.9 watt-hours per ChatGPT request, AI queries require about 10 times the electricity of traditional Google queries. Emerging AI capabilities such as audio and video generation will add to this energy demand. Energy companies are seeking ways to produce more electricity and are even considering restarting a nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island power plant, site of the infamous disaster in 1979. With the advent of AI, many countries are having trouble adhering to their ‘decarbonization’ goals (note: global warming is a manufactured problem used to control the energy supply)..
The artificial intelligence boom has had such a profound effect on big tech companies that their energy consumption, and with it their carbon emissions, have surged.
The spectacular success of large language models such as ChatGPT has helped fuel this growth in energy demand. At 2.9 watt-hours per ChatGPT request, AI queries require about 10 times the electricity of traditional Google queries, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit research firm. Emerging AI capabilities such as audio and video generation are likely to add to this energy demand.
The energy needs of AI are shifting the calculus of energy companies. They’re now exploring previously untenable options, such as restarting a nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island power plant, site of the infamous disaster in 1979, that has been dormant since 2019.
Data centers have had continuous growth for decades, but the magnitude of growth in the still-young era of large language models has been exceptional. AI requires a lot more computational and data storage resources than the pre-AI rate of data center growth could provide.
AI and the grid
Thanks to AI, the electrical grid – in many places already near its capacity or prone to stability challenges – is experiencing more pressure than before. There is also a substantial lag between computing growth and grid growth. Data centers take one to two years to build, while adding new power to the grid requires over four years.
As a recent report from the Electric Power Research Institute lays out, just 15 states contain 80% of the data centers in the U.S.. Some states – such as Virginia, home to Data Center Alley – astonishingly have over 25% of their electricity consumed by data centers. There are similar trends of clustered data center growth in other parts of the world. For example, Ireland has become a data center nation.
Along with the need to add more power generation to sustain this growth, nearly all countries have decarbonization goals. This means they are striving to integrate more renewable energy sources into the grid. Renewables such as wind and solar are intermittent: The wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. The dearth of cheap, green and scalable energy storage means the grid faces an even bigger problem matching supply with demand.
There are several ways the industry is addressing this energy crisis. First, computing hardware has gotten substantially more energy efficient over the years in terms of the operations executed per watt consumed. Data centers’ power use efficiency, a metric that shows the ratio of power consumed for computing versus for cooling and other infrastructure, has been reduced to 1.5 on average, and even to an impressive 1.2 in advanced facilities. New data centers have more efficient cooling by using water cooling and external cool air when it’s available.
Unfortunately, efficiency alone is not going to solve the sustainability problem. In fact, Jevons paradox points to how efficiency may result in an increase of energy consumption in the longer run. In addition, hardware efficiency gains have slowed down substantially, as the industry has hit the limits of chip technology scaling.
Similarly, researchers are increasingly studying and developing data center cooling technologies. The Electric Power Research Institute report endorses new cooling methods, such as air-assisted liquid cooling and immersion cooling. While liquid cooling has already made its way into data centers, only a few new data centers have implemented the still-in-development immersion cooling.
Flexible future
A new way of building AI data centers is flexible computing, where the key idea is to compute more when electricity is cheaper, more available and greener, and less when it’s more expensive, scarce and polluting.
Data center operators can convert their facilities to be a flexible load on the grid. Academia and industry have provided early examples of data center demand response, where data centers regulate their power depending on power grid needs. For example, they can schedule certain computing tasks for off-peak hours.
Implementing broader and larger scale flexibility in power consumption requires innovation in hardware, software and grid-data center coordination. Especially for AI, there is much room to develop new strategies to tune data centers’ computational loads and therefore energy consumption. For example, data centers can scale back accuracy to reduce workloads when training AI models.
Realizing this vision requires better modeling and forecasting. Data centers can try to better understand and predict their loads and conditions. It’s also important to predict the grid load and growth.
The Electric Power Research Institute’s load forecasting initiative involves activities to help with grid planning and operations. Comprehensive monitoring and intelligent analytics – possibly relying on AI – for both data centers and the grid are essential for accurate forecasting.
On the edge
The U.S. is at a critical juncture with the explosive growth of AI. It is immensely difficult to integrate hundreds of megawatts of electricity demand into already strained grids. It might be time to rethink how the industry builds data centers.
Computer scientists have for decades been vying to emulate the human brain, replicating its neural networks to build artificial intelligence (AI) with enhanced processing power.
But the more sophisticated those artificial neural networks become, the more powerful they get, and the more we rely on them, the more energy they consume. And sometimes nature’s original design is just better in some regards.
In the latest demonstration of nature’s efficiencies, a Swiss start-up company has just launched a ‘biocomputer’ that connects to living, pulsing brain cells and, according to its makers, uses far less energy than traditional, bit-based computers as a result.
Rather than merely integrating biological concepts into computing, FinalSpark’s online platform ‘taps’ into spherical clusters of lab-grown human brain cells called organoids. A total of 16 organoids are housed within four arrays that connect to eight electrodes each and a microfluidics system that supplies water and nutrients for the cells.
The approach, known as wetware computing, in this case harnesses researchers’ abilities to culture organoids in the lab, a fairly new technology that allows scientists to study what are essentially mini replicas of individual organs.
The rise in organoids as a popular research technique comes at a time when artificial neural networks, which underpin large language models such as Chat GPT, have also exploded in use and processing power.
FinalSpark claims that so-called bioprocessors like the brain-machine interface system they’re developing “consume a million times less power than traditional digital processors”.
While we don’t have any numbers on their specific system, its energy usage, or processing power, FinalSpark’s research team says that training a single large language model like GPT-3, a precursor to GPT-4, required 10 gigawatt hours or about 6,000 times the energy that one European citizen uses in a year.
Technology trends also indicate that the booming AI industry will consume 3.5 percent of global electricity by 2030. Already, the IT industry as a whole is responsible for around 2 percent of global CO2 emissions.
Clearly, it’s becoming increasingly necessary to find ways to make computing more energy efficient, and the synergies between brain cell networks and computing circuits are an obvious parallel to explore.
FinalSpark is not the first outfit to try connecting probes to biological systems, or attempt to reliably program neural networks so they perform specific input-output functions on command.
In 2023, researchers in the United States built a bioprocessor that connected computer hardware to brain organoids, and the system learned to recognize speech patterns.
“Over the past three years, the Neuroplatform was utilized with over 1,000 brain organoids, enabling the collection of more than 18 terabytes of data,” FinalSpark co-founder Fred Jordan and his colleagues write in their published paper, which has been peer-reviewed like other scientific studies.
While the end goal may be new, energy-efficient computing approaches, for now the system is being used to enable researchers to run lengthy experiments on brain organoids, just like its predecessors.
However, there are some improvements: The FinalSpark team says researchers can connect to its system remotely, and the mini-brains can be sustained for up to 100 days, their electrical activity measured around the clock.
“Currently in 2024, the system is freely available for research purposes, and numerous research groups have begun using it for their experiments,” Jordan and colleagues write.
“In the future, we plan to extend the capabilities of our platform to manage a broader range of experimental protocols relevant to wetware computing,” such as injecting molecules and drugs into organoids for testing, the team concludes.
Manufacturing Consent: The Border Fiasco and the “Smart Wall”
The political response to the crisis at the southern border continues to advance the bipartisan “smart wall,” having been backed by Trump and Biden alike. This bipartisan consensus reaches far beyond the US, as much of the world is similarly speeding along in implementing “digital borders.”
The disastrous situation at the US-Mexico border is, and has been, intentionally produced. Throughout the last several administrations, regardless of campaign and other public rhetoric, the porous nature of the border has remained unresolved. On several occasions, the situation as it has developed has been blamed largely on incompetence and government inefficiency. Though some administrations have been tougher than others in regards to terrestrial migration (under some metrics), the US-Mexico border has not been sealed off so to force entrants to cross through officially recognized and managed ports of entry.
Under the current administration, it has been pointedly obvious that even the sections of the border that do contain physical barriers are being dismantled on purpose, all the while illegal crossings have risen to unprecedented levels. Whatever the motives for this deliberate policy on the part of the Biden administration, the end result has been the widespread characterization of the crisis as an “invasion,” priming the voter bloc usually most concerned with border security – the American Right – for military-style “solutions.”
While the justifications for the frenzied media coverage are based on the actual reality that the border is indeed highly insecure (and has been for some time), the policy responses from American politicians reveal that there is a bipartisan consensus about what must be done. Tellingly, the same “solution” is also being quietly rolled out at all American ports of entry that are not currently being “overrun”, such as airports. That solution, of course, is biometric surveillance, enabled by AI, facial recognition/biometrics and autonomous devices.
This “solution” is not just being implemented throughout the United States as an alleged means of thwarting migrants, it is also being rapidly implemented throughout the world in apparent lockstep. The reasons for the unspoken, but obvious, global consistency in implementing invasive, biometric surveillance is due to the fulfillment of global policy agendas, ratified by nearly every country in the world, that seek both to restrict the extent of people’s freedom of movement and to surveil people’s movements (and much, much more) through the global implementation of digital identity. Those policy agendas include mainly the UN’s Agenda 2030 or Sustainable Development Goals, specifically SDG 16, as well as Interpol’s Global Policing Goals.
While the American Right has been rather outspoken in its rejection of the UN’s Agenda 2030, and the digital ID project at large, the distress over the border situation is being used to manufacture consent among this specific group for “solutions” that are focused on expanding surveillance and biometric collection as opposed to the implementation of physical barriers.
The Virtual Wall
The Hawaiian shirt-wearing inventor of the VR headset Oculus Rift, Palmer Luckey, has become the face of America’s “virtual border wall.” Luckey, the brain behind the defense tech firm Anduril, is a long-time associate of Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, with Luckey having met Thiel at 19 when Luckey presided over his first company Oculus Rift, which was later sold to Facebook. Thiel was then on Facebook’s board and was also instrumental in the rise of the social media company. Luckey’s Anduril is also backed by Thiel’s Founders Fund and another Palantir co-founder, Joe Lonsdale, is also an Anduril investor.
Anduril is one of the main beneficiaries of government contracts to build autonomous surveillance towers along the US-Mexico border, which are now also being rolled out along the US-Canada border. As a consequence, they are likely to be among the beneficiaries of the Senate’s current proposal for “border security,” which sets aside $170 million for additional towers to be build.
Under the Trump and now Biden administrations, Luckey has been vocal about how Anduril will create “a digital wall that is not a barrier so much as a web of all-seeing eyes, with intelligence to know what it sees.” As noted by WIRED in 2018, Luckey and Anduril has long been pitching its technology “as a complement to – or substitute for – much of [then] President Trump’s promised physical wall.”
Luckey was a donor to Trump’s inaugural committee and his apparent mentor, Peter Thiel, was a key figure on Trump’s transition team, particularly for defense. The company dresses itself in “America First” rhetoric, especially when it comes to border security, framing itself as a beacon of “Western democracy” and nationalism in an age of globalism. Despite this, Anduril is part of a network that fronts for the long-standing surveillance ambitions of the same American “Deep State” that Trump supporters revile.
An Anduril surveillance tower deployed on the US-Mexico border, Source: FedScoop/Anduril
Luckey’s Anduril would not exist without the assistance of Thiel and several executives from Thiel’s Palantir. As Unlimited Hangout has reported in multiple articles, Palantir isa CIA front explicitly aimed at resurrecting the controversial surveillance dragnet once housed by the Pentagon’s DARPA known as Total Information Awareness (TIA), which sought to use warrantless, dragnet surveillance of Americans to prevent crime and terrorism before it happens (i.e. pre-crime, a field which Palantir has since pioneered and which was essentially made DOJ policy by Trump’s Attorney General William Barr).
One of those Palantir executives who later came to Anduril, Trae Stephens, worked at a government intelligence agency (he declines to specify which one) before joining Palantir. From there, Stephens joined Thiel’s Founders Fund and ended up on the boards of some of the most controversial Founders Fund-funded companies, such as Carbyne911. Financed in part by Jeffrey Epstein and the brainchild of former Israeli Prime Minister (and Epstein associate) Ehud Barak, Carbyne’s platform also involves invasive data collection from civilians and “predictive policing” functionalities. On Carbyne’s board, Stephens originally sat alongside Barak as well as Israeli intelligence-linked figures like Pinchas Buchris (former commander of Israel’s Unit 8200), Lital Leshem (“former” Israeli intelligence operative who know works for documented CIA asset and former head of the infamous mercenary group Blackwater, Erik Prince), and Nicole Junkermann (an Epstein associate who has since rebranded as a venture capitalist in emerging technologies and FinTech). Stephens remains on Carbyne’s board, where he now sits alongside former US Homeland Security chiefs Michael Chertoff (Bush administration) and Kirstjen Nielsen (Trump administration).
Thanks in part to Thiel’s influence over the early Trump administration, Stephens was chosen to oversee Trump’s transition team for the Defense Department, where he “steered” Trump’s early Pentagon policies. At the time, Stephens was also in talks with Luckey to create a new company. After Luckey left Facebook under a cloud of controversy in late March 2017, he and Stephens created Anduril and other Palantir executives were recruited to join the company. Within a year of its existence, Anduril had already netted millions in contracts from the Department of Homeland Security. Stephens has remained at Thiel’s Founders Fund since co-founding Anduril.
Not unlike Palantir, Anduril is also a modern reboot of a failed DHS initiative from around the same time as TIA. The Secure Border Initiative Network (SBInet) was a Bush-era DHS effort that sought to build a virtual border wall that could not only deter and detect illegal border crossings, but also automatically designate those illegal crossers a “threat level” as well as predict “illegal border activities” before they occur. Like Anduril, it relied on surveillance towers and a litany of sensors spread throughout the environment. The program, though shuttered by DHS in 2011, never actually ended, as the DHS report announcing the “end” of SBInet stated the following:
DHS is currently developing a comprehensive border technology deployment plan that will build upon successful technology currently deployed and provide the optimum mix of proven surveillance technologies by sector. Where appropriate, this technology plan will also include elements of the former SBInet program that have proven successful.
Just like Anduril’s marketing strategy, SBInet was pitched as a cheaper, more cost-effective and “faster” means of securing the border than the construction of physical barriers. Anduril has openly laid out its strategy to avoid the pitfalls of SBInet; whereas SBInet was doomed to fail by hiring incompetent contractors to build and sell the system to the government, Anduril plans to own the system it builds and lease it to the government, which – according to Trae Stephens – “creates an incentive to keep development costs low.” Despite claims it is “low” cost, since 2017, massive DHS contracts have been given to Anduril to fulfill many of the original ambitions of the SBInet project and, despite the construction of hundreds of towers and millions spent, the border remains more insecure than ever.
One of Anduril’s earliest advocates was Congressman Will Hurd, a former officer in the CIA’s clandestine operations division who now represents Texas in the House of Representatives. With Hurd’s help, Anduril was able to place their first prototypes for the “virtual wall” on the border-adjacent private property of an anonymous rancher. Custom and Border Protection (CBP) then conducted their first official pilot of Anduril towers in 2018, leading to the Trump administration’s approval to deploy Anduril’s towers along the entirety of the south-western border in 2020. That approval saw Anduril awarded a five-year and still-ongoing contract and also saw the contract designated a “program of record,” meaning it is deemed essential enough to be a dedicated item in the DHS budget.
Trump, in the latter years of his presidential term, began to embrace the type of virtual wall that Anduril would enable even more so than the physical barrier he had campaigned on. In January 2019, for example, Trump stated “The walls we are building are not medieval walls. They are smart walls designed to meet the needs of frontline border agents.” The “smart walls”, Trump went on to say, would include “sensors, monitors and cutting-edge technology.”
Under the Biden administration, Anduril’s star has continued to rise. This is partially due to the millions the company has spent lobbying Congress, but also facilitated by the long-standing bipartisan love affair with building a “smart wall” on the Southern border. CBP was given millions for autonomous surveillance towers along the border in the 2021 US Citizenship Act and then again in the 2022 omnibus bill, with millions more granted last year. The lion-share of that money is destined for Anduril’s coffers. This year, if the Senate’s bipartisan “border security” efforts are any indication, Anduril stands to gain even more contracts to build ever more autonomous towers, which are now accompanied by autonomous drones and other connected devices. Luckey, despite Anduril’s claims that there will always be human oversight of its products, has stated that his vision for the future of warfare that Anduril is helping to build will soon result in humans playing ever more insignificant roles.
Palmer Luckey works on an Anduril product, Source: Inceptive Mind
While Anduril is one of the main companies building the “virtual wall,” they are not alone. General Dynamics, a defense firm deeply connected to organized crime, espionage scandals and corruption, has developed several hundred remote video surveillance systems (RVSS) towers for CBP while Google, another Big Tech firm with CIA connections, has been tapped by CBP to have its AI used in conjunction with Anduril’s towers, which also utilize Anduril’s own AI operating system known as Lattice. Anduril is merely the visible face of the “virtual wall” that has positioned itself in close proximity to Trump’s political movement and is sure to benefit if Trump is re-elected later this year. However, Anduril has been more than happy to cozy up to the Biden administration, having praised Biden for calling to develop border protection measures using “high-tech capacity,” which they have say they’ve “delivered.”
Yet, despite support from both political parties, millions upon millions of funding and several hundreds of towers and supporting devices deployed, this “virtual wall” has done nothing to stop the drastic increase in illegal migration into the United States. Why, since the towers were deployed, are illegal crossings skyrocketing? Why is it that the proposed solution to this “invasion” is to build even more towers? One could argue that the answer to those questions lies in the fact that the border crisis is being used to manufacture consent amongst Americans for the implementation of a surveillance panopticon, not just on the border, but well into the interior of the country.
The Thiel-Funded, All Seeing AI
Anduril’s other government contracts suggests that the company’s installations on the border are only a small component of what a completed “smart wall” might entail. In addition to their contracts with CBP, Anduril is a major contractor for the Department of Defense and supplies (or is soon to supply) the military with autonomous aircraft, such as its Ghost platform and autonomous underwater vehicles. Like the drones that interface with their surveillance towers on the border, they are framed as useful for surveillance and reconnaissance, but are also able to deliver payloads, i.e. they are able to be outfitted with weapons of war. They have also been developing weapon systems that appear to fall under the controversial category of autonomous weapons, meaning that the unmanned device could kill without meaningful human oversight. These drones utilize Lattice, the same AI-enabled operating system as those that run Anduril’s border towers and surveillance drones. Last year, Anduril unveiled a new version of Lattice that “is designed to foster dynamic collaboration among autonomous systems,” e.g. allowing surveillance drones/towers and weaponized ones to be interoperable and conduct missions together without necessarily needing a human to coordinate them.
An Anduril underwater drone developed for the Australian military, Source: Breaking Defense
Anduril’s ambitions go far beyond dominating the Pentagon’s push into autonomous vehicles and AI and the Southern border’s “virtual wall.” Anduril’s website describes how Lattice can be deployed to surveil and protect the 16 critical infrastructure sectors that have been identified in the United States, including “dams, energy, nuclear reactors, transportation systems, water and wastewater, and communications.” “Securing critical infrastructure is vital for the U.S. and beyond, and, similar to our border security solution, Lattice can take over the dull work of monitoring cameras and sensors for threats to critical infrastructure sites and free up humans to do something about it,” the company states on their website. The company has also pitched Lattice for use in detecting and responding to wildfires and conducting civilian search and rescue missions. Luckey has stated that Anduril ultimately plans “to turn American and allied warfighters into invincible technomancers.”
The potential dangers of Anduril can only fully be fleshed out when considering the family of Thiel-backed defense/intelligence companies as a whole. For instance, Thiel’s Palantir, which has numerous ties to Anduril aside from just Thiel, is the engine that intelligence agencies and militaries (in the US and beyond) use to analyze drone footage, satellite imagery, and open-source data and turn that visual and non-visual data into actionable intelligence. It has been openly described by mainstream outlets like Bloomberg as “using War on Terror tools to track American citizens” and has long been a major driver of “predictive policing”, i.e. pre-crime.Another Thiel-funded venture, Clearview AI, has developed AI-powered facial recognition tools that were trained off of billions of photos scrapped from the internet, many of them from the Thiel-backed social media platform Facebook and the Facebook-owned Instagram. Despite being a favorite of US law enforcement and DHS, Clearview AI has been sued numerous times over privacy violations and its database has been banned in numerous countries including Australia, Britain, Italy and Canada. Like Palantir, which mainstream media has acknowledged for years as knowing “everything about you” and even called an “all-seeing eye,” Clearview AI’s tools are allegedly able to “identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.”
In looking at the overlap shared between Palantir, Anduril, Clearview AI and even Elon Musk’s SpaceX (which has been backed by Founders Fund since 2008 and is tied to Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens), one wonders if this Thiel-backed family of companies could eventually serve as an interoperable system for total AI surveillance. Troublingly, there are numerous indications this is already happening. Furthermore, given their common links to Thiel, it seems that such an outcome was likely always the intent.
For instance, as Stavroula Pabst previously reported for Unlimited Hangout, Anduril and Palantir, both contractors to military and intelligence agencies, are currently collaborating on the Army’s Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) program. In addition, Anduril has announced that its Lattice AI system “is now for everything” and designed to be interoperable with the products of other contractors. All three of these Thiel-backed companies have been testing the interoperable use of their products already in the Ukraine conflict and appear to be using Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip for the same ends.
How Peter Thiel-Linked Tech is Fueling the Ukraine War
As war in Ukraine continues, controversial defense contractors and adjacent companies like Palantir, Anduril, and Clearview AI are taking advantage to develop and level-up controversial AI-driven weapons systems and surveillance technologies. These organizations’ common link? The support of the controversial, yet ever-more powerful Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel.
Often, these technologies are tested and used abroad first before they are deployed at home, something that even mainstream media has acknowledged that Palantir has been doing for years. The so-called War on Domestic Terror has long been about retooling the weapons of the War on Terror as a means of curbing domestic dissent and Palantir is just one of several companies aiding that shift. Similarly, Clearview AI, despite claims that the company is Trump-linked and tied to right-leaning political circles, has bragged about its utility to the US law enforcement community by highlighting the company’s role in identifying those involved in January 6th, which the company’s CEO refers to as an “insurrection.” After January 6th, Clearview AI’s use by US law enforcement jumped by 26%.
However, Thiel, Luckey and others in this network who are building the domestic panopticon often claim that they are defending “Western values” and “democracy” by embracing military and intelligence contracts. They also rely heavily on “America First” rhetoric. These companies contrast themselves to companies like Google, where employees have previously scuttled the big military contracts over ethical concerns, even though figures like Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO who is a big backer of the Democrats and the Biden administration, are similarly developing autonomous weapon technology also under the guise of “defending democracy.” These Big Tech oligarchs ultimately agree about the plan, though Thiel and his ilk are much more vocal about their willingness to overlook ethical quandaries in the pursuit of ever more lucrative government contracts and cloak themselves in right-leaning, “America First” rhetoric.
An example of Anduril’s marketing materials and narratives, Source: Shack News/Anduril
This intelligence-linked web of Thiel-backed companies is poised to follow this same trajectory with respect to the “smart wall” being erected on the southern border as well as the northern border. While framed as only surveilling border crossings, the surveillance towers, drones and related devices being deployed are able to spy beyond the border and into American border cities and towns. While Anduril’s towers in particular are often framed as being placed in rural, sparsely populated parts of the southern border, there are several that are located close to major urban centers.
There is also the issue of the so-called “Constitution Free Zone,” which refers to the “border region” claimed by the US government that extends roughly 100 miles inland from all of the US’ terrestrial (including coastal) borders. It is estimated that 2/3 of all Americans live within this “border region”, which also includes 9 of the 10 largest US cities. The blatant overreach has been criticized by left-leaning (e.g. the ACLU) and right-leaning groups (e.g. the CATO Institute) alike. Whenever there are frenzied pushes in the media (mainstream and alternative alike) demanding new border security measures, many forget or are simply unaware that the government defines “the border” as much, much more than just the physical US-Mexico border and – thus – military-style measures rolled out on “the border” could also be rolled out much more inland.
The “Constitution Free Zone” may soon have implications for the border “smart wall.” Those surveillance devices could also be utilized, once they are capable, to surveil within the government-defined “border region,” where the violation of basic civil rights by law enforcement and CBP is a well-documented phenomenon. Given that intelligence agencies have been known to engage in the warrantless wiretapping of Americans for well over a decade, it seems likely that the “smart wall” could be used for much of the same.
Though some recent US court cases have tackled modern video surveillance tactics by law enforcement, it is still possible for them to collect data from surveillance cameras without a warrant if the intent is to “guard against […] crime.” The precarious state of civil liberties in the US, combined with the growing dominance of a small, close-knit and intelligence-linked group over the surveillance infrastructure of the State, should be carefully scrutinized, not rapidly rubber-stamped on the back of media-generated panic.
Agenda 2030 and Global Policing Goals
The bipartisan consensus around an Anduril-built “smart wall” likely has its roots in the same global agenda that is spurring the rapid implementation of biometric entry/exit systems at ports of entry throughout the Western world. For instance, this is the year where the European Union’s biometric entry/exit system is due to launch, whereby travelers crossing the EU’s new “digital border” system – whether terrestrial or aerial – will have to provide their fingerprints and submit to facial scans if they wish to enter an EU member state. Despite claims that the “digital border” would facilitate easier travel and reduce wait times, current estimates reveal that the new system is likely to take almost ten times longer per entry. The UK, despite leaving the EU, is also poised to “make its borders digital” by 2025, i.e. next year, with Canada implementing similar policies.
A pilot of BorderXpress biometric kiosks at Keflavik International Airport in Iceland in 2020, Source: Biometric Update
In the US, the move toward the “real ID” system, which is to come into force in 2025, will see biometric collection in the US become a requisite for domestic flights and any other “official purposes” that the DHS Secretary can unilaterally determine require a “real ID.” The “real ID” also provides favorable provisions for digital IDs, such as digital drivers licenses (such as the “Florida smart ID” being piloted in Ron DeSantis-governed Florida) and other “mobile digital documents and digital cards.” Elsewhere in the US, in airports, the push for digital IDs and facial biometric scans continues torapidly advance.
It is quite obvious that the “smart wall” being built on the US’ southern and northern borders is intended to be part of the same “digital border” system that DHS has been designing and gradually implementing for most of the past 20 years. For instance, CBP currently utilizes the same biometric facial comparison technology used at numerous land, sea and air ports of entry throughout the country and plans to continue to expand its use nationwide. As noted above, Anduril’s towers or its affiliated drones could easily be equipped with facial recognition or other related technologies, while official terrestrial port of entries are already using the same biometric system being rolled out at American airports. In addition, many of those seeking to cross the southern border are being onboarded to the CBP One app, which CBP initially claimed would result in a “safe, orderly and humane” border processing when it was launched in January 2023. That app also collects biometric information from applicants of certain nationalities, a functionality CBP will likely expand in the future as reliance on its app increases.
The apparent global coordination of biometric entry/exit systems is no coincidence, as it is a policy initiative deeply connected to the UN’s Agenda 2030, or the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Specifically, it is tied to the implementation of SDG 16, which contains provisions for digital identity systems, among other things. The UN has chosen the global law enforcement entity Interpol as its “implementing partner” of SDG 16, a decision that ultimately spawned Interpol’s SDG-aligned Global Policing Goals (GPGs). The GPGs were approved and adopted by Interpol’s 196 member countries in 2017. As previously noted by Unlimited Hangout, Interpol is a dangerous organization to trust with the vast power these goals and their associated policies will bestow upon them, as they operate as a “pay-to-play” organization and have been embroiled in several significant corruption scandals.
SDG16: Part 1 — Building the Global Police State
The United Nations claims that the purpose of Sustainable Development Goal 16 (SDG16) is to promote peaceful and inclusive societies and to provide access to justice for all. Hiding behind the rhetoric is the real objective: to strengthen and consolidate the power and authority of the “global governance regime” and to exploit threats—both real and imagined—in order to advance regime hegemony.
One of the GPGs, GPG No. 2, is to “promote border security worldwide.” Interpol specifically notes that the implementation of this goal will involve establishing “advanced global standards for an intelligence-led border management, including standards for border surveillance, border checks and related equipment.” These standards, they continue, “should be underpinned by technology and digital advancement and risk analysis.” Elsewhere, they discuss how the implementation of this goal will also involve “managing and sharing biometric data, including with the use of the Interpol’s Biometric Hub [“a state-of-the-art system for identifying criminals˝] and other hubs.” Interpol has teamed up with biometric digital ID companies Idemia and Onfido as part of this effort. Both of those companies facilitatedvaccine passports during Covid-19 and are currently helping to create digital driver’s licenses in some US states.
Interpol is mainly funded by the European Commission and the governments of Germany, the US and Canada, all of which – as noted above – are implementing the same biometric entry/exit systems on similar timelines. However, many other Interpol member countries are similarly ramping up their adoption of biometric, digital IDs for foreign travel and domestic use, including the West’s ostensible adversary countries, like Russia and China. The vast majority of the world’s countries, whether West or East, have signed onto Interpol’s GPGs and the UN’s SDGs, both of which push for comprehensive, biometric digital IDs interfaced with a digital currency wallet (whether a CBDC or private sector-issued equivalent). Globally, these agendas are being rolled out rapidly, forming the foundation for the next era of highly centralized global governance.
However, in some countries, such as the United States, where a significant portion of the population has become wary of digital IDs and digital, programmable money, unprecedented efforts are being made to sell these globalist policies via right-leaning talking points in contrast to years prior. For instance, digital, programmable money is being developed in the US, not as a CBDC, but a mix of regulated stablecoins and tokenized bank deposits. Even global carbon markets are being framed, not as being about climate change, but about innovation and profiting off a new class of assets. Now, it seems, the biometric “digital border” tied to the UN’s SDGs – a key component of the infrastructure for digital ID – is being sold mainly to the populist right and being rolled out under the guise of tackling illegal immigration. Not unlike Israel’s “smart wall,” these walls can be “turned off” when a crisis needs to be manufactured and, just like so much else, used to sell the same agendas that are pushing us all into a global, public-private panopticon.
Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She is contributing editor of Unlimited Hangout and author of the book One Nation Under Blackmail.
Election disinformation takes a big leap with AI being used to deceive worldwide
From Bangladesh to Slovakia, AI-generated deepfakes have been undermining elections around the globe. Experts say their reach and sophistication is a sign of things to come in consequential elections later this year. (March 15)
LONDON (AP) — Artificial intelligence is supercharging the threat of election disinformation worldwide, making it easy for anyone with a smartphone and a devious imagination to create fake – but convincing – content aimed at fooling voters.
It marks a quantum leap from a few years ago, when creating phony photos, videos or audio clips required teams of people with time, technical skill and money. Now, using free and low-cost generative artificial intelligence services from companies like Google and OpenAI, anyone can create high-quality “deepfakes” with just a simple text prompt.
Experts warn AI and deepfakes will likely be worse in the coming elections. Here’s how governments and organizations are responding to the threat.
A wave of AI deepfakes tied to elections in Europe and Asia has coursed through social media for months, serving as a warning for more than 50 countries heading to the polls this year.
“You don’t need to look far to see some people … being clearly confused as to whether something is real or not,” said Henry Ajder, a leading expert in generative AI based in Cambridge, England.
The question is no longer whether AI deepfakes could affect elections, but how influential they will be, said Ajder, who runs a consulting firm called Latent Space Advisory.
As the U.S. presidential race heats up, FBI Director Christopher Wray recently warned about the growing threat, saying generative AI makes it easy for “foreign adversaries to engage in malign influence.”
People are reflected in a window of a hotel at the Davos Promenade in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)
With AI deepfakes, a candidate’s image can be smeared, or softened. Voters can be steered toward or away from candidates — or even to avoid the polls altogether. But perhaps the greatest threat to democracy, experts say, is that a surge of AI deepfakes could erode the public’s trust in what they see and hear.
Some recent examples of AI deepfakes include:
— A video of Moldova’s pro-Western president throwing her support behind a political party friendly to Russia.
— Audio clips of Slovakia’s liberal party leader discussing vote rigging and raising the price of beer.
— A video of an opposition lawmaker in Bangladesh — a conservative Muslim majority nation — wearing a bikini.
The novelty and sophistication of the technology makes it hard to track who is behind AI deepfakes. Experts say governments and companies are not yet capable of stopping the deluge, nor are they moving fast enough to solve the problem.
As the technology improves, “definitive answers about a lot of the fake content are going to be hard to come by,” Ajder said.
Some AI deepfakes aim to sow doubt about candidates’ allegiances.
In Moldova, an Eastern European country bordering Ukraine, pro-Western President Maia Sandu has been a frequent target. One AI deepfake that circulated shortly before local elections depicted her endorsing a Russian-friendly party and announcing plans to resign.
Moldova’s President Maia Sandu, right, greets Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Bulboaca, Moldova, June 1, 2023.(AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda, File)
Officials in Moldova believe the Russian government is behind the activity. With presidential elections this year, the deepfakes aim “to erode trust in our electoral process, candidates and institutions — but also to erode trust between people,” said Olga Rosca, an adviser to Sandu. The Russian government declined to comment for this story.
China has also been accused of weaponizing generative AI for political purposes.
In Taiwan, a self-ruled island that China claims as its own, an AI deepfake gained attention earlier this year by stirring concerns about U.S. interference in local politics.
The fake clip circulating on TikTok showed U.S. Rep. Rob Wittman, vice chairman of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, promising stronger U.S. military support for Taiwan if the incumbent party’s candidates were elected in January.
Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., questions witnesses during a congressional hearing, on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2023, in Washington.(AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
Wittman blamed the Chinese Communist Party for trying to meddle in Taiwanese politics, saying it uses TikTok — a Chinese-owned company — to spread “propaganda.”
A spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry, Wang Wenbin, said his government doesn’t comment on fake videos and that it opposes interference in other countries’ internal affairs. The Taiwan election, he stressed, “is a local affair of China.”
BLURRING REALITY
Audio-only deepfakes are especially hard to verify because, unlike photos and videos, they lack telltale signs of manipulated content.
In Slovakia, another country overshadowed by Russian influence, audio clips resembling the voice of the liberal party chief were shared widely on social media just days before parliamentary elections. The clips purportedly captured him talking about hiking beer prices and rigging the vote.
It’s understandable that voters might fall for the deception, Ajder said, because humans are “much more used to judging with our eyes than with our ears.”
In the U.S., robocalls impersonating U.S. President Joe Biden urged voters in New Hampshire to abstain from voting in January’s primary election. The calls were later traced to a political consultant who said he was trying to publicize the dangers of AI deepfakes.
Paul Carpenter describes AI software during an interview in New Orleans, Friday, Feb. 23, 2024. Carpenter says he was hired in January to use AI software to imitate President Joe Biden’s voice to convince New Hampshire Democrat voters not to vote in the state’s presidential primary. (AP Photo/Matthew Hinton, File)
In poorer countries, where media literacy lags, even low-quality AI fakes can be effective.
Such was the case last year in Bangladesh, where opposition lawmaker Rumeen Farhana — a vocal critic of the ruling party — was falsely depicted wearing a bikini. The viral video sparked outrage in the conservative, majority-Muslim nation.
“They trust whatever they see on Facebook,” Farhana said.
Rumeen Farhana, a politician from the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) sits for a photograph during an interview at her residence in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Thursday, Feb. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Al-emrun Garjon)
Experts are particularly concerned about upcoming elections in India, the world’s largest democracy and where social media platforms are breeding grounds for disinformation.
A CHALLENGE TO DEMOCRACY
Some political campaigns are using generative AI to bolster their candidate’s image.
In Indonesia, the team that ran the presidential campaign of Prabowo Subianto deployed a simple mobile app to build a deeper connection with supporters across the vast island nation. The app enabled voters to upload photos and make AI-generated images of themselves with Subianto.
As the types of AI deepfakes multiply, authorities around the world are scrambling to come up with guardrails.
Noudhy Valdryno, the digital coordinator for the campaign team of Indonesian presidential frontrunner Prabowo Subianto, shows the interface of a web application that allows supporters to upload photos to make AI-generated images of them with Subianto, in Jakarta, Indonesia, Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)
The European Union already requires social media platforms to cut the risk of spreading disinformation or “election manipulation.” It will mandate special labeling of AI deepfakes starting next year, too late for the EU’s parliamentary elections in June. Still, the rest of the world is a lot further behind.
The world’s biggest tech companies recently — and voluntarily — signed a pact to prevent AI tools from disrupting elections. For example, the company that owns Instagram and Facebook has said it will start labeling deepfakes that appear on its platforms.
But deepfakes are harder to rein in on apps like the Telegram chat service, which did not sign the voluntary pact and uses encrypted chats that can be difficult to monitor.
Some experts worry that efforts to rein in AI deepfakes could have unintended consequences.
An advertising banner with a slogan about AI is fixed at a building at the Davos Promenade, alongside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)
Well-meaning governments or companies might trample on the sometimes “very thin” line between political commentary and an “illegitimate attempt to smear a candidate,” said Tim Harper, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington.
Major generative AI services have rules to limit political disinformation. But experts say it remains too easy to outwit the platforms’ restrictions or use alternative services that don’t have the same safeguards.
And software isn’t the only threat. Candidates could try to deceive voters by claiming that real events portraying them in an unfavorable light were manufactured by AI.
“A world in which everything is suspect — and so everyone gets to choose what they believe — is also a world that’s really challenging for a flourishing democracy,” said Lisa Reppell, a researcher at the International Foundation for Electoral Systems in Arlington, Virginia.
Swenson reported from New York. Associated Press writers Julhas Alam in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Krutika Pathi in New Delhi, Huizhong Wu in Bangkok, Edna Tarigan in Jakarta, Indonesia, Dake Kang in Beijing, and Stephen McGrath in Bucharest, Romania, contributed to this report.
Here is the video link for the interview: https://www.bitchute.com/video/HYLSZeU3Hon7/
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
David Webb, a former hedge fund investor, has written a book called “The Great Taking,” as well as filmed a documentary by the same name. His book and film detail how the Federal Reserve influences financial markets, and how its money creation has outpaced economic growth of the U.S., which is a huge red flag indicating that the velocity of money is collapsing
Central bankers and other globalists have carefully planned the coordinated takedown of the financial system using highly sophisticated strategies, including the manipulation of derivative markets. Whatever securities you believe you may own, you’re not the actual owner of, and when the derivative markets collapse, everything can be taken from you
While Webb’s work raises serious concerns, there are other more pressing issues that need our attention. Priority No. 1 is ensuring we have control over our financial transactions. We need to help state legislators to protect financial transaction freedom
North Dakota has a sovereign state bank, and the Florida State Legislature is getting ready to introduce legislation for state banking in the state of Florida. All states need to do this, as it’s one of the primary ways to protect the financial freedom of all citizens
Priority No. 2 is building and securing food freedom, and No. 3 is transparency and education. We need to educate people about the severity of what’s coming, so that we can, en masse, begin to make different choices
The video above features repeat guest Catherine Austin Fitts, a finance expert, and founder and president of the Solari Report. She’s one of the wisest persons out there when it comes to understanding finances and how to protect your wealth in the face of this global wealth transfer.
We also discuss the work of David Webb,1 a former hedge fund investor and a good friend of Austin Fitts. He has written a book called “The Great Taking,” available for free as a PDF from thegreattaking.com, as well as a documentary by the same name, available on CHD.TV, Rumble and YouTube.
Webb’s book and film detail how the Federal Reserve influences financial markets, and how its money creation has outpaced economic growth of the U.S., which is a huge red flag indicating that the velocity of money (the rate at which money is circulating through the economy) is collapsing. In short, a major financial depression is at hand, and when it all falls apart, we will lose everything.
A Financial Coup Is Underway
Webb reveals how central bankers and other globalists have, for at least five decades or more, carefully planned the coordinated takedown of the financial system using highly sophisticated strategies, including the manipulation of derivative markets.
Whatever securities you believe you may own, you’re not the actual owner of, and when the derivative markets collapse, everything can be taken from you. At the end of it all, you truly will “own nothing,” as predicted/promised by the World Economic Forum (WEF).
But there’s more. In her annual wrap-up, Austin Fitts reviews what she calls “The Many Great Takings,” because Webb only describes one of them. Wealth is also being stolen from us in dozens of other ways, and we need to understand them all if we are to protect ourselves with any amount of success.
“My focus is hugely on remedies, not problems,” Austin Fitts says, “and when it comes to remedies, you want to make sure you sequence your remedies against the enemy’s various tactics. So, sequencing is very, very important when it comes to remedies.
The important thing to understand about the great taking is that the World Economic Forum has told you what they’re planning: It’s 2030 and you have no assets. So the question is, exactly how are they going to strip you of your assets?
What David is talking about is stripping you of your securities, but you need to worry about far more than just your securities. You need to worry about your bank, which he touches on and does a very good job of describing some of the history around banking. You have to worry about your real estate. You have to really worry about your precious metals and other currency alternatives.
You have to worry about your business and your local investments and then yes, you have to worry about your securities. David is focused on just securities, which is why we did this section called ‘The Great Taking’ that goes through everything.”
Top Three Priorities
While Webb’s work may raise serious concerns, there are other more pressing issues that need our attention. Priority No. 1, according to Austin Fitts, is ensuring we have control over our financial transactions. Her focus for 2024 is therefore to help state legislators in the U.S. to work with banks and citizens within its jurisdiction to protect financial transaction freedom.
“That’s where pushback is critical,” she says. “If they can get financial transaction control then they can take everything, and I mean, everything, including your children …
If you dive in and look at the terms and conditions that some of these payment gateways are asking for now … you’re giving them permission to go into your bank account and take everything. It’s frightening.
So, the No. 1 thing to remedy against is financial transaction control. If you go to Solari, we have something called a financial transaction freedom memo. Print it out and start looking at all the things you can do to protect yourself from somebody controlling your financial transactions.
If they get that, The Great Taking is on. They take everything — real estate, securities, everything. So first and foremost, don’t worry about your securities. Worry about your banking and your transactions.
The second Great Taking is … food and health. The push to control the food system is on because to control financial transactions, they also need to control food because, if you can get your food and energy outside the banking system, you can survive without their banking system. This is why we cannot allow a 100% digital financial system.
The third Great Taking I’m concerned about is the real estate, because we see an extraordinary move being done to take control of the land, the real estate, including farmland, which is very much related to the food.
There are all sorts of games that can be played with the banking system to default people on their mortgages, and of course, interest rates and inflation are part and parcel of that.”
As noted by Austin Fitts, the process of reducing the homeownership rate has been going on for decades. It’s related to monetary policy, because inflation has doubled the average payment on the median-price home in America over the last four or five years alone. So, the younger generation is being completely wiped out and cannot afford to buy homes.
It’s also related to another Great Taking, which is the fraudulent inducement of student loans. Most of the big banks are paying close to zero percent for their capital, while students with loans are paying 5% to 9%, and those with credit card debt are paying 17%. “It’s an extraordinary differential in the cost of capital that’s literally engineered into the system in a very unfair way,” she says.
A System to Rob Us of Our Security Assets
Austin Fitts goes on to review Webb’s background, and how he came to the discoveries he made. In summary, financial regulators have created a way, through the custodian system, of robbing 100% of the security assets as a senior creditor, most likely through a default of derivatives.
Austin Fitts is not overly concerned about this, though, because while Webb believes a legal pathway has been created through the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), Austin Fitts and her experts don’t think it’ll stick. “We are still looking for a UCC expert who can figure this out,” she says.
What Webb has proven, however, is that there has been an extraordinary effort by the financial regulators to assert control of ALL collateral. Austin Fitts believes this was done to keep the financial bubble going.
“The reason I’m not worried about a grab of the securities in the near future is because I think the way you grab assets is by getting financial transaction control to the banking system,” she says. “Once you have that, you can do everything. You can take 100% of the assets, including securities. So, I think financial transaction control is coming faster.
I think in terms of sequencing, a grab of all the securities is not near. What David would say is, if they get themselves in a corner, they have to do it. My feeling is they have so many ways out of a corner, it’s not necessary. What they’re going to do is what I’ve seen them doing, which is pushing for financial transaction control.
But here’s what’s great about David’s research. No one goes through the bother of doing what they’ve done if there’s integrity in the system. I think David has proven, yet again, that the financial system is lacking integrity and is engineered to benefit a few at the expense of the many.
The other thing I thought was very good about his book was, he describes the game in terms of insiders and outsiders to the banking system through the Great Depression — how your bank could fold; you lose your deposits, but you’re still liable for your mortgage.
And of course, that’s how you get people’s real estate. You abrogate your income obligations to them, but then you hold them accountable for their debts.”
There’s No Safe Harbor for Anyone
It’s telling that Webb started this journey because he was trying to figure out how to protect his own family’s wealth only to, in the end, realize there is no safe harbor, not even for a financial insider like himself. The system is completely rigged from every angle. The sober realization is that there’s no getting away from this Great Taking.
We must face it head on, and do the work necessary to change the system so that it protects everyone. Part of that work is to make our political representatives understand what is happening, and that it is in their own self-interest to protect financial freedom.
Many of them are extraordinarily wealthy, and they too stand to lose everything if they don’t take action. They’re not insulated from this Great Taking. Like Webb discovered, there’s no safe harbor for them either. Webb’s contention is that the situation is salvageable, but we do need some kind of reset.
Just not The Great Reset the globalists have planned. One possibility would be to implement a small tax on digital transactions, like a fraction of 1%. The revenues generated from that transactional fee could fund the government, doing away with income taxes, provided we don’t have to engage in international wars.
Top Three Financial Drains
According to Austin Fitts, the top three things that are draining our wealth are:
Tyranny
The use of environmentally damaging processes like industrial farming instead of regenerative farming, the hardware required for the control grid and the electromagnetic field radiation that goes with it
The control of innovation, which prevents cost savings
All three of these are alterable. We can eliminate these financial drains, but we can’t start there. First, we need to secure our financial transaction freedom, because everything basically hinges on that. If we lose that, we’ve already lost everything else.
Three Basic Action Items
Again, be sure to download Solari’s financial transaction freedom memo. It details the problems, and the solutions. “Do what you’re comfortable doing,” Austin Fitts says.
“One is using cash. And when you use cash, start talking with local businesses and find ways of interacting locally that will give you more local resilience. And of course, the big one is food, because I don’t know a way of getting food that is safe, other than knowing where it’s coming from and knowing the people who are producing it …
The third thing you can do is to bring transparency, and this is really important. If you go to Solari, we’ve put together a list of short videos on CBDCs and financial transaction freedom. The first one is the one-minute video of the head of the BIS basically saying we can make the rules centrally and enforce them centrally with CBDCs.
The second one is Neel Kashkari, head of the Minneapolis Fed, one of the 12 Fed banks, saying ‘I can see why the Chinese would want this because it gives you complete surveillance and control. But why would Americans ever let this happen?’ If it’s so bad that one of the Fed presidents is telling you you don’t want it, that’s very helpful.
Then we have Bo Li [deputy managing director of the] IMF talking about the programmability of money, so if they decide you can only eat bugs and no pizza, your money will only buy bugs. And then the last one is Richard Werner talking about a top central banker telling him that CBDCs, ultimately, will be a chip that they want to put in your hand.
We need to tell people what’s going on and help them understand how serious this is, because it’s hard for many to fathom that somebody would want that kind of complete control. With AI and software, you can deliver that kind of complete control.
With a very short video, one minute or less, people get it. And that’s the point at which you can turn to your state legislators and your state banking association and say, ‘OK, what are you guys going to do to make sure I don’t end up like the Tennessee truckers?’
What’s very interesting … the states have the power to assert complete sovereignty over the money and the cash flows within their area, and to protect them. Now, they haven’t done it. And one of the reasons they haven’t done it is the Treasury and the central banks have been very good at making it financially attractive to buy into the federal system.
[Eventually], it’s going to be more important to be sovereign and free than to get another $2 billion in education — an education that requires you to teach your kids how to be sex slaves.
So, one of the things you can do bring transparency, but start working with your bankers, with your State Bankers Association, your state legislators, and encourage them to take the steps. And if you look at the Financial Transaction Freedom memo, we list all the different things that a federal legislator can do.”
Why We Need Sovereign State Banks
North Dakota already has a sovereign state bank, and the Florida State Legislature is getting ready to introduce legislation for state banking in the state of Florida. Tennessee is looking at ways to create independent payment systems, and is in the process of starting a Bullion Depository and authorizing their treasurer to start buying gold and silver.
These are just some of the strategies that can, and need, to be implemented by all states. As noted by Austin Fitts, “The only way I can protect my individual sovereignty is if my state protects my financial sovereignty.” And states can do that by implementing sovereign state banks that are not tied to the central banking system.
“If you have a sovereign state bank, what that means is, your citizens are paying taxes into your accounts, and you have the ability, working with the state banks and credit unions and financial institutions, to keep the transactions going so that the Treasury or the central bank can’t lock you down or shut you down.
I mean, that is amazing. If you also have a bullion depository, then you’ve got gold and silver reserves and that makes it easier for other people in the state to have a depository they can trust, and that means they can start doing transactions with gold and silver, particularly if you take the sales tax off.
Tennessee has taken the sales tax off golden and silver. And there’s a big squabble now — several states have put in bills making gold and silver legal tender, but do it in a way where the Feds can’t charge capital gains, so that you can use gold and silver as currencies locally. It’s a great way to start a local currency.”
A Building Wealth Reset
In conclusion, what we need to do, first and foremost, is to regain and safeguard our control of our financial transactions. Next, we need what Austin Fitts refers to as a “building wealth reset,” a reset of the financial system that allows us to build both living equity (health) and financial equity.
And we can do that. While it may seem as though we’re on a speed train headed for a brick wall, and that we have no way to get off, that may simply be an illusion. We probably have far more choice than we think.
“During my litigation [against the government], I had many different attorneys, and they would surround me and say, ‘You have to do this, you have no choice,’” Austin Fitts says.
“And I would say ‘I refuse. I’m not going to do that.’ That’s a choice. And then, what would happen? Suddenly, an option would open up that wasn’t there before. In other words, my refusal to go down the pathway that I had no choice created a new choice.”
Remember that as you move forward. Refusing to be part of the system may seem impossible, but the very act of making the choice to refuse may be the very thing that opens up brand new possibilities and options. Certainly, there are paths to victory, beginning with getting state leadership to get onboard with sovereign state banking.
Mass mental illness is running amok across the world, and German scientist Dr. Michael Nehls offers some interesting insights as to why.Author of “The Indoctrinated Brain,” Dr. Nehls appeared with Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, on an episode of the “Health Ranger Report” to discuss the matter further.
In the following video, Dr. Nehls unpacks what he has learned over the past several decades in his studies on the human brain and how the globalist “elite” are exploiting it.
“I was seeing the attack on the human brain indirectly by the health policy of the last decades,” Dr. Nehls explained.
“But what we have observed in 2020 and even worse with the mRNA injection program in 2021 when it started, it became totally clear that this is a real major attack on the human mental immune system.”
Be sure to watch the full video below to see the entire interview:
(Related: One major way the globalists have taken control of people’s minds and bodies in recent years involves COVID “vaccines,” which are causing recipients to develop major personality changes – are COVID jabs genetically modifying human DNA, turning people into walking, talking GMOs?)
Humans no longer able to think due to attack on human mental immune system
While the attack on the human brain has been an ongoing operation for many years, it really ramped up with the onset of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) “pandemic.”
For the first time in recent history, people everywhere bought the lie that a scary “virus” was circulating that required them to stay at home in fear, cut off their friends and family members, and take chemical injection after chemical injection to stay “safe.”
COVID and the Operation Warp Speed “vaccine” campaign that accompanied it successfully disengaged most people’s brains, causing them to let down their guard and just believe whatever the “authorities” told them.
In order to survive as a species, humans must engage their mental immune system in a healthy and constructive way, which is many ways is no longer possible since humanity is under attack by an increasingly evil global governance system that disrespects human autonomy and strips people of the fruits of their labor.
It has become a situation where it no longer makes sense to even try, at least not to the degree that natural instinct would dictate, because doing so becomes an exercise in futility.
At the start of our lives, the human brain is filled with wonder and possibility about the future. The brain’s immune system coordinates with the rest of the body’s immune system to facilitate cooperation between the gut and brain.
That cooperative arrangement is under attack by all sorts of things, including not just COVID jabs and other childhood “vaccines” but also 5G and other related wireless technology, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the food supply, brain-damaging media programming, and rampant corruption both in the public and private sectors that keeps humanity enslaved in a matrix of braindead existence from which there is no apparent escape.
Add to the mix the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and the replacement of the human brain with computers and robots and the situation becomes even more dire. Are humans still relevant, so to speak, or have the globalists rendered all their peasants redundant and obsolete?
Dr. Nehls believes that there are solutions that have the ability to “unblock” neurogenesis in the brain, allowing people to once again utilize their full brain power. Have a watch above to learn more about his ideas.
You will also find the latest news about the mass brainwashing of the global population into forced acceptance of global totalitarianism at Propaganda.news.
