Central Planning or I Know What I Know?
May 19, 2024 Leave a comment
“If science is really given a free hand it can now take over the human race and re-condition it: make man a really efficient animal. If it doesn’t – well, we’re done.”
That is Lord Feverstone speaking to Mark Studdock in C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength.
Feverstone, a shrewd sociopath, uses idealism to lure gullible Mark Studdock, an ambitious, self-centered and shallow intellectual looking to ‘upgrade’ his life. Feverstone wants Mark to join the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.)
N.I.C.E. is a scientific social engineering agency and a front for dark supernatural forces. It is bent on world domination through scientific management. Propagandistic media is used to persuade the educated, like Studdock, to join in disseminating N.I.C.E. propaganda:
One interesting feature in the effort toward totalistic control over society, as developed in That Hideous Strength, is the matter of influencing public opinion through the news media. Mark, the insecure protagonist in the story, finds himself drawn into the “inner ring” of the technocratic project; he eventually discerns his role to write stories that support the agenda of the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.). -Ted Lewis, Jacques, Jack and the Technocrats | | The International Jacques Ellul Society
Feverstone continues working Mark . . .
“Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest – which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of. Quite.”
[Mark] “What sort of thing have you in mind?”
“Quite simple and obvious things, at first – sterilization of the unfit, liquidation of backward races (we don’t want any dead weights), selective breeding. Then real education, including pre-natal education. By real education I mean one that has no ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ nonsense. A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly: whatever he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it’ll have to be mainly psychological at first. But we’ll get on to biological conditioning in the end and the direct manipulation of the brain . . .”
“N. I. C. E.’s symbol, devoted as it was to “Technocratic and Objective Man” (That Hideous Strength, 259), was a muscular male nude grasping a thunderbolt (That Hideous Strength, p. 215).” – The Devils in Our World – Official Site | CSLewis.com
There were significant parallels to N.I.C.E.’s scientific management activity and the characters involved in 1945, when Lewis came out with the final book of his Ransom trilogy. Mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) the “father of scientific management”, could have been one of the characters in the technocratic project. And there’s Le Corbusier (1886–1965), a Swiss French architect, designer, and painter who was an urban planner.
Le Corbusier was to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform. In one sense, he had less excuse for his activities than Pol Pot: for unlike the Cambodian, he possessed great talent, even genius. Unfortunately, he turned his gifts to destructive ends, and it is no coincidence that he willingly served both Stalin and Vichy. Like Pol Pot, he wanted to start from Year Zero: before me, nothing; after me, everything. By their very presence, the raw-concrete-clad rectangular towers that obsessed him canceled out centuries of architecture. Hardly any town or city in Britain (to take just one nation) has not had its composition wrecked by architects and planners inspired by his ideas.
-Theodore Dalrymple, Le Corbusier’s Baleful Influence: The Architect as Totalitarian (city-journal.org)
Today, there are significant parallels to N.I.C.E.’s scientific management activity and the characters involved. I suppose one could replace the Lord Feverstone character with a number of elites: Lord (Klaus) Schwab of the World Economic Forum (WEF) or Lord (Tedros Adhanom) Ghebreyesus of the World Health Organization (WHO) or with the infamous Lord Science, Anthony Fauci and his COVID boss Lord (Francis) Collins who now Confesses Lockdown Damage Was ‘Another Mistake We Made’.
The scientific management of COVID “to save a life” went in a horrible direction against humans. Many of my posts from March 2020 onward document the destructiveness of central public health planning and what other experts were saying.
Certainly, there are those today who want to rework humans with neural links, gene therapy, AI, and scientific management via central planning.
The following well-produced documentary Trust Us is an absolute must for understanding the central planners and the elites. Homeschoolers should show this video to the charges.
““Trust Us” traces the rise of American technocracy: governance by bureaucratic experts. Beginning in the early 20th century, “Trust Us” reveals how our leaders funneled power to unelected experts, who were convinced they could engineer solutions to all our nation’s problems. Not only did these experts fail to solve those problems, but in example after example, they caused irreversible damage to the country.
With The One Best Way – scientific management – Progressives “impose an ideology that not only can every corner of society be planned and controlled from the top down, but that it must be.”
Trust Us | The Rise of American Technocracy (youtube.com)
As we saw during COVID, the collusion of science and state powers forms a dangerous mix. We were told and made to “trust the science” about masks, lockdowns, social distancing, and the COVID vaccine for a flu virus that was 99.9 % survivable for healthy adults who were not very elderly.
The elites of public health central planning lied to us about immunity so that the vaccine could be pushed by the medical-industrial complex. They told us lies about hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin so that the vaccine could be pushed by the medical-industrial complex. They told us lies about the origins of COVID to protect the medical-industrial complex that created a gain-of function virus.
At the same time, you would be mocked as “misinformed” and as a “conspiracy theorist” if you questioned the elites of public health central planning. You would be punished by censorship or loss of license or worse.
See this link for the lies we were told and for the adverse and deadly effects of the COVID vaccine: Investigations Archives – DailyClout.
A world-renowned scientist and leading immunology expert has raised the alarm with an explosive warning to the public that everyone who has been vaccinated with Covid mRNA shots “will die within 3 to 5 years, even if they have had only one injection.”
The alert was issued by Professor Dr. Dolores Cahill.
Renowned Scientist: All Covid-Vaxxed ‘Will Die in 3 to 5 Years’ – Slay News
The Onrushing Death Wave – by Richard Sauder (substack.com)
C.S. Lewis tried to warn us about the collusion of science and state powers used against humanity for “the public good.” (Who determines what “the public good” is should concern us all. Should the Godless determine “the public good”?)
That Hideous Strength “is a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked scientific and technological advancement.
The National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) embodies the perils of divorcing knowledge from ethics. Their vision of progress, which seeks to dominate and control nature, starkly contrasts the traditional Christian understanding of humanity’s role as stewards of creation. In this, Lewis critiques a growing cultural trend that prioritizes technological advancement at the expense of moral and spiritual values.” Manrado Gorgio
I am not against technological advancements. I have worked in engineering for many years. Experts are needed and should be given a platform but not the power to coerce.
Do not become so desperate and afraid that you beg government to do something.
I am against technological advancements tied to bureaucratic machinations and coercion by the state. I am against top-down scientific management central planning of my life. I am against elites telling me how to live my life. I am against being experimented on.
We, of Middle Earth America, are sick and tired of elites telling us how to think, speak and act!
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Currently, there are organizations plotting world domination in terms of scientific management. The World Economic Forum (WEF) is one such cabal of elites chomping at the bit to control every corner of our lives. Another is the World Health Organization (WHO), the public health arm of the UN with more elites hankering to centrally plan our health under One Health.
Be aware! May 27th – June 1st, the Seventy-seventh World Health Assembly is being held in Geneva, Switzerland. The theme of this year’s Health Assembly is: All for Health, Health for All. There will be scheduled votes on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) pandemic treaty and the proposed changes to the International Health Regulations (IHR). The votes on this treaty and the IHR won’t be the end of an attempt at a global health security state; they mark just the beginning.
I do not want WHO oversight of my health/life. Nor do I want a Federal or State apparatus that has oversight of my health/life. I don’t want to exchange one authoritarian central planning system for another. I don’t want to live under a health technocracy. I prefer practical wisdom over central planning.
“. . .an unlettered peasant is considered ignorant, however much he may know about nature and man, and a Ph.D. is never considered ignorant, however barren his mind might be outside his narrow specialty and however little he grasps about human feelings or social complexities.” Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions
In the video you will learn:
The status and legality of the WHO treaty and IHR votes.
How we got here.
What’s in the ever-shifting documents.
What states are doing about it.
How state AGs and U.S. senators are stepping up for health freedom.
WHO Update 5/13/24: The votes are still on! (rumble.com)
WHO Update 5/13/24 – STAND FOR HEALTH FREEDOM
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If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on earth does not have even one percent of the total knowledge on earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism, and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left. – Thomas Sowell
Government central planning means over-riding other people’s plans. – Thomas Sowell
“What is inadmissible, both morally and scientifically, is the hubris that pretends to understand the behavior of human agents without for a moment listening systematically to how they understand what they are doing and how they explain themselves.”
― James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play
“Social order is not the result of the architectural order created by T squares and slide rules. Nor is social order brought about by such professionals as policemen, nightwatchmen, and public officials. Instead, says Jacobs, “the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities … is kept by an intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
Here’s an inciteful brief description of James Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed:
“. . . the twentieth century has been racked by grand utopian schemes that have inadvertently brought death and disruption to millions. Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry?
“The author [James Scott] builds a persuasive case against “development theory” and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires, and objections of its subjects. He identifies and discusses four conditions common to all planning disasters: administrative ordering of nature and society by the state; a “high-modernist ideology” that places confidence in the ability of science to improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large- scale interventions; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans.” (Emphasis mine.)
What remains of hubristic endeavors. . .
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
— Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias”, 1819
31 reasons why central planning failed in the Soviet Union | by Charles Orton-Jones | Medium
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That Hideous Strength: Is technology dangerous?
Alister McGrath explores how CS Lewis addresses the perceived conflict between God and science in That Hideous Strength. What insights can Lewis give about pertinent issues such as the atomic age, eugenics and Artificial Intelligence? When does technology becomes technocracy and why was Tolkien so anti tech? What are some of the ways religion is being challenged and how does Lewis expose these critiques?
#143 That Hideous Strength: Is technology dangerous? – ThriveCast
John J. Miller is joined by Michael Ward of the University of Oxford to discuss C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.
The Great Books — Episode 224: ‘That Hideous Strength’ by C. S. Lewis | National Review
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The Hound of Hell
November 9, 2025 Leave a comment
“The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse.”
-Guy Montag, Fahrenheit 451
Anyone who has read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 will remember the menacing Mechanical Hound.
In fireman Guy Montag’s world, firemen burn outlawed books and where people hid them. The firehouse ‘dog’, a robotic beast, is an enforcer for the state. If you do not follow society’s rules, the Hound is unleashed. It tracks down and kills book readers using stored information about individuals. The Hound catches its prey and then injects it with lethal drugs.
Though configured as man’s best friend, Montag finds out the true nature of the beast. Being “fascinated as always with the dead beast, the living beast,” he touches the muzzle of the Hound. The Hound growls and Montag recoils.
“The Hound half rose in its kennel and looked at him with green-blue neon light flickering in its suddenly activated eye bulbs. It growled again, a strange rasping combination of electric sizzle, a frying sound, a scraping of metal, a turning of cogs that seemed rusty and ancient with suspicion.”
Not long afterward, Montag tells Captain Beatty “It doesn’t like me.” Captain Beatty tells Montag:
“Come off it. It doesn’t like or dislike. It just `functions.’ It’s like a lesson in ballistics. It has a trajectory we decide for it. It follows through. It targets itself, homes itself, and cuts off. It’s only copper wire, storage batteries, and electricity.”
The Mechanical Hound attacks what it is programmed to attack. And when Montag becomes more and more inquisitive about books and one is found in his possession, the Hound is released to track him down.
~~~
The techno-capitalist-industrialist-open borders system that goes by “Progress” or “Development” or “the Science” or “Fair-Trade” or “Commercialization” or “Globalization” or “Open Society,” is summed into a single descriptor – “the Machine” – by Paul Kingsnorth in his book Against the Machine (See side bar, previous post, and podcasts below for more information.)
In the chapter Come the Black Ships, Kingsnorth describes the process of Machine as being
“a war against all ‘closed’ things; against limits and boundaries of any kind, cultural and ecological; against historical traditions, local economies, trade unions, national economic plans, nations themselves, tribal cultures, religions . . . anything that interferes with the path of commercial expansion and its associated culture of individualist liberalism. Open is good, closed is bad. Why? Because closed things can’t be harvested, exploited or transformed in the image of the new world which the Machine is building. ‘Open’ things, on the other hand; well, they’re easy prey.”
That is our reality today. The West has colonialized itself with what it has colonized other nations – the Machine’s promise of the “open is good” gravy train. The WEF’s mission statement cloaks the Machine in good: “We bring together government, businesses and civil society to improve the state of the world” by “seiz[ing] opportunities for positive change.”
And so it is that the Machine’s process is advertised as that which benefits humanity in various ways. These include “Enhanced Customer Experience”, “Innovation”, “Diversity”, and “Advancements in Medicine, Education, Efficiency, Productivity, and “Sustainability” all while waging “a war against all ‘closed’ things” for the sake of its commercialization, monetization, and control of the process.
For the Machine to wage “war against all ‘closed’ things”, technology is employed to sniff out and snuff out the ‘closed’ – those people and their places unwilling to “be harvested, exploited or transformed in the image of the new world.” This machine I see depicted as Bradbury’s Mechanical Hound.
The Mechanical Hound represents the perversion of technology. Man’s best friend, a creature meant for companionship, aid, and protection, is turned into a technological tool of oppression. Its purpose is to impose order with terror.
With the Mechanical Hound in mind, consider digital technology which can be seen as friendly and helpful but can been programmed to avenge and punish citizens who break society’s rules. See China’s social credit system.
With the Mechanical Hound in mind, see the UK introducing digital ID cards. The UK government claims the system will simplify access to public services such as healthcare, welfare, and childcare, reduce identity fraud, ensure that only those with the right to work can be hired and is expected to minimize identity fraud by linking personal information to a secure digital format. With all these great “benefits” (for the state), what could go wrong? Say, if someone online says something that is considered “hate speech” by the UK government will the Hound be released to track that person down? That is happening today in the UK.
See a cashless society and Central Bank digital currency (CBDC) where purchases are monitored and financial accounts controlled by the government.
See the smartphone that “slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of” your pocket.
Consider the digital contraptions in your home and car that, like the Hound, can track you with information gathered from 5G towers that is downloaded to data centers that consume massive amounts of energy and water and taxpayer money – to monitor your physical and societal whereabouts so it can sell you more of the Machine’s process.
In Montag’s repressed society, books, book holders, and critical thinkers are dealt with. For books hold the experience and wisdom of ‘closed’ things – history, tradition, culture and religion – and must be done away with. And, so must thinking critically. For researching and comprehending what the Machine is doing to humans and their world is a threat. (https://www.thefire.org/news/10-worst-censors-2024)
With this in mind, consider the calls for censorship on our college campuses. In Britain you can go to jail for saying the ‘wrong’ thing.
In Montag’s repressed society, wall screens and pills replace books. The wall screens produce for Montag’s wife, Mildred, her ‘family’. Their home has three wall screens. She wants a fourth wall screen. We learn how depressing life is for Mildred when she attempts to commit suicide with an overdose.
Consider that it is depressing to live in places run by Democrats: (Illinois state legislature passes assisted-suicide bill)
~~~
How did we get amenable to the Machine’s control over us and thus take on a mechanized way of seeing and relating to the world? Bradbury provides insight.
Fahrenheit 451 is about more than censorship. It is about conformity to state-imposed uniformity. Books in 451 were seen as creating discord. They had to go. For, with the advent of visual media, TV in particular, people no longer read and didn’t want to hear anything but what they heard on the screens. People wanted censorship and conformity to the screens.
As Captain Beatty tells Montag,
“’The fact is we didn’t get along well until photography came into its own. Then–motion pictures in the early twentieth century. Radio. Television. Things began to have mass.’
“Montag sat in bed, not moving.
“’And because they had mass, they became simpler,” said Beatty. “Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?’”
“’I think so.’”
“Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. ‘Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.”
“’Snap ending.’ Mildred nodded.”
Captain Beatty, again:
“You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.”
“Yes.”
Beatty’s Full Speech to Montag is provided below.
~~~~~
This our reality: the Machine and the Mechanical Hound.
Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine – On the Unmaking of Humanity has provided us a prophetic understanding of where we are and where we are headed. The Machine is moving us downstream, displacing us from what we value – in Kingsnorth’s words “the past, people, place, and prayer.”
Various entities participate and promote the Machine.
Mainstream media is run by the Machine. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, WSJ, NYT, WaPo and other outlets are the Machine’s mouthpieces. They talk down the “closed” and proclaim the “open.”
Both political parties promote the Machine. It is “progress” (and control) after all. The biggest threat to democracy is the Machine that consumes culture and churns out cogs.
Now that Mamdani has won the NYC mayor’s race, you can be sure that the Mechanical Hound will be released in NYC to enforce socialist jihad. Neither socialism nor Jihad exists without a Mechanical Hound.
Central planners – The World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the World Trade Organization – represent the Machine’s values.
It takes no stretch of the imagination to see ourselves in Montag’s society or to see technology as that which mimics the good but is easily programmed to avenge and punish citizens who break society’s rules. The Mechanical Hound can tract us down to dispose of the ‘closed’ and conform us to the “Open is good” of the Machine.
Bradbury said that with Fahrenheit 451 he wasn’t trying to predict the future but to prevent it. He wanted to protect the present.
The terror of the Hound of Hell is becoming a permanent feature of the “open” (closing up) brave new (upside down) world.
~~~~~
Read Fahrenheit 451: Beatty’s Speech to Montag
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Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity | Paul Kingsnorth
Demetri Kofinas speaks with Paul Kingsnorth, a novelist, essayist, and former environmental activist who first came on many people’s radars during the Covid-19 pandemic with the publication of his viral three-part series “The Vaccine Moment.” His current work explores the intersection of technology, culture, and the divine. In his latest book, Against the Machine, Kingsnorth examines how our increasingly mechanized way of seeing and relating to the world—and to ourselves—has contributed to the death of Western culture, and what it would take to reclaim our humanity and save our souls.
Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity | Paul Kingsnorth | Listen Notes
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How We Lost Ourselves to Technology—and How We Can Come Back
Do you feel uneasy? Do you feel a level of ambient anxiety? Do you feel despair, despite the fact that we live in the most luxurious time and place in human history?
The point is, you are not crazy. If you feel these things, you are simply attuned to reality—and it’s not a problem that’s solvable with less screen time or with meditation, red light, or sea moss.
Bari Weiss’ brilliant guest, Paul Kingsnorth, argues that the reason you feel this way is not this or that social media app or algorithm or culture war issue. That these are all superficial expressions of a thousand-year battle with what he calls “the Machine.” What exactly that means, he’ll explain tonight.
How We Lost Ourselves to Technology—and How We Can Come Back
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From Doug Ross’ substack:
Top 20 Chilling Insights from Yuri Bezmenov
How the KGB’s Playbook Is Destroying the West Today
Yuri Aleksandrovich Bezmenov (1939–1993), also known as Tomas David Schuman, was a Soviet journalist and KGB operative specializing in propaganda and ideological subversion.
Ideological subversion is the process of bending a society’s perception of reality so completely that it destroys itself.
The goal is to demoralize a society by undermining its moral, educational, and cultural foundations, making people unable to recognize or defend against threats.
Demoralization takes 15-20 years, the time needed to educate one generation with subversive ideas.
Read Bezmenov’s 20 key insights
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From the Free Press:
Peter Thiel Says Capitalism Is Failing the Young. Is He Right?
Five years ago, Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist behind PayPal and Palantir, sent a prescient email to Facebook executives.
“When 70% of millennials say they are pro-socialist,” he wrote, “we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why.”
The email went viral after democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s victory last week in the New York City mayoral race. Thiel then sat down with The Free Press’s Sean Fischer to explain what he saw in 2020 that no one else did.
Capitalism isn’t working for young people, Thiel said, citing burdensome student debt and regulations putting homeownership out of reach for many. “People assume everything still works, but objectively, it doesn’t. . . . If you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist.” (Emphasis mine.)
Thiel, who I see as also promoting the Machine, at least sees what the Machine is doing to the young.
And, of course, socialism/communism is a horrifying Machine that revels in terror to replace humanity with ideology.
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The Machine’s AI Alchemy
Mary Shelly’s Victor Frankenstein, obsessed with creating a human being, used alchemy and electricity and body parts to create a creature (without woman). . .
A group of Stanford University scientists . . . used artificial intelligence to design new viruses capable of killing bacteria.
In a world where AI keeps creeping in on uniquely human territory by composing sonnets, writing songs or forging friendships, this seemed to be crossing a new Rubicon. Depending on your belief system, AI was doing what evolution, or God, or scientists working with genome-engineering tools aim to do.
“Machines are rethinking what it is to be human, what it is to be alive,” said Michael Hecht, a chemistry professor at Princeton University focused on designing novel proteins and artificial genomes. “I find this very unsettling and staggering. They are devising, coming up with novel life forms. Darwin 2.0.”
AI-designed viruses raise fears over creating life – The Washington Post
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Filed under 2025 Current Events, AI, central planning, Economic World Forum, Globalism, Political Commentary, Progressivism, social commentary, Technocracy, technology, totalitarianism, WEF, World Economic Forum Tagged with Against the Machine, AI, artificial intelligence, censorship, central planning, Fahrenheit 451, Globalism, progressivism, technology, totalitarianism