If you needed another reminder why this year’s midterm elections are so important, Barack Hussein Obama II is back to make the case: Democrats intend to seize control over artificial intelligence and shape it to their advantage. The former president, who has refused to exit the political stage a decade after leaving office, wants his communist-curious comrades to scare voters about potential threats from AI in the final weeks of election season (Remember when we used to vote in person and tally all those votes in a single day?)
Obama is a blowhard, but he knows how to tap into voter fears for maximum political leverage. When he entered the White House, race relations between black and white Americans were at a historic high. Obama enjoyed extremely high approval ratings because Republicans who voted against him hoped that his presidency would heal any remaining racial wounds.
Instead of embracing that goodwill and uniting Americans in common purpose, Obama and his attorney general wingman, Eric Holder, jumped at every opportunity to pour salt in those wounds. Even though crime statistics proved otherwise, Obama and Holder insisted (with the help of a compliant news media) that law enforcement officers were abusing and murdering black Americans.
By the time his divide-and-conquer presidency came to an end, race relations between black and white Americans had deteriorated; Democrats were screaming, “Black lives matter!” and, “Defund the police!” in the streets; and domestic terrorists had assassinated numerous police officers across the country. Obama used the imaginary problems of “systemic racism” and police brutality to stoke fears, resentments, and racial divisions.
Obama has a long track record of inciting public fears and using those fears as political weapons. His decision to start banging the apocalyptic drum over AI is no different. Just as he inexcusably convinced half the nation that police officers were murdering black Americans, he is now working to convince voters that unregulated AI means certain doom.
Obama’s not against the technological reality of artificial intelligence; he just wants to make sure Democrats are in complete control of it. This is what disciples of Big Government do: They write laws, rules, and regulations that give preferred companies monopoly power within a given industry, and in return, the corporate beneficiaries of these unfair privileges do Big Government’s bidding.
This is the leftist, globalist, crony-capitalist model of governance throughout the West. First, governments conjure a problem that can be used to scare the public. Then their partners in the corporate news media hammer that problem until the public demands government action. Finally, governments propose new laws that infringe upon the public’s freedoms while allocating new powers to the fearmongering governments. Scaring people until they beg for more government is how authoritarianism and totalitarianism take hold.
For decades, the best example of this government-run con game has been the “global warming” bugaboo. Over the last fifty years, Western governments have told us to be afraid of a cooling planet, then a warming planet, then a changing climate, and now extreme weather. Their constantly revised temperature predictions, shoddy science, and fake statistics have not stopped them from frantically ringing the alarm about a coming apocalypse that they use to terrify children. “The science is settled!” Obama and his globalist friends all exclaim.
Lucky for us, the leftist-globalists have a “solution”: Carbon taxes, expensive “green energies,” and expansive government regulations just might save the day! If we allow governments to control every part of the economy, some people could survive. It’s amazing when you think about it. Planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old, but we humans were on our way to killing it until we discovered that paying more in taxes fixes “global warming.”
Of course, more taxes and regulations do produce a lower standard of living for the average person, which means that some percentage of the population must be sacrificed for the “greater good.” The Ancient Aztecs who sacrificed humans to appease their weather gods must have been the “progressives” of their day.
Just as people were starting to see through the “climate change” con, Western governments gave us the “Reign of COVID Terror.” Anthony Fauci and his government health bureaucrats funded a dangerous research project in communist China that ended up infecting most of the planet.
Rather than admit that government scientists had once again killed a lot of people, Western governments saw an opportunity to push totalitarianism upon their populations. We got lockdowns, small business bankruptcies, school closures, mask mandates, experimental mRNA concoctions falsely labeled “vaccines,” quarantine camps, and “vaccine” passports.
Online public debate was censored. Church congregations were arrested for praying together. In the United States, the whole Bill of Rights was thrown out the window. But pharmaceutical companies made tons of money! And Big Box stores such as Amazon and Walmart saw record profits after governments forced all their smaller competitors to close up shop! It’s almost as if Big Government and Big Business conspired to screw over billions of people!
We didn’t have to shut down the planet to survive COVID. We could have taken Anthony Fauci’s Chinese bioweapon project in stride. There was no reason for Westerners to curl up into balls and embrace mass panic. But governments told us that tyrannical edicts were the only acceptable “solutions” to a public health emergency that they created.
They told us that, unless we consented to totalitarianism, we were all going to die! It was the “global warming” model of governance turbocharged to regulate us into total submission in record time. Just as is the case with every other globalist information war against the public, the blueprint remained the same:
- Scare the public with a new problem.
- Encourage the public to demand a government solution.
- Provide a “solution” that transfers power from the public to the government.
The era of AI has arrived, and here we go again! AI tech bros are publicly hyperventilating about how their creations will probably murder us all. Wall Street and City of London speculators are promising that society will soon collapse.
Big Government priests such as Obama are warning that the situation is dire unless bureaucrats seize more power. The corporate news media are blaring the same sirens that they use for “global warming” and COVID. All the smartest, wealthiest, most powerful people and institutions are screaming in unison: Regulate us before we hurt you!
Should we do it? Should we once again demand that governments come up with “solutions” that coincidentally take freedom and power away from us and hand those priceless heirlooms over to them? Or will we pause to consider how much of today’s AI fearmongering resembles the “global warming” and COVID fearmongering of the recent past? Will we ponder whether governments have our best interests at heart or theirs?
After all, Barack Obama doesn’t come out of retirement unless there’s a golden opportunity to scare people into handing his friends more power.
If the Democrat Party takes control over AI, all the “politically correct” lies that run amok today will become cybernetic “truths.” AI will tell us that some women have penises and that some men give birth. It will regulate market transactions in order to “save us” from “global warming.”
It will rewrite history in order to hide the fact that communism killed well over a hundred million people last century. It will falsely identify President Trump’s MAGA movement and other political parties that defend national sovereignty as being ideologically equivalent to Hitler’s Nazis.
Leftist, Marxist, globalist points of view will become the default settings for the greatest information repository ever created. If Obama and his fellow travelers secure a government monopoly over AI, they will use it to advance their totalitarian playbook.
When Barack Obama tells you to be afraid, he wants to take something from you. If you don’t let him scare you, he can’t succeed.
Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
