For many, there are good guys and bad guys dotted across Big Tech, Big Banking and the “controligarchy”.
The bad guys, we know well. The names Soros, Zuckerberg, Gates, Schwab, Bezos, Fink, Dimon and friends are familiar to all.
One of the supposed good guys is Elon Musk, an apparent freedom fighter who has liberated Twitter. This is despite the richest man in the world getting most of his wealth and influence off the back of protection from government, climate zeal and outer-space fantasies. Tesla man. Be careful who you trust.
One suspects that the new look Twitter (X) is a limited hangout. The whole thing might well have been a charade of little meaning and import, despite the ostentatious displays of pro-freedom machismo.
The other man touted as a counter-weight to the Silicon Valley progressive set is Peter Thiel. The “libertarian”. The (gay) Republican. The Trump-adjacent man. A darling of establishment conservatism. The libertarian whose company, Palantir, provides surveillance capability to the Central Intelligence Agency. Oops. Not such a libertarian, then. And who would trust a libertarian, anyway? They were massively MIA during the Covid mayhem.
Readers will know that the surveillance state is one of the biggest threats to our liberal-democratic future. Here is Thiel enabling it, while simultaneously turning up as a star turn at Republican and related think-tank events. If it looks like establishment, and sounds like establishment, and quacks like establishment, well, you know the answer.
A clue to Thiel’s positioning and a clue to the rise of the global Tech elite lies in Thiel’s 2014 book, From Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. For some, an innovator/entrepreneur/startup bible. But one of Thiel’s chief insights in the book is that every business owner wants to create a monopoly. That defines success. Whatever anyone says about competition being the core of capitalism, and the customer always being right, and the rest of the neo-liberal hymn sheet, it comes back to this. Those who drive capitalism want to rig the system, and seek actively to do it. On a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis. By whatever means, including using the dreaded “big government” to achieve their ends.
Thiel himself has done it, over and again. Many refer to the “Paypal mafia”, which includes, not uncoincidentally, Musk. Paypal was Thiel’s first massive venture. Another successful monopoly.
If this is what elite entrepreneurs want in business, should we be surprised that, when they have gotten their mits on the global levers of policy power, these same oligarchs will in this new domain of theirs be also trying to establish a monopoly? By whatever means possible. We should not. The current game plan is to shut down the internet 1.0 and to replace it with their own version. To control the narrative. Shut down the opposition. To kill privacy. Specifically, to kill encryption online. To use the internet as a controlled plaything. To create massive new income streams from the financialisation of the climate (for heaven’s sake).
Those truth-tellers with global financial expertise and regular deep-diving activities are priceless at this time. One is Whitney Webb, an American investigative researcher and podcaster. She will be familiar to regular rabbit-holers, as would be Catherine Austin-Fitts. For others, she may be unfamiliar.
In a compelling recent podcast interview, Whitney Webb has laid out in graphic detail the dark situation we face. She names names. She takes no prisoners. She loathes the elites. She has her own very compelling counter-narrative.
One of Webb’s themes is the coming of AI. Well, it is already here. In Webb’s analysis, AI is already being used by tech companies to gather even more data on us all and to convert that data into opportunities for control. Many are familiar with the tools of the Chinese Communist Party and its social media arm, WeChat, and their uses in service of social control. AI will only turbo-charge their efforts, and those of the West’s salivating China-imitators. Astonishingly, Webb predicts that in the next couple of years, AI will be producing over 90 per cent of online content. That is producing content, not merely processing and responding to the content of human beings. Many of the nutters who run Big Tech are advocates of transhumanism. Webb calls them “data barons”, and they rule the world. As she says, Silicon Valley owns AI. She also says:
The worst people in the world own AI.
The internet, like democracy and everything else, depends on its control by good actors. We have not lucked out here, alas.
Webb draws our attention to a recent (2022) book by the late Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt (of Google fame) and another guy, called The Age of AI. Kissinger, a dedicated new world order man, had anointed Schmidt as his “successor”. Henry’s heir.
This portends a neo-feudal order run by Wall Street grifters. A “Thielverse”. Whose track record of stealing from the underclass is beyond debate. That the conservative movement in all of its current incarnations seems to be unaware of these threats to our lives and freedom is cause for deep unease.
Whitney Webb mentioned in passing a figure from the deep dark past of American history, Albert Pike, a freemason of yore, who once said that “if you want a saviour, we can supply one”.
Those on the establishment right love saviours. One was Ronald Reagan. That a lever-puller like Pike could come up with this limited hangout strategy is instructive. And disturbing. The punters who suffer grievously from the socialist endeavours of the Obamas and the Bidens often yearn for redemption via push-backers with political appeal. They always disappoint. They are not playing the main game, whatever their intent. At best, our apparent political saviours will slightly slow the rush to the cliff. At worst, they will give us a false sense of security and distract us from what the puppeteers are doing, day after day, to ensure our perdition.
The masters of the universe, those who run creepy companies like Palantir, with their hands now firmly on the levers of global public power, will charge on, with every weapon they can find – and there are plenty that many of us haven’t even heard of – towards their ultimate goals. These are not new. Power. Control. Profit. Maintenance of all three.
And all with the quiet approval of those old leftists who, once upon a time, used to care about the common people. Many of them are in on the scam.
Whitney Webb has alerted us to the next, coming, inevitable “crisis”. It will be here before we know it. World war, financial meltdown, disease X, or whatever. When it comes, what will the punters do? Here, she echoes Ivor Cummins, who has suggested a very long-term plan to create “global” crises that require “global” solutions. The World Health Organisation is leading us all towards a Pandemic Treaty. The governments of the world are enacting safety online legislation, in lockstep. And nudging us towards digital ID. And “brain chips”! They say it, and they mean it.
We, the cognitively diminished people, the victims of what Webb calls “mental co-option”, don’t even know we are in a fight for our survival. The elites like that. That is their ultimate weapon.
Paul Collits
4 March 2024
So the world is going to hell in a handcart. Not for the first time. On past performance Australia will be dragged along with it if our fearless leaders and semi comatose population have anything to do with it.
Instead of whining about the never ending procession of evil actors across the world stage maybe we would do well to concentrate on improving our own responses to problems, some of our own making.
Improving self sufficiency in vital matters like defense and energy would be a start.
We don't have to be in the procession to hell.
‘One of the supposed good guys is Elon Musk, an apparent freedom fighter.’ He seems too good to be true. Amr