The Rise of the Thielverse and the Construction of the Surveillance State (w/ Whitney Webb) | The Chris Hedges Report

Whitney Webb traces the Thielverse’s rise and the bipartisan construction of the modern surveillance state that Trump and his benefactors are deploying against dissidents and immigrants today.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

The descent into a new, mutated and technology-focused form of American fascism is already here. Those who have kept track of the rise of the Thielverse, which includes figures such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and JD Vance, have understood that an agenda to usher in a unique form of authoritarianism has been slowly introduced into the mainstream political atmosphere.

Whitney Webb, investigative journalist and author of One Nation Under Blackmail, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to document the rise of this cabal into the most powerful positions of the American government.

“I think now it’s quite clear that this is the PayPal Mafia’s moment. These particular figures have had an extremely significant influence on US government policy since January, including the extreme distribution of AI throughout the US government,” Webb explains.

It’s clear that the architects of mass surveillance and the military industrial complex are beginning to coalesce in unprecedented ways within the Trump administration and Webb emphasizes that now is the time to pay attention and push back against these new forces.

If they have their way, all commercial technology will be completely folded into the national security state — acting blatantly as the new infrastructure for techno-authoritarian rule. The underlying idea behind this new system is “pre-crime,” or the use of mass surveillance to designate people criminals before they’ve committed any crime. Webb warns that the Trump administration and its benefactors will demonize segments of the population to turn civilians against each other, all in pursuit of building out this elaborate system of control right under our noses.

---

---

---

Host

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos

Crew:

Diego Ramos and Victor Castellanos

Transcript:

Diego Ramos

---

Transcript:

Chris Hedges

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 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 dollars — 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 to 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, 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’état by inches, one that will be enforced in crude and brutal fashion by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on the streets of our cities and empowered by Thiel’s Palantir and the sophisticated forms of monitoring made possible by artificial intelligence 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 her website, Unlimited Hangout.

Whitney, let’s go back to the beginning, [John] Poindexter, Iran-Contra, which I covered actually when I was in Nicaragua, because that’s really the origin of where we are today.

Whitney Webb

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 [Ronald] 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 “godfather of modern surveillance”.

And this is in part because of his efforts in the immediate post-9/11 era pioneering an office within DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] 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 (TIA) would later do, like Saffron Technology, Syntech Technologies that were defense contractors and trying to basically create sort of predictive analytics to determine what terrorists would do next, all before 9/11 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-9/11 era. And when this information was reported on, Total Information Awareness, there was a huge outcry throughout US mainstream media.

A lot of organizations, including the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] 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… 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 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, 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, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, the Palantir co-founders, reached out to Poindexter directly through Richard Perle, who’s a well-known neoconservative figure and was also one of the architects of the Iraq War at the Bush-era Pentagon.

Basically they hatched this plan to privatize this program, rightly calculating that if they turned it into an entirely private sector enterprise, the outrage would essentially dissipate, which it remarkably did because originally it was a public-private partnership housed within DARPA and then by making it this private sector enterprise a lot of the concerns about it disappeared and this is arguably because, by moving into the private sector, they were able to accomplish a lot more than they could have by being affiliated directly with the public sector even though they contract with the public sector.

And so Palantir funding 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, that helped make 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 Total Information Awareness with Poindexter in the immediate post-9/11 era and so the CIA was Palantir’s exclusive client for, I believe, the first six years of its existence as a company and its engineers went to Langley, the CIA headquarters in Virginia, every two weeks for several years as well where the CIA was developing their algorithm with them, in a very direct partnership and Alex Karp has even said that the CIA was always the intended client of Palantir. So I guess I’ll pause there and iIm happy to go in other any other direction.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, explain what it does, what Poindexter’s goal was and what they were able to establish, I mean the mechanics of it.

Whitney Webb

So Poindexter’s goal was extremely broad. I mean, it really covered, it’s absolutely staggering when you think about it. 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 if certain data points are flagging that a terrorist attack will take place 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 futures market, which was really like a forerunner to Polymarket 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. 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 biosurveillance, which actually, a lot of it Palantir helped launch with HHS (US Department of Health and Human Services) during the COVID era. Things like analyzing American wastewater to determine if there is going to be an outbreak of a disease before it happens with, again, an algorithm or basically surveilling Americans’ health data 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 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 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) under the HHS and also the NHS (National Health Service) in Britain as well and have continued to expand on that front.

But Palantir, you know, 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 programs that are sold to different entities, but ultimately, they are a massive contractor to essentially every US 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 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, they call it predictive policing is the term that they use but a lot of other companies have attempted to also get in on this.

One of the most notorious being PredPol 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 being caught up in crimes that are very petty but you’re just sending police to all these areas in a relatively discriminatory way.

I mean the PredPol is really outrageous because it’s accuracy was found to be like insanely low and they didn’t phase it out despite the extreme inaccuracy. 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 Carbyne also has a predictive policing component, but has been sort of taking over 911 emergency call systems throughout the United States, which is generally at the county level.

But this is a company that wasn’t just funded by Peter Thiel, it was funded by Jeffrey Epstein and was led for a significant amount of time by Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, 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 guise of combating the COVID-19 situation with data, that we needed data to solve those problems.

Chris Hedges

And are you in essence just creating profiles? I mean, these are just creating profiles for every American citizen?

Whitney Webb

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 until the present.

But 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 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 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 HOME. It’s an acronym.

And basically that was about using AI to scan 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 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 rather unsettling but, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of this profiling of Americans has been going on for a long time under the guise of what was developed by the Iran-Contra crowd covertly. The continuity of government protocols in this effort by parts of the “deep state” or the national security state to basically profile people they deemed unfriendly 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 nonviolent against US military intervention in Latin America, like in Nicaragua, for example, was something that could have them use these profiles they had developed on Americans then back in the 1980s and incarcerate them at a time deemed convenient or necessary by the Reagan administration.

And they claimed then, in 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 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.

Chris Hedges

Let me ask about what you call the “PayPal Mafia”. Palmer Luckey, he was a Thiel fellow, founded [Oculus] in 2012 before it was purchased by Meta, [Mark] Zuckerberg. [CEO of OpenAI] Sam Altman, [Vice President] JD Vance, Elon Musk. Talk about that little cabal.

Whitney Webb

Yeah, well they are quite the cabal. 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’s 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 teamed up with Elon Musk and X and created this, I mean, it basically dollarized the internet. It made the dollar the de facto currency of the internet and had 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, it’s really no surprise that you see, when it’s sold, when they sell PayPal to Pierre Omidyar of eBay, Peter Thiel 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 protege’s of these figures or worked at one point for PayPal. For example the current AI and crypto czar at the White House David Sacks, a former top executive at PayPal with Thiel 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 (venture capital), 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 I think now it’s quite clear that this is the PayPal Mafia’s moment. These particular figures have an extremely significant influence on US government policy 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, a lot of former employees for Palantir have been placed throughout the US government that you don’t think a lot about or most people don’t think a lot about, 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, whose political philosophy is essentially that the way to solve the problems of our 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 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 continue and expand. And you can also see how a lot of these people are also war profiteers, 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 [Israel Defense Forces] to decide who lives and who dies in Gaza.

And a lot of these other people that have been Thiel protégés, for example, like Palmer Luckey and Anduril, which Luckey co-founded with Trae Stephens, who’s also affiliated with the aforementioned Epstein-funded Carbyne 911.

Anduril 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 defense contractor giants like Lockheed Martin, for example, or General Dynamics 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 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 necessarily better?

I don’t really think so. And when you consider, too, that you have the current Secretary of War, since it’s been recently renamed, in Pete Hegseth coming out and basically saying, the massacre of Wounded Knee, the soldiers that did that should have their medals restored and all of this, it’s basically trying to be anti-woke by conflating American culture with war crimes at the same time that we’re developing all of this autonomous technology that would allow these people to conduct more war crimes than ever before.

So under the 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.

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.

Chris Hedges

Let’s talk a little bit about, you mentioned privatizations, let’s talk about SpaceX, cryptocurrency, and Musk’s early involvement with DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] 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.

Whitney Webb

So I’ll start with that because you asked a couple different things there. So basically the goal of the smart wall, 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 free 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 wall and obviously a lot of Trump supporters, I think, originally had envisioned a physical wall and not this combo of non-lethal-potentially-in-the-future-lethal drone technology and mass surveillance but also as you may be aware, the US government defines the border as going much more inland than a lot of people would imagine.

And 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 U.S. domestically as well as presumably into Mexico to some extent as 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. I’m not sure exactly what you’d like to talk about as it relates to SpaceX, but it is worth pointing out that they’re a massive military contractor specifically for Space Force created under the first Trump administration. They really are the main contractor for Space Force.

And also, you know, they are directly affiliated with Starlink, the satellite internet company that also arguably has some kind of covert uses with Elon Musk, for example, saying he is going to help sneak Starlinks into Iran, for example, I wonder who that would benefit. And also, 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 think that was them sort of trying to cover their tracks afterwards because it’s obviously affiliated with a major U.S. military contractor. I mean, it can’t be that surprising. And also what’s important in that context as well is that he’s a major military contractor that wants the US government to go in a particular direction, particularly a highly automated future.

And through the Department of Government Deficiency, a government efficiency DOGE, a lot was made to facilitate that by laying off a lot of government workers in their place putting, basically replacing them with, AI algorithms.

And those algorithms are, of course, patented and controlled by Silicon Valley companies. And 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, Larry Ellison is becoming, basically taking over 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 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, 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 stablecoin, 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-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 stablecoins and stablecoin issuers of course buy lots of treasuries and serve to 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 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 benefit the American people significantly more.

Chris Hedges

Can you talk about Oracle’s relationship with AI?

Whitney Webb

So I’m not an expert on what Oracle does specifically. As far as I’m aware, they mostly focus on database management. But I do know that they’ve had a significant influence over the Trump administration previously as well. So Safra Catz is a major top executive at Oracle in addition to Larry Ellison.

And she, along with Sheldon Adelson, coordinated the firing of H.R. 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 seeing 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 data management and digital infrastructure. Not sure on the specifics there, sorry about that.

Chris Hedges

I want to ask you about Israel because there are many tentacles I guess running each way between the military, the [Unit] 8200, and Silicon Valley. It’s an incestuous relationship which you’ve written about.

Whitney Webb

Yeah, so there’s a couple different things here. So I would say that a major pillar, not just of [Benjamin] 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.

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 meaningfully adopting the Boycott Divest Sanctions Movement, or BDS, by basically marketing Israeli startups, particularly in technology to American companies and also to the US government.

And of course, the US government contracts with significant Unit 8200 companies. For example, the NSA in the mid 2000s had an Israeli Unit 8200-linked company develop its back doors and the popular software programs. I mean, Carbyne 911 that I brought up earlier, also Unit 8200 created and now controlling a litany of 911 emergency call centers throughout the US.

There’s a lot of companies that have popped up to do so and also you’ve seen a lot of these Silicon Valley giants — Google, Microsoft, Intel — recruit heavily from Unit 8200 and also open offices in Israel. Of course some of those, in the case of Microsoft significantly, precede this 2012 point.

But basically the goal was to prevent the US from ever 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 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, is, 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 US national security state and is building a quite a massive US domestic media empire and I believe he’s going to be one of the figures involved in the takeover of TikTok that was just signed off on by Trump not that long ago.

Chris Hedges

And he’s just taken CBS.

Whitney Webb

Yeah, and I think Paramount and I think a few others are, I think CNN is about to be acquired by them as well, so we’ll see. But it’s definitely a rapid consolidation.

Chris Hedges

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 that criminalizes people who criticize capitalism, support gender equality.

Whitney Webb

Or really anyone who is antifascist in any capacity.

Chris Hedges

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?

Whitney Webb

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 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 propaganda 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 a repeated trope of what we saw in the War on Terror. We have to give up all of our, all of these new 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 the head of al-Qaeda in Syria being given a diplomat, 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 let’s shake hands and let them come to the UN while we don’t let anyone from Palestine come. I mean, it’s totally insane. So 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, unfortunately, a lot of 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 efforts to pass DHS as 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 security agencies and the expansion of the national security state in general has also had a lot of tentacles domestically.

And I think Americans have been naive that a lot of the evil that that national security state has done abroad would never be used against them. And I think that we need to be very aware of what is going on here and that the deep state, 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 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 some of the ideas promoted by its 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 backed 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 group backs it. And it’s just change a couple terms around and try and make it edgy, but ultimately at the same day, 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 efforts are being done to do that now under the guise of fighting the corruption in the national security state. But unfortunately 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 going to be, if we allow it, political opposition could be labeled “terrorism”.

And to think that this wouldn’t come back on people on the right as well, I think is naive. You know, the definition of domestic terrorist under the Biden administration concluded people that were outraged by 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 to sort of be a catchall 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 prodded to do so.

So 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 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’s still time to do all of that. You can look up online different guides to use different operating systems, whether it’s on your computer or your phone, or use alternatives to Google or any of these other things. Because, I mean, ultimately, they may try and move to make it illegal to boycott Israel, but we can boycott the other enablers of the system that are based in the United States.

Maybe it’s inconvenient at the time to change these things, but I think it’s much more inconvenient to just walk into this world that they’re trying to usher us into without offering any sort of meaningful pushback. And if they’re going to try and censor speech or criminalize speech, there’s other things we can do to stop this from happening.

Chris Hedges

Great. Thank you, Whitney. I want to thank Diego [Ramos], Victor [Padilla], Sofia [Menemenlis], Thomas [Hedges], and Max [Jones], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

---

Photos:

President Trump Holds Dinner For Tech And Business Leaders At The White House

WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 04: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks as (L-R) CEO of Social Capital Chamath Palihapitiya, White House “AI and Crypto Czar” David Scahs, U.S. President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump and Microsoft Co-Founder Bill Gates listen during a dinner at the State Dining Room of the White House on September 4, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Trump Holds Summit With Technology Industry Leaders

NEW YORK, NY - DECEMBER 14: (L to R) Vice President-elect Mike Pence looks on as President-elect Donald Trump shakes the hand of Peter Thiel during a meeting with technology executives at Trump Tower, December 14, 2016 in New York City. This is the first major meeting between President-elect Trump and technology industry leaders. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

US-POLITICS-TRUMP

Leader of the Department of Government Efficiency Elon Musk wears a shirt that says “Tech Support” as he speaks during the first cabinet meeting of US President Donald Trump’s second term in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, DC, on February 26, 2025. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP) (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

President Trump Holds Press Conference With Elon Musk in White House’s Oval Office

WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 30: Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks alongside U.S. President Donald Trump to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House on May 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. Musk, who served as an adviser to Trump and led the Department of Government Efficiency, announced he would leave his role in the Trump administration to refocus on his businesses. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Portland Residents React To Trump’s Threats To Deploy National Guard

PORTLAND, OREGON - OCTOBER 12: Federal agents clash with anti-I.C.E. protesters at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building on October 12, 2025 in Portland, Oregon. An Instagram post from the WorldNakedBikeRidePortland account stated - “The emergency WNBR Portland is in response to the militarization of our peaceful city. Right now peaceful protesters are being brutalized as they do their best for our neighbors and cousins who are being kidnapped.” (Photo by Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty Images)

US-MEXICO-BORDER-WALL-REPLACEMENT

A surveillance tower is seen through a hole on the US-Mexico border wall before being replaced in Playas de Tijuana, Baja California state, Mexico, on February 16, 2023. - US authorities announced that they resumed construction this week on the border fence at the iconic Friendship Park, replacing primary and secondary barriers along a 0.03-mile stretch of its southwest border with Mexico. (Photo by Guillermo Arias / AFP) (Photo by GUILLERMO ARIAS/AFP via Getty Images)

John M. Poindexter

National Security Advisor John M. Poindexter, smoking a pipe in his bedroom. (Photo by Diana Walker/Getty Images)

Attack on New York City

NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 11: An unidentified New York City firefighter walks away from Ground Zero after the collapse of the Twin Towers September 11, 2001 in New York City. The World Trade Center’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon were attacked by terrorists using commercial airliners as missiles. (Photo by Anthony Correia/Getty Images)

FRANCE-TECHNOLOGY-POLITICS-GOVERNMENT-ECONOMY

CEO of Palantir Alex Karp leaves the Elysee Palace in Paris, on May 23, 2018 after the “Tech for Good” summit. (Photo by ludovic MARIN / AFP) (Photo credit should read LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP via Getty Images)

Peter Thiel Speaks At The Cambridge Union

CAMBRIDGE, CAMBRIDGESHIRE - MAY 08: Peter Thiel speaks at The Cambridge Union on May 08, 2024 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire. (Photo by Nordin Catic/Getty Images for The Cambridge Union)

Yasser Arafat Speaks to the UN General Assembly

Yasser Arafat giving a speech at the UN General Assembly, in Geneva, Switzerland, on December 13, 1988. The US barred Arafat from entering the United States and speaking in New York at the UN Headquarters. (Photo by © Shepard Sherbell/CORBIS SABA/Corbis via Getty Images)

Jeffrey Epstein

Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein in Cambridge, MA on 9/8/04. Epstein is connected with several prominent people including politicians, actors and academics. Epstein was convicted of having sex with an underaged woman. (Photo by Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images)

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak speaks during a...

JERUSALEM, ISRAEL - 2024/04/02: Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak speaks during a demonstration. Israeli police clashed with antigovernment protesters outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s home in Jerusalem which was the third day of demonstrations calling for early elections and his ouster. (Photo by Eyal Warshavsky/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Attorney General Barr Testifies Before House Judiciary Committee

WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 28: Attorney General William Barr appears before the House Oversight Committee In his first congressional testimony in more than a year, Barr is expected to face questions from the committee about his deployment of federal law enforcement agents to Portland, Oregon, and other cities in response to Black Lives Matter protests. (Photo by Matt McClain-Pool/Getty Images)

Collision 2019 - Day Two

Toronto , Canada - 22 May 2019; Palmer Luckey, Founder @ Oculus VR Andutil Industries, during day two of Collision 2019 at Enercare Center in Toronto, Canada. (Photo By Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile via Getty Images)

Clinton Global Initiative Brings Business And World Leaders Together

NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 23: eBay founder Pierre Omidyar speaks during the panel session Democracy and Voice: Technology For Citizen Empowerment and Human Rights during the annual Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) on September 23, 2010 in New York City. (Photo by Brian Harkin/Getty Images)

2024 Republican National Convention TW

UNITED STATES - JULY 15: David Sacks, a venture capitalist, and Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, right, vice presidential nominee, are seen in Fiserv Forum on the first day of Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wis., on Monday, July 15, 2024. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Former Executives Of Collapsed Banks Silicon Valley Bank And Signature Testify To Senate Banking Committee

WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 16: Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) questions former executives of failed banks during a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Capitol Hill May 16, 2023 in Washington, DC. The hearing was held to examine the recent failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Black-and-white portrait of Curtis Yarvin in the garden of St Paul’s Cathedral.

By David Merfield | Wikimedia Commons

The Game Awards 2015 - Inside

LOS ANGELES, CA - DECEMBER 03: Founder of Oculus VR Palmer Luckey speaks onstage during The Game Awards 2015 at Microsoft Theater on December 3, 2015 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Allen Berezovsky/Getty Images)

US-TECHNOLOGY-COMPUTERS-WSJ

Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus and Anduril Industries, speaks during The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live conference in Laguna Beach, California on October 16, 2023. (Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP) (Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)

President Trump And Pete Hegseth Address U.S. Senior Military Leaders At Quantico

QUANTICO, VIRGINIA - SEPTEMBER 30: U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth speaks to senior military leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico on September 30, 2025 in Quantico, Virginia. In an unprecedented gathering, almost 800 generals, admirals and their senior enlisted leaders have been ordered into one location from around the world on short notice. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-ISRAEL-PALESTINIAN-CONFLICT-GAZA

TOPSHOT - An Elbit Skylark miniature unmanned aerial vehicle (mini UAV) used by the Israeli army for surveillance flies after being launched from a position along the border with the Gaza Strip in southern Israel on September 30, 2025. (Photo by Jack GUEZ / AFP) (Photo by JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images)

SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket Launch

SANTEE, CALIFORNIA - JULY 18: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a payload of 24 Starlink internet satellites soars into space after launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base on July 18, 2025, seen from Santee, California. (Photo by Kevin Carter/Getty Images)

European Forum Idc On September 15th, 1996 In France.

FRANCE - SEPTEMBER 15: European Forum Idc On September 15th, 1996 In France. (Photo by William STEVENS/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Trump Holds Summit With Technology Industry Leaders

NEW YORK, NY - DECEMBER 14: Safra Catz, chief executive officer of Oracle, arrives at Trump Tower, December 14, 2016 in New York City. This is the first major meeting between President-elect Trump and technology industry leaders. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

President Donald Trump

WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 23: National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster listens to reporters and members of the media during the press briefing in the Brady press briefing room at the White House in Washington, DC on Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2018. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

President Donald J. Trump

WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 18 : National Security Advisor John R. Bolton listens as President Donald J. Trump meets with Prime Minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte in the Oval Office at the White House on Thursday, July 18th, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

TOPSHOT-ISRAEL-PALESTINIAN-CONFLICT-HOSTAGES

TOPSHOT - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gives a press conference in Jerusalem on May 21, 2025. Netanyahu said on May 21 that he was ready for a “temporary ceasefire” to guarantee the return of hostages held in Gaza, of whom 20 are “certainly” alive. (Photo by Ronen Zvulun / POOL / AFP) (Photo by RONEN ZVULUN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

The New York Times 2014 DealBook Conference

NEW YORK, NY - DECEMBER 11: Founder and President, Elliot Management Corporation Paul Singer speaks onstage during The New York Times DealBook Conference at One World Trade Center on December 11, 2014 in New York City. (Photo by Thos Robinson/Getty Images for New York Times)

Friends Of The Israel Defense Forces 2014 Western Region Gala

BEVERLY HILLS, CA - NOVEMBER 06: Larry Ellison attends the Friends Of The Israel Defense Forces 2014 Western Region Gala at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on November 6, 2014 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Tiffany Rose/WireImage)

Barack Obama Joins Kamala Harris As She Campaigns For President In Georgia

CLARKSTON, GEORGIA - OCTOBER 24: Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, campaigns with former President Barack Obama at the James R Hallford Stadium on October 24, 2024 in Clarkston, Georgia. Harris and Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump, continue campaigning in battleground swing states before the November 5 election. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

World Leaders Gather For The 80th Session Of The United Nations General Assembly

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 24: President of Syria Ahmed al-Sharaa addresses the United Nations (UN) General Assembly during the 80th session of the annual event on September 24, 2025, in New York City. This year’s theme for the annual global meeting is “Better together: 80 years and more for peace, development, and human rights.” (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa in New York

NEW YORK, UNITED STATES - SEPTEMBER 22: Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa (L) speaks with former CIA Director General David Petraeus during Concordia’s 15th Annual Summit in New York City, United States, on September 22, 2025. (Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

SWITZERLAND-DAVOS-POLITICS-ECONOMY

World Economic Forum founder and chairman Klaus Schwab addresses to assembly during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos on January 21, 2025. The World Economic Forum confirmed on April 23, 2025 that it has launched an investigation into allegations made against its founder Klaus Schwab that reportedly prompted his resignation this week. (Photo by Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP) (Photo by FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images)

Peter Thiel Speaks At The Cambridge Union

CAMBRIDGE, CAMBRIDGESHIRE - MAY 08: Peter Thiel speaks at The Cambridge Union on May 08, 2024 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire. (Photo by Nordin Catic/Getty Images for The Cambridge Union)

Elon Musk Meets With Republican Lawmakers On Capitol Hill

WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 5: White House Senior Advisor to the President and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk departs the U.S. Capitol Building on March 5, 2025 in Washington, DC. Musk was meeting with Republican senators at a closed door lunch. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)