Transcription
I think the elites believe in karmic law, and I think they play a lot of games on people to get people to voluntarily do things they otherwise wouldn't do. And I think that's what a lot of the manipulations on me in media and in society are kind of ultimately about >> [clears throat] >> at the end of the day. And so if there's a particular policy, for example, digital ID or things like that that you're against, you have to ultimately commit to not participate in them, even if efforts are made to manipulate you into consenting to that.
That is the question most people never stop to ask. When billionaires feud online, when Silicon Valley splits into team Musk and team Gates, when every crisis gets packaged into a culture war, are we watching a real struggle for power? Or are we watching a show designed to keep ordinary people emotionally invested in battles they were never meant to win?
Well, that's just my opinion. And I think, you know, maybe there are squabbles. I think there absolutely are some squabbles that are genuine. But I think ultimately it comes to squabbles over the spoils and not over the agenda. Who gets what, you know, who gets power over this versus that, but not really about the the broader agenda.
That line is the whole thesis. The fight may be real at the level of who gets what, but not at the level of where the system is going. And once you see that distinction, the next question becomes much darker. If the agenda is shared, how do elites get the public to go along with it?
The elites at the top are always fighting, and I always wonder, is this an illusion? Like, are they actually all on the same team? Behind closed doors, is Bill Gates shaking hands with Elon Musk, and they're saying, "Okay, let's just pretend to have this feud, so you know, you have people in the streets that are shouting, 'I'm on team Elon Musk,' and somebody else is like, 'No, I'm pro Bill Gates,' and I'm wondering, I don't know if either of these guys are for both of you, but you're arguing for them. You know, the ordinary people are are on these teams. And I'm wondering is this division an illusion?
Yeah, I think ultimately a lot of times it is cuz again, I don't think these Silicon Valley oligarchs really have as much power as people, you know, give them credit for. As I mentioned, why would someone like Jeffrey Epstein be so influential in the lives of so many of them? I mean, I would argue a lot of them are pretty effectively controlled by higher powers and that, you know, I think once you get that level of money and influence becomes dependent on a lot of things considering that essentially the power structure in the world as I laid out earlier is sort of, you know, organized crime and intelligence sort of coming together. You have to play ball with those people if you want to become the richest billionaire in the world.
Whitney's first big claim is that the public overestimates the independence of celebrity billionaires. Her argument is not that Musk, Gates, Thiel, or Schmidt are powerless. It's that their power exists inside a larger structure, one shaped by intelligence networks, organized interests, financial leverage, and closed-door coordination.
So as an example, you know, Eric Schmidt I mentioned earlier, big Democrat donor, Peter Thiel, a big sort of Republican libertarian figure. They're both on the steering committee of Bilderberg together, the closed-door sort of globalist conference where, you know, top political leaders meet top corporate leaders and decide things in secret. AI has consistently been a big focus of that. Alex Karp of Palantir goes to pretty much every meeting. And it's essentially been I think Newsweek said that it was essentially Bilderberg was essentially divided between factions of Schmidt and Thiel, but they come together and network and make decisions at those closed-door meetings. So how much do they really disagree on? At the end of the day, they both seem to very much agree on pre-crime and in of the surveillance state um and increased digital control over over most people um because if you look at their actions as CEOs and investors, that's what they have you know, essentially built.
That's not just rhetorical. The official Bilderberg Steering Committee page does in fact list Eric Schmidt, Peter Thiel, and Alex Karp. And The Guardian describes Bilderberg as a secretive annual summit where political leaders, military officials, tech billionaires, and major business figures meet behind closed doors. So, even if people posture publicly as rivals, they may still share the same rooms, the same tables, and the same long-term priorities, which means the real battlefield may not be who wins the feud, it may be who controls what everyone else believes the feud means.
I think some of it is theater for us down here to keep us distracted um and have our attention be elsewhere and not on the things we can actually do to increase our own power and to end distractions like get us to willingly and voluntarily outsource our power. I think the elites believe in karmic law and I think they uh play a lot of games on people to get people to voluntarily do things they otherwise wouldn't do. And I think that's what a lot of the manipulations on me in media and in society are kind of ultimately um about >> [clears throat] >> at the end of the day. And so, if there's a particular policy, for example, digital ID or things like that that you're against, you have to ultimately commit to not participate in them even if uh efforts are made to manipulate you into consenting to that.
This is where the clip stops being about elite gossip and turns into a theory of control. Whitney's point is that modern manipulation doesn't always work by force first, it works by shaping consent, by making people feel that a policy they would normally resist is now necessary, moral, urgent, or inevitable.
And a lot of those efforts are based around fear about something. Um and it's very easy to manipulate how people perceive reality today. Uh that same Schmidt Kissinger book I've been referencing uh doesn't refer to AI as like a [clears throat] revolution in the sense of making people's lives easier and all of this stuff, but as a as a really a revolution in in perception, how people perceive reality. So, ultimately, you could argue that they that the elite sort of view it as the ultimate perception management tool. And I think that's ultimately what it's about because if you can control how people perceive, uh that translates into control over behavior at the end of the day. So, if you can get people to alter their perception of a particular policy, uh like digital ID or programmable surveillable money, and you can mean if and you can manipulate their perception into going from thinking it's a bad thing to a necessary thing to fight, you know, that some yet unforeseen evil or something, uh then you can get people to acquiesce them and onboard themselves to it.
That is probably the most important passage in the entire clip. Not AI will do more tasks, not AI will save time, but AI is perception management. And that's not just some new internet phrase. Historically, the idea that power depends on shaping mass belief is deeply rooted. Britannica defines public relations as a field concerned with affecting public perceptions by focusing, curtailing, amplifying, or augmenting information conveyed to the public. So, when Whitney says elites want to manage perception, she's describing an old power technique entering a much more technologically advanced phase. And that brings us to one of the central names she invokes, Edward Bernays.
Then you technically don't have to take them over at all. You don't need a single bullet. You kind of you've taken over their minds. Um so, you just kind of remind me of that idea. It's a very powerful one. I'll have to get your thoughts on that.
Yeah, I I think this is something though that isn't exclusive to the former Soviet Union. I think it was something the US was also doing in that same era. Uh You know, to Soviet satellite states and the Soviet Union itself. I think this is something that elites have been doing to people for a very long time. I think a very instructive video um or documentary into this is Adam Curtis' Century of the Self, which talks about the work of Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, that simultaneously developed public relations for the corporate world and propaganda for the public sector.
According to Britannica, Edward Bernays was a pioneer of American public relations and is widely considered one of the first people to develop the idea of the professional PR counselor, someone who uses the social sciences to shape how an audience responds. Britannica also notes that Bernays edited a book titled The Engineering of Consent, which became one of his most quoted definitions of public relations. That phrase matters, engineering consent. It means modern persuasion isn't just about telling people what to do. It's about arranging the emotional, social, and informational environment so people will think they decided it themselves.
Um because ultimately um public relations is propaganda for corporations at the end of the day, right? So he or he sort of developed that and saw the masses as sort of this these animals prone to animalistic whims and how to control the masses. Um and and all of that and how to manipulate them and then you consider that you have families like the Rockefellers in the US manipulating the education system. And then of course the US exports that model abroad once it becomes an empire for example. And a lot of these things you know, in the same with however the Soviet Union was doing it. I mean obviously that would get replicated in areas that come under Soviet influence. And so you know, it kind of is I think kind of inherent to you know, the imperial context and when you have competing power blocks they're they're to expand their influence in that way by by sort of doing that ideological subversion play.
That's Whitney's wording, but even Britannica's more neutral definition of PR still describes it as a structured effort to shape how publics perceive an entity. So, whether you use the word propaganda or not, the mechanism is real. Influence the frame, shape the emotional response, narrow the interpretation, guide the behavior. And if Bernays helps explain the machinery, Walter Lippmann helps explain why it works on mass audiences. Whitney doesn't name Walter Lippmann here, but his work is useful context for exactly the issue she's raising. According to Britannica, Lippmann argued in public opinion that ordinary citizens often cannot judge public issues rationally because the speed and condensation of the mass media tend to produce slogans rather than interpretations. And Britannica's public opinion entry says, "Lippmann observed that there have long been skilled organizers of opinion who understand public opinion well enough to create majorities." That's the bridge to Whitney's AI argument. Because if 20th century elites could shape perception using newspapers, radio, film, and PR, what happens when the tools become personalized, algorithmic, predictive, and available 24/7 in everyone's pocket?
Um and I think people are not really uh necessarily aware of the degree to which there are efforts to manipulate them today, particularly as it relates to online discourse. It's very hard to know if the person you're talking to is even a real person anymore. Um and how can And what if uh a major influencer you follow isn't even a real person anymore? It's an AI and things like that. Um and I think the ultimate goal is to have us not be able to know what's real and what's not, and then and then, you know, be marketed an AI that can help us determine what's real and what's not online, which again feeds into what I mentioned earlier as sort of outsourcing uh our decision-making. But, I think ultimately uh we're being led on this this sort of March to global government that is technocratic in nature and then we'll be inherently at some point authoritarian but it's going to be marketed as sort of everyone will have a more equal seat at the table type of thing but I don't think necessarily that means US power is going to Wayne. I think US Empire may actually be the vehicle to instigate some of that even though people think that you know, it's against the unilateral unipolar world is inherently against that. I think it could come from US Empire quite easily. We'll see. But I think ultimately in order to engineer that type of change and have people be acclimated enough to it particularly younger generations, you sort of have to erode the concept of national identity and really identity in general and have any things that normally were hard rigid definitions of one's identity become fluid and easily changeable and manipulable based on the desires of the social engineers or the cultural engineers.
That is the nightmare she's warning about not just fake news but fake consensus, fake personalities, fake authority, fake crowds, fake permission structures and once people can't tell what's real the next step is obvious. They'll beg for a system to tell them. This is where Whitney moves from analysis to warning. Her claim is that the public can be walked into systems they would normally reject not by openly announcing control but by changing the sales pitch.
But ultimately I think they want to erode any interest in national sovereignty or nationalism or of people being of a particular group and sort of had because that ultimately facilitates this idea of being a of a global citizen and all of that and I think there's um >> [clears throat] >> you know, efforts to manipulate both left and right in that context and I think we're seeing some of that now with sort of these efforts to shop around a quote unquote North American Union which is originally a a club of Rome and technocracy Inc. idea as sort of this uh make America great again uh thing. And this is something I argued again last year when when my friend Mark and I were talking about this shift from public to private and how the dialectics were going to be uh shifting to sell people the policies they rejected under COVID under different sales pitches essentially and have the sales pitches be sort of framed towards uh right-leaning people. I think we're absolutely seeing that right now. Um and I think again that's why it's important to focus on policies, which things are your red line, and focus less on the rhetoric uh because I mean they're going to do their best to sell you all sorts of stuff. But if you knew 2 years ago that digital ID and surveil- surveillable programmable money were going to be uh very harmful to society and freedom, you should know that that will not change even if the sales pitch changes and even if it's shopped around now as a cure to illegal immigration or terror attacks or crime, it doesn't actually solve those problems. You can see where digital ID has been implemented in places like India very extensively. It has not done any of those things and is unlikely to do the those things at the end of the day. That's a strong point regardless of whether viewers agree with every policy example she gives because historically major systems of power are often normalized through reframing. What was sold as public welfare gets resold as national security, what was sold as convenience gets resold as anti-crime, what was sold as emergency response gets resold as modernization. The language changes, the underlying structure may not. Whitney's advice here is tactical. Don't get hypnotized by branding. Look at the policy itself. You know, there's a famous uh Benjamin Franklin quote, I'll paraphrase, where you know, if you uh trade your liberty for security, you end up with neither, and that's ultimately uh what happens here and when people surrender their freedoms to the government, you know, they rarely get them back. And I think people would be uh very wise, even if it's presumably the solutions are coming from the private sector, and it's described as more innovative and more efficient in all of this stuff. Again, we're governed by a public-private partnership. The public sector is the enabling environment. It's not really running the show anymore. And so, you should be wary of digital ID be from the public sector. The UN documentation on digital ID talks about selling it from the private sector and marketing it as decentralized, but all of the data would be centralized in a single database globally. So, it's functionally still a centralized digital ID system, but they're showing kind of revealing their hand. They want to market it as something decentralized and something that has a variety of private sector vendors compete, presumably competing for the contracts to implement digital ID in the public sector. But, ultimately all of the data will be centralized and housed by a single authority that can use it to, you know, for all the same, you know, ends that are considered a threat to the liberty. Right. So, um I think people should be uh very uh skeptical of the sales pitches, and again, just focus a lot more on on the policy.
That's the old warning she's applying to new infrastructure, but the most subtle part of the clip comes at the end, because it's not just politics she thinks is programming people. Whether people like the phrase predictive programming or not, the broader point is worth taking seriously. Mass culture doesn't only entertain, it also rehearses emotional possibilities. It teaches people what to fear, what to trust, what to normalize, what to imagine as inevitable. And once enough people emotionally acclimate to a future in stories, they are far easier to manage when parts of that future begin showing up in real policy.
Mhm. Well said. And I I pay attention to what Hollywood's putting out because I think there's a lot of predictive programming embedded in those movies and I watch the changing narrative over time and I remember when I was a kid there was a lot of movies like Deep Impact or Armageddon that were about saving the planet. Like humans have to go out and save Earth. And then there was maybe 10, 15 years later there was a theme of we need to leave Earth. We've messed Earth up too much and we need to find a new planet like Pandora in um Avatar or Interstellar. We need to find a new place. And then maybe 10 years after that I'm starting to see things like we're not even a species worth saving. Like some new thing needs to come in and take over. And I've seen a similar narrative change with as it pertains to AI. Um so many movies a long time ago like Terminator showed us going to war with AI. And then it was you know, we were always in opposition with AI and and it got dystopian and out of hand. And I recently watched a movie I can't remember. I think it was a Marvel movie where AI was like this benevolent, good, god-like thing that took care of society and then the bad guy was somebody that came in and destroyed it. And I was like that's a different framing. You know, that's a very different way of framing the thing. So
Sure. So after all of that, what is the practical takeaway? That is the real ending of this video. Not trust this billionaire instead of that billionaire, not switch from team Ditz to team Musk, not pick your favorite elite. The defense Whitney is describing is a method. Ignore the theater, study the structure, verify the sourcing, watch the policy, and don't surrender judgment to branding, panic, or algorithms. Because if public perception can be engineered, then real freedom starts with learning how not to be engineered.