It’s not often that we get a ringside seat to the Birth of a Narrative. Usually, those overseeing the parturition are careful to manage the event offstage, away from the prying eyes of skeptics, spoilsports, and counternarrativists. There are walls of silence and moats of obfuscation to accompany the rollout. That helps keep everyone on message. There are media firemen assembled to extinguish the flames and wash away the reputations of questioners. That helps neutralize pests and quash doubts.
But with the sudden onslaught of the “AI will end humanity” narrative, the impresarios orchestrating the debut got sloppy. They knew their own lines. Artificial intelligence was the biggest threat to humanity since, well, since ever. Forget Covid, forget climate catastrophe, forget the population explosion or collapse. AI was it, the real McCoy, the cliff, the secret signal calling forth all the Chickens Little throughout the land. Right on cue, Bernie Sanders threatened legislation to bankrupt companies and cast anyone pursuing “superintelligence” into prison for 20 years. Some innocent bystanders wondered whether by “superintelligence” the Senator meant anyone more intelligent than he.
You can be sure that Xi Jinping is not ‘self-pacing’ the development of AI
Barack Obama, still following the mantra of not letting any crisis go to waste, issued statements about “slowing down the pace of AI development.” Watch out for that word “pace.” You will see it everywhere. On September 12 this year, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, the company at the center of this hurricane, published an essay declaring that “We Must Pace the Frontier.” What’s the goal? This summary, seen on X, comes close: “Anthropic and OpenAI are teaming up with Barack Obama to make AI regulation the centerpiece of Democrat politics now that it’s clear that immigration is a losing issue for them.”
The problem for those hawking the “AI will end humanity” story is that they did not do enough to neutralize their critics. The show had barely started before the circus master wheeled out a wet-behind-his-ears chap who announced he was quitting Anthropic because he had stared into the AI abyss and it made him wet his pants. Instant celebrity. Anderson Cooper donned his most serious glasses and slobbered all over the guy. But then the buzzards of the counternarrative began picking his story apart. How do you spell “set-up?”
And then, faster than you can say “market share,” the doubters, the red- and black-pill poppers, the anti-globalist skeptics piled on. One theme was “where have we heard this before?” Commentator Miranda Devine was among the first to ask how anyone who had lived through the “bogus fear campaigns” of climate hysteria, Russiagate and Covid could allow himself to be “duped yet again by the same cynical freaks using the same playbook.” Good question.
The headlines came fast and furious. “Lies, damned lies, and the AI scare,” from the Washington Examiner. One fellow with a long memory juxtaposed an image of a TIME magazine cover from 2006 with one from 2026. “Be worried, be very worried” TIME screamed in 2006. Earth is at the “tipping point”! But today it’s all about “the AI tipping point.” Been there, done that.
But the clumsy debut of this latest fraud on the public should not distract us from the serious issues standing behind the hysteria. Several commentators have cast their jaundiced eyes upon Anthropic’s multifarious deep-state connections and its dubious finances. (“Expenses? What are expenses? Do we need to show expenses and revenues to make an IPO?”)
Not unrelated is the complex symbiotic relationship between the burgeoning AI Leviathan and the globalist deep state. As the commentator Rick DeVos put it: “These people really only have one Solution™ for everything and it’s just ‘World Communism’ with corporate buzzwords.” Right on cue, Bill Gates – Bill Gates! – came on board to demand an “international organization” to regulate AI because people were too stupid to understand its “whole-of-society impact.” Toto, we’re not in Davos anymore.
At the end of the day, however, the deepest issues that AI raises are issues of national security. The great Don Surber telegraphed this point in the headline to a recent Substack post: “Support AI or learn Mandarin.” That is about the size of it. You can be sure that Xi Jinping is not “self-pacing” the development of AI. He is not worried about the “environmental impact” of data centers. He is untroubled by sanctimonious sagas of the apocalypse. Admiral David Farragut is more to his taste: “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead.”
Fortunately for America, some important people, including the single most important person, understand this. I mean, of course, Donald Trump. From the moment this “psyop” (to use Elon Musk’s term) broke, President Trump has been all over it. “Whoever wins AI,” he wrote, “wins.” Period, full stop. He also posted on Truth Social that “the AI Hoax being perpetrated by the Radical Left Dumocrats is reminiscent of their Global Warming Scam of not so long ago, where everyone was going to die from extreme heat. What happened?” We’re all still here!
And again:
The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by “Climate Change.” That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one. These people are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause.
Soon you’ll find out they’re working for people that do not have the best interests of the United States in mind!
Artificial intelligence, President Trump noted, “will be the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History – Bigger than Oil, Gold, Diamonds, or even the Internet.” This is true. Act accordingly.
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