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The Chris Hedges Report
The Rise of the Thielverse and the Construction of the Surveillance State (w/ Whitney Webb) | The Chris Hedges Report
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Foreign.
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There were many, including some liberals, who mistakenly believed the Trump administration would dismantle the deep state. In fact, as the investigative reporter Whitney Webb has documented, Trump is closely allied with the most authoritarian figures in Silicon Valley, such as Peter Thiel, who envision a world where our habits, proclivities, opinions and movements are minutely recorded and tracked. These Trump allies do not intend to free us from the tyranny of intelligence agencies, militarized police, the largest prison system in the world, predatory corporations, or the end of mass surveillance. They will not restore the rule of law to hold the powerful and the wealthy accountable. Nor will they slash the bloated and unaccountable. Spending some $1 trillion by the Pentagon, they are rapidly purging the civil service as well as law enforcement and the military not to eradicate the deep state, but ensure that those in charge of state machinery are exclusively loyal to the whims and dictates of the Trump White House. What is being targeted is not the deep state, but the laws, resolutions, regulations, protocols and rules and the government civil servants who enforce them, which hinder absolute dictatorial control. Compromise, limited power, checks and balances and accountability are slated to be abolished. Those who believe that the government is designed to serve the common good rather than the dictates of a tiny cabal of billionaires will be forced out. The deep state will be reconstituted to serve the leadership cult. Laws and the rights enshrined in the Constitution will become irrelevant. It is a coup d' etat by inches, one that will be enforced in crude and brutal fashion by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency on the streets of our cities, empowered by Thiel's Palantir and the sophisticated forms of monitoring made possible by artificial intelligence and, and digital surveillance pioneered by Silicon Valley. Joining me to discuss our emergent Orwellian state is the investigative journalist and author of One Nation Under Blackmail, Whitney Webb. You can find her on our website, Unlimited Hangout. Whitney. Let's go back to the beginning, Poindexter. Iran Contra, which I covered actually, when I was in Nicaragua, because that's really the origin of where we are today.
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Yeah, it's definitely, I would argue, one of the best starting points. And also thanks so much for having me on, Chris. So, John Poindexter, as of course you know, was one of the national security advisors to Reagan and was the highest ranking member of his administration that was indicted as part of Iran Contra, but he is also remembered as the, quote, unquote, godfather of modern surveillance. And this is in part because of his efforts in the immediate post 911 era, pioneering the off an office within DARPA that housed a program called Total Information Awareness. So right after the Reagan administration, Poindexter was sort of in various roles throughout these tech companies that were sort of a prototype to what Palantir and Total Information Awareness would later do, like Saffron Technology, Syntech technologies that were defense contractors and trying to basically create use sort of, you know, predictive analytics to determine what terrorists would do Next, all before 911 even happened. And of course there was a renewed demand for that type of technology and these sort of innovative solutions in the immediate post 911 era. And when this information, you know, was reported on Total Information Awareness, there was a huge outcry throughout, you know, us, US mainstream media. A lot of organizations, including the ACLU and organizations like that rightly noted that it would eliminate the constitutional right to privacy and create this very disturbing era of mass surveillance by, you know, I think one of the mainstream media reports on it said that it would fight terrorism by terrifying US citizens basically and making everyone a suspect under this type of, this paradigm he was seeking to usher in. And so it was eventually under pressure. It was I think first announced in February 2003. And by May they attempted to change the name to Terrorism Information Awareness. Trying to move away from the idea that it would be total, it would surveil absolutely everyone through a name change. But obviously it didn't change how the program actually worked. It would still be focused on everyday Americans, you know, a total dragnet really. And in that same month where that name change happened, Peter Thiel incorporated Palantir. And as Palantir was developing as a company, they, you, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, the Palantir co founders, reached out to Poindexter directly through Richard Pearl, who's a well known neoconservative figure and was also one of the architects of the Iraq war at the Bush era Pentagon. And you know, basically they hatched this plan to private it to privatize this program, rightly calculating that if they turned it into a entirely private sector enterprise, the outrage would, you know, essentially dissipate, which it remarkably did because, you know, originally it was a public private partnership housed within darpa. And then by making it this private sector enterprise, you know, a lot of the concerns about it disappeared. And, and this is arguably because by moving into the private sector, they were able to accomplish a lot more than they, than they could have by being affiliated directly with the public sector, even though they contract with the public sector. And so Palantir funding wise was set up with money from Peter Thiel himself and that the algorithm for it had originally been developed at PayPal. And the other funding source was the CIA's in Q Tel. And one of the figures that helped create, that helped made that funding decision was the CIA's Chief Information Officer at the time named Alan Wade. And Alan Wade had been one of the top allies of the total information awareness with Poindexter, you know, in the immediate post 911 era. And so the CIA was the, was Palantir's exclusive company or sorry, exclusive client for I believe the first six years of its existence as a company. And its, its engineers went to Langley, you know, CIA headquarters in Virginia every two weeks for several years as well, where the CIA was developing their algorithm with them, you know, in a very direct partnership. And Alex Karp has even said that the CIA was always the intended clients of Palantir. So I guess I'll, I'll pause there and I'm happy to go in other.
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Any other direction, explain what it does, what the goal, what Poindexter goal was and what they were able to establish, I mean, the mechanics of it.
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So Poindexter's goal was extremely broad. I mean, it really covered, I mean, it's absolutely staggering when you think about it. So the way it was initially sold to the public was this is a way to stop terrorism attacks before they happen by collating so much data from all different sources and then using it in some sort of analytic or AI to determine, you know, if certain data points are flagging that a terrorist attack will take place here, here or there. But there's various different aspects of this program that didn't really get enough coverage at the time. So one is that they attempted to use free market forces to determine if a terrorism attack would happen before it happened. They created basically what's referred to as a terrorism future market. It was really like a forerunner to Poly market and some of these predictive markets where people bet on things online. It was basically that, but about whether a terrorist attack will happen in the Middle east or if there will be turmoil in the Middle east, if someone like Yasser Arafat would be overthrown. You know, these were the kinds of things they were going to have these unnamed investors bet on. Another one was focused entirely on health under this program called bio surveillance, which actually a lot of it, Palantir helped launch with HHS during the COVID era. Things like analyzing American wastewater to determine if there is going to be an outbreak of the disease before it happens with again with an algorithm or basically, you know, surveilling Americans health data and to determine if there will be a pandemic before it happens or if there will be a bioterror attack. Because remember this was also in the aftermath of the, of the anthrax attacks. And so a lot of that, particularly on the health front has absolutely come under the portfolio of Palantir in the years since. They now control basically all of the health data at HHS and also the CDC under the HHS and also the NHS in Britain as well and have continued to expand on that front. But Palantir also works extensively now in the private sector as well. They're a major AI engine for Wall street banks for example. And they have different, you know, programs that are sold to different entities. But ultimately they are a massive contractor to essentially every U.S. intelligence agency. And that includes DHS and ICE, which a lot of the reporting, critical reporting on Palantir focuses on their contracts with ICE specifically. But all of that is intended to also be used against people that are not illegal immigrants. It's meant to be an entire dragnet of basically pre crime. And Palantir in, in concordance with Poindexter's ambitions has been a major piloter of pre crime technology in the United States. I think they began doing that in New Orleans initially, but it was, they call it predictive policing is the term that, that they use. But a lot of other companies have attempted to also get in on this. The one of the most notorious being pred, that was a partnership I believe with UCLA and LAPD or something to that effect. And they're notoriously inaccurate and they're almost always piloted in low income minority neighborhoods and basically are a way, I mean in essence what happens because the accuracy rate is so low is that you're creating this pipeline of people basically being sent to prison or you know, being caught up in crimes that are, that are very petty. But I mean you're just having, sending police to all these areas in a relatively discriminatory way. I mean the PRED poll is really outrageous because it's like accuracy was found to be like insanely low and they didn't phase it out despite the extreme inaccuracy. I mean it was worse than a coin toss essentially and departments around the country continued to use it. And then in some of these areas where Palantir ended up leaving. Another Peter Thiel backed entity called Carbine also has a predictive policing component but has been sort of taking over 9911 emergency call systems, you know, throughout the United States, which is, you know, generally at the county level. But this is a company that, that wasn't just found, you know, funded by Peter Thiel. It was funded by Jeffrey Epstein and was led for a significant amount of time by Ehud Barak, you know, the former Israeli Prime Minister, as, as well, and has sort of expanded outwards. So yeah, a lot of Poindexter's ambitions, unfortunately have been becoming true at a really rapid pace. And part of this was done under the, the guise of, you know, combating the COVID 19 situation with, with data that we needed data to solve those problems.
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Are you in essence just creating profiles? I mean, these are just creating profiles for every American citizen?
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Well, ultimately, I mean, that's been acknowledged now. I think there was a report on that a few months ago. The Trump administration was explicitly using Palantir to make databases on every American. But that has been done in a way that has been more covert through something called the main core database. That was again, something that goes back to Iran Contra and persists into the present. But it, this is sort of a way to make it a more overt program that can be used openly by law enforcement. Arguably. And I would say if you look back to how the Trump administration behaved around the end of 2019, there were a spate of mass shootings and basically their response to those was to create the legal infrastructure for pre crime. So after the El Paso Walmart shooting and some of these shootings that happened during that time, William Barr, then Attorney General, created this program at the DOJ called deep that was basically created the legal infrastructure for pre crime. And you had Trump come out and say that the way to combat these shootings was to have social media develop algorithms that flag posts to predict shooters before they can act, target some of these anonymous online message boards. And he was also considering this program that where they were, he was being pitched, creating a DARPA for Health Harpa, which was actually created under Biden under the name ARPA H. They just moved the H to the back. And the pilot program for that that was being pitched during the Trump era was called Safe Homes, it's an acronym. And basically that was about using AI to scans American social media posts in mass to determine what they called early warning signs of neuropsychiatric violence. And that people that were flagged by that algorithm could then be sent to, you know, a court ordered physician or put under house arrest or all sorts of possibilities were fielded. And it ultimately wasn't adopted by Trump. But These are the types of things that they were considering. And so now, you know, given the current climate, how extremely entangled Palantir has become with the current administration expanding even into the IRS and Treasury and mortgages, in addition to just the national security components and health components. It is, it is rather unsettling. But a lot of, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of this profiling of Americans has been going on for a long time under the guise of, you know, what were developed in, by the Iran Contra crowd covertly, the continuity of government protocols in this effort by parts of the quote unquote deep state or the national security state to basically profile people they deemed unf friendly for whatever reason. People that could be, you know, potentially incarcerated in a time of political upheaval, they said. But the Reagan administration's examples of political upheaval in these cases were. One example given was widespread mass protests that were non violent against US military intervention in Latin America. Like in Nicaragua for example, was something that could, you know, have, have them use these, these profiles they had developed on Americans then back in the 1980s and incarcerate them at a time deemed, you know, convenient or necessary by the, by the Reagan administration. And they claimed then at the 1980s to be able to locate these so called dissidents almost immediately based on the data they had compiled on them at that point. So imagine what it's become, you know, over the past 25 years when we've seen a lot of these extreme surveillance capabilities and also the development of the associated technology just take off in the aftermath of 9 11, 2001.
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Let me ask about the, what you call the PayPal mafia. Palmer Lucky who He, he was a teal fellow, founded Oracle 2012 before it was purchased by Meta Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, JD Vance, Elon Musk. Talk about that little cabal.
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Yeah, well they are quite the cabal. So first of all, PayPal mafia. It's important to point out what PayPal is. So PayPal is most widely known, right to have been a project of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. But it was originally a combination of Peter Thiel's confinity and Elon Musk x.com and when Peter Thiel was setting up this proto PayPal, he and his co founders openly, they've admitted this, consulted with every three letter agency in the US government that would talk to them about developing their product before they launched it and then they team up with Elon Musk, Musk and X and create, you know, this some, I mean it basically dollarized the Internet, made the dollar the de facto currency of the Internet and had a very huge reverberations for the early fintech space. But of course, as I just said, they did this hand in hand with the US Government. And then, you know, it's really no surprise that you see, you know, when it sold, when they sell PayPal to Pierre Omidyar of ebay, you know, Peter Thiel moves into the, you know, moves into this effort to privatize total information awareness. The algorithm for Palantir Having started as PayPal's anti fraud algorithm initially and then being developed to become what it is today. And so since then, you have a whole network of people that have either been proteges of these figures or worked at one point for PayPal. For example, the current AI and crypto czar at the White House, David Sachs, a former top executive at PayPal with teal and all of these other people. And of course, JD Vance, the current vice president, is intimately connected to Peter Thiel. His whole career in VC is entirely responsible. You know, Peter Thiel's entirely responsible for that. And also Thiel was the main donor to a lot of his political campaigns. And he would not be the vice president if it wasn't for Peter Thiel. He wouldn't even be a politician, probably. So Thiel's influence is incredibly significant. It was also arguably significant during the first Trump administration. But, you know, I think now it's quite clear that this is, you know, the PayPal mafia's moment you've had. These particular figures have an extremely significant influence on US government policy, you know, since January, including the extreme distribution of AI throughout the US government. And this includes not just well known figures of the PayPal mafia, but people, you know, a lot of former employees for Palantir have been placed throughout, you know, maybe positions throughout the US Government that you don't think a lot about, or most people don't think a lot about, you know, chief information officers of various departments and things like that. You know, there's a considerable, very considerable amount of influence. And what I find particularly troubling about this is that a lot of these PayPal mafia figures, Thiel, Musk and Vance, among others, are extremely close to or acolytes really of the philosophy advocated by a fellow named Curtis Yarvin, who's in political philosophy, is essentially that, you know, the, the way to solve the problems of our current, current system and current bureaucracy is to basically completely privatize the state and install a CEO in place of the president who would rule Essentially as a dictator, which is completely bonkers. And it's amazing that people, you know, have allowed people like Peter Thiel or even Yarvin himself to masquerade as so called libertarians when they're very in favor of the authoritarian abilities of the state. They just want to sufficiently privatize it before allowing that authoritarianism to, to continue and expand. And you can also see how a lot of these people are also, you know, war profiteers. A Palantir of course not only is this tool of mass surveillance, it's a tool of mass murder used by the US army and also by the IDF to decide who lives and who dies in Gaza. And a lot of these other people that have been Teal proteges, for example like Palmer Lucky in and Anduril, which he co, which Lucky co founded with Trey Stevens who's also affiliated with the aforementioned Epstein, funded carbine 91 1. You know, Anderil is ushering in this era of autonomous warfare and bankrolled of course by Peter Thiel. And they're also developing the so called smart wall on the US Mexico border. And really, you know, these people are developing very Orwellian disturbing systems with not just domestic implications but also very significant implications to how the US military and other militaries operate abroad. And it's extremely disturbing to say the very least. And a lot of their branding is, you know, we're America first and so we should replace the old, you know, defense contractor giants like Lockheed Martin for example, or General Dynamics and these and these entities and framing that as a good thing. This is how we're going to defeat the deep state, right? We're going to remove these. It's correct that they're corrupt and, and terrible companies that have enabled terrible things. But it's not like Anduril won't enable the same sort of thing. It'll just enable it more efficiently and at greater scale and with less humans involved. And is that necess better? I don't really think so. And when you consider too that you have, you know, the current Secretary of War since it's been recently renamed, and Pete Hegseth coming out and basically saying the massacre of Wounded Knee, the soldiers that did that should have their, you know, medals restored and all of this, you know, it's basically trying to be anti woke by saying, you know, I'm conflating American culture with war crimes at the same time that we're developing all of this autonomous technology that allows, that would allow these people to conduct more war crimes than ever before. So you Know, under this guise of we're making the government more efficient, what aspects of the government are these people in the PayPal mafia actually making more efficient? Well, one of them is mass murder. And unfortunately you don't hear enough about this. And presumably a lot of people that wanted the destruction of the so called deep state under Trump didn't want these things to expand and continue. But they absolutely are.
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Talk a little bit about, you mentioned privatizations. Let's talk about SpaceX cryptocurrency and Musk's early involvement with Doge in the administration, what they were doing, what they're doing and explain for people who don't understand the smart wall, what the smart wall is, is.
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So I'll start with that. So the. Because you asked a couple different things there. So basically the goal of the SmartWall there is it's not a physical wall. It's meant to be basically an invisible wall that uses a combination of surveillance and drone technology to basically intercept anyone crossing the border in a non authorized way. So that presumably includes both people crossing from Mexico into the US and people crossing from the US to Mexico. And again, it's framed in terms of efficiency and all of that. You don't have to have necessarily border agents there. You can have drones that are currently not lethal, but could be made lethal at any point. And that is basically what they envision as the future of the, of the wall. And obviously a lot of Trump supporters I think originally had envisioned a physical wall and not this, you know, combo of, you know, non lethal, potentially in the future lethal drone technology and mass surve. But also, as I, as you may be aware, the US government defines the border as going much more inland than a lot of people would imagine. I forget exactly how long it is, but a significant amount of the country actually lives in what is considered a border zone that have sometimes in the past been referred to as constitution free zones, where they're allowed to basically extend this type of technology deep into the US domestically as well as presumably into Mexico to some extent as well. Well, especially now that the military and intelligence agencies say they have to go be more active in Mexico to presumably fight Mexican drug cartels and things of that nature. So they'll certainly be taking liberties there as well. So I'm not sure exactly what you'd like to talk about as it relates to SpaceX, but it is worth pointing out that, you know, they're a massive military contractor specifically for Space Force, created under the first Trump administration. They really are the main contractor actor for Space Force and also, you know, they have, they are directly affiliated with Starlink, the satellite Internet company that also arguably has some kind of COVID uses. With Elon Musk, for example, saying he was going to help sneak starlinks into Iran, for example. I wonder who that would benefit. And also, you know, it's used by Ukraine and the Ukrainian military. And then them coming back saying we didn't know they would use it for offensive purposes. I I think that was them sort of trying to cover their tracks afterwards because it's obviously affiliated with a major U. S. Military contractor. So, I mean, can't be that surprising. And also what's important in that context as well is that, you know, he's a major military contractor that wants the U. S. Government to go in a particular direction, particularly a highly automated future. And through the department of government deficiency, government efficiency doge, a lot was made to facilitate that by laying off a lot of government workers and in their place putting, you know, basically replacing them with AI algorithms. And those algorithms are of course patented and controlled by Silicon Valley companies. In the vast majority of major Silicon Valley companies double as either intelligence or military contractors or both, or have for a very long time. And a lot of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley arguably started because of national security involvement. One that's often overlooked a lot is Oracle, Larry Ellison's Oracle. And Larry Ellison, before creating Oracle, worked on project Oracle at the CIA and then created Oracle, the company which then took on the CIA as one of its earliest main clients. Similar in a way to what happened with Palantir, as I noted a moment ago. And now, you know, Larry Ellison is becoming, you know, basically taking over the. A large swath of American media now. So you're seeing a lot of these silicon billionaires that contract for the military are also becoming major owners of mass media. So you see that with Ellison, for example, and it's also true with Elon Musk, you know, after his purchase of Twitter and his ambition to basically turn what is now X, formerly Twitter, into the everything app with a major financial component. So as I noted earlier, this effort, there have been these efforts going around previously considered by the Trump administration to have AI algorithms go over social media posts and flag people, but they also are pushing to have you tie your finances to those same apps. And presumably X will also be using some form of cryptocurrency, most likely a stable coin, which has been the major focus of the Trump administration. Being a major pro crypto administration, a lot of people thought they would be more pro bit bitcoin than anything else. That's how they sort of touted themselves on the campaign trail. But they've been overtly, most overtly supportive of stable coins and stablecoin issuers, of course, buy lots of Treasuries and serve, help service the US debt. So it's a way for them to continue to spend more than they are bringing in and to basically service that debt so they can, you know, obviously I would say increase the Pentagon budget, which is the budget that in the national security budget in general, DHS and these things that continue to grow and grow and grow and grow at the expense of other departments that actually, you know, benefit the American people significantly more.
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Can you talk about Oracle's relationship with AI?
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So I'm not an expert on what Oracle does specifically, as as far as I'm aware, they mostly focus on database management. But I do know that they've had significant influence over the Trump administration previously as well. So Safra Katz is a major top executive at Oracle in addition to Larry Ellison, and she, along with Shel Shell and Adelson, coordinated the firing of HR McMaster, who was previously a Trump National Security Advisor and had, I believe, John Bolton put in his place. So Oracle has been sort of very influential, particularly on the Trump administration behind the scenes before this administration. But now we're sort of see Larry Ellison come out more into himself. But my understanding is that they contract widely throughout the national security community and beyond, and that a lot of it is, you know, data management and digital infrastructure. But I'm not exactly sure on the specifics there. Sorry about that.
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I want to ask you about Israel because there are many tentacles, you know, I guess, running each way between military, the 8200 unit, and Silicon Valley there. It's an incestuous relationship which you've written about.
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Yeah, so there's a couple different things here. So I would say that a major pillar, not just of Netanyahu, but really going back TO the early 90s in Israel has been to empower their venture capital ecosystem. And it began with state backing really significantly in the early 90s. But Netanyahu, throughout his lengthy time as Prime Minister, has made that a major priority. And back in 2012, it actually became Israeli policy to have basically some of these startups that are incubated by Veterans of Unit 8200 and some of these other Israeli intelligence agencies that involve technology to a significant degree to have them conduct operations that were previously done in house by Mossad or unit 8200. So basically to use them as fronts is Essentially what the policy admitted policy began. And in the Israeli media report that documents this, they note that a firm like Black Cube for example, which has been called a privatized Mossad, was one of the companies that was developed under this policy. But presumably there's a lot of other companies that also operate this way. And, and it's important to note that in the same period of time you had a neoconservative and Zionist mega donor to the gop, Paul Singer, team up with people from Netanyahu's office to develop something called Startup Nation Central, which was framed as a way to prevent the United States from ever meaningful, meaningfully adopting the Boycott Divest Sanctions movement or bds by basically marketing Israeli startups, particularly in technology, to American companies and also to the U.S. government. And of course the U.S. government contracts with significant unit to 8200 companies. For example, the NSA in the mid 2000s had an Israeli unit 8200 link company develop its backdoors into popular software programs and Carba 911 that I brought up earlier, also unit 8200 created and now controlling a litany of nine hundred and eleven emergency call centers throughout the U.S. there's a lot of companies that have, that have popped up to do so. And also you've seen, you know, a lot of these Silicon Valley giants, Google, Microsoft, intel, recruit heavily from unit 8200 and also open, you know, offices and in Israel though of course some of those in the case of Microsoft, significantly precede this 2012 point. But basically, you know, the, the goal was to prevent the US from ever adopt, you know, boycott, allowing boycotts of Israel at any meaningful level by integrating companies at the same time that Netanyahu made it a deliberate policy to use a lot of these companies as fronts for either the Israeli military or for Israeli intelligence. So unfortunately, in addition to that we also have, you know, a significant overlap of some of these Silicon Valley billionaires and the IDF rather overtly so. Larry Ellison, who I brought up a moment ago as I believe, if not the leading donor, one of the most major private donors to the IDF and is also, as we noted a moment ago, a major contractor to the U. S National security state and is, you know, building a quite, quite a massive, you know, U. S domestic media empire and I believe he's going to be one of the figures involved in the takeover of Tick Tock that was just signed off on by uh, by Trump not that long ago.
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And he's just taken cbs.
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Yeah, and I think Paramount and I think a Few others are, are. I think CNN is about to be acquired by them as well, so we'll see. But it's definitely a rapid consolidation.
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I want you to speculate what this world is going to look like. It is the fusion of corporate and governmental power. In some ways, of course, these corporations will have even more power than government institutions. We just had the presidential memo that came out a couple days ago which essentially criminalizes, it's quite an amazing memo. The, criminalizes people who criticize capitalism, support gender equality, or really anyone who's anti.
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Fascist in any capacity.
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Yeah. And of course all of these tools will be employed against these people who are being targeted. What kind of a world will it create? Will it kind of look like China's totalitarian capitalism or will it be different?
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You know, I think it's really hard to know because of course the future is unwritten and a lot of it depends on us. And there's an unprecedented effort, of course, to propagandize the American people, to have us willingly walk in and support and consent to these systems being installed, because a lot of people forget. But the, the ban on propaganda being used domestically against Americans was lifted under the Obama administration. And now with all of this extreme media consolidation by the specific cabal of billionaires and oligarchs, the, the propaganda is, is already bad, I would argue, but is going to get even worse to get people to consent to these systems specifically. And I think a lot of what we're going to see is going to be sort of the, a repeated trope of what we saw on the war on terror. We have to give up all of our, all of these new freedoms or all of these freedoms and things like that because we have to go after Al Qaeda and get them at all costs. But now, you know, 20 plus years later, you have, you know, the head of Al Qaeda in Syria being given a diplomat, you know, a, a. I don't even know what to call it. It's so ridiculous. Like a red carpet welcome to shake hands with David Petraeus and all of this. So we lost all of our freedoms, but now Al Qaeda is just, you know, let's, let's shake hands and, and let them come to the UN While we don't let anyone from Palestine come. I mean, it's totally insane. So I, I think it's quite possible that given that we're seeing this effort to gin up a war on domestic terrorism yet again, we're going to be given another invisible enemy and told that we need to give up all of these remaining freedoms and civil liberties to go after the domestic terrorists. And that it's going to be, you know, unfortunately, a lot of the, the depravity that we witnessed during the war on terror, but directed domestically, hence the name domestic terrorism. And I think you can argue that was always the plan post 9 11. A lot of the stuff was focused domestically before 9 11. There were EFF to pass. DHS is the national Homeland Security Agency. It stalled in Congress, of course, after 9 11, no longer stalled. And so DHS was created in a lot of these, you know, security agencies. And the expansion of the national security state in general has also, you know, had a lot of tentacles domestically. And I think Americans have been naive that a lot of the evil that that national security security state has done abroad would never be used them. And I think that, you know, we need to be very aware of what is going on here and that the deep state, if you, whatever you want to call it, is expanding and it's expanding in the hands of private oligarchs that have a very dangerous political vision that is rarely talked about. And you know, a lot of people on the right, for example, during the COVID era were up in arms about the World Economic Forum and the public private partnership, stakeholder capitalist model. And, and you know, of the ideas promoted by, you know, it's, it's former chairman Klaus Schwab and the fourth Industrial Revolution and transhumanism, but somehow are lining up behind these figures like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, who are also overtly transhumanist and have, you know, back someone like Curtis Yarvin who has a very similar political vision in many ways to Klaus Schwab. And somehow it's bad when one group does it, but not bad when the other. I mean, the other group backs it. And it's, it's just, you know, change a couple terms around and, you know, try and make it edgy. But ultimately at the same day, it's very. It's essentially fascism. And people. But I mean, they obviously want to market it under different names to get people to consent to it, which I think is, you know, efforts are being done to do that now under the guise of fighting the corruption in the national security state. But unfortunately, you know, this has always been a cancer on American society that has been distinctly bipartisan. And I think a lot of what's going to be done here is it's going to be, you know, if we allow it, you know, political opposition could be labeled terrorism, quote, unquote. And to think that this wouldn't come back on people on the right as well, I think is naive. You know, the, the, the definition, the definition of domestic terrorist under the Biden administration concluded people that were outraged by pursu perceived government overreach, for example, which could easily include people on the right as well. I mean, a lot of the things in the definitions of these things are incredibly vague and just meant, you know, to sort of be a catch all for people who don't agree with the government for whatever reason and who won't just put their head down and be obedient when, when prodded to do so. So, you know, I think there's a potentially dark future, but there's still time for awareness about these agendas and for people to develop parallel systems to, to, to escape this. And I think it's very important too that people start really seriously considering how to wean themselves off of these Silicon Valley giants that are building these systems and contracting with these military and intelligence agencies. You know, getting off of Microsoft or Google products. I mean, there, there's still time to do all of that. You can look up online different guides to use different operating systems, systems, whether it's on your computer or your phone, or use alternatives to, to Google or any of these other things to, because I mean, ultimately, you know, if they, they may try and move to make it illegal to boycott Israel, but we can boycott the other enablers, enablers of their, of the system that are based in the United States. And you know, maybe it's inconvenient at the time to change these things, but I think it's much more inconvenient to, you know, just walk into this world that they're trying to usher us into without offering any sort of meaningful pushback. And you know, if they're going to try and censor speech or criminalize speech, you know, there's other things we can do to stop this from happening.
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B
Great. Thank you, Whitney. And I want to thank Diego, Victor, Sophia, Thomas and Max who produced the show. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.