The Highwire with Del Bigtree - AI AND THE GLOBAL CONTROL GRID

Episode Date: July 26, 2025

Investigative journalist Alex Newman joins the show to expose how AI, transhumanism, and digital surveillance are merging into a global control system. From digital IDs to CBDCs, he warns the world is sleepwalking into a “digital gulag” designed to monitor and manipulate every move.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

This is the biggest conversation really on my desk right now is this rapid build-out of artificial intelligence. I want to remind people that before COVID happened, this was just kind of a pie in the sky someday maybe, you know, we're going to have this great artificial intelligence that are do all our work for us. We'll have so much leisure time. And then you had a lot of people talking about these, this massive futuristic view of what artificial intelligence is.

COVID happened, and then all of a sudden it was just dropped in our lap. Here it is. And now we're in it. I didn't get a vote to you, but society's changing rapidly like this. Artificial intelligence is transforming the way we live. Your fitness tracker, that's AI powered. The music recommendations you get on your various playlist. Guess what?

AI power. For all human history, human beings have been the smartest beings on the planet. Now human beings have created something that is far smarter than they are. People are concerned about immediate problems, maybe it will influence some election, they are concerned about technological unemployment, bias. My main concern is long-term super-intelligence systems we cannot control, which can take us out. We are building more and more these AIs that seem to have deceptive intentions and behavior and one that preserve themselves at the expense of our moral instructions.

It's pretty obvious that if we create new and that are way smarter than us. There's no guarantee that we're not going to totally lose power to them. The biggest risk is obviously human extinction that every single person on the planet is dead. I can't see a path that guarantees safety. We're entering a period of great uncertainty where we're dealing with things we've never dealt with before.

I think we should be cautious with AI. I think there should be some government oversight because it affects it's a danger to the public. In that clip, you may not realize, but those are some of the founders of large language models, some of the programmers of the base AI. And obviously you have Elon Musk in there. I mean, this would be akin to people going into a workshop and saying, trust me, we're going to go in and make something that's going to help humanity. And then minutes later, they come running out, the workshop's on fire, and they're going,

it's going to kill us all. That's what that is. And so I want to bring out our next guest. He is an amazing investigative journalist. He's been looking at this issue for a couple years now with increasing scrutiny. He's looked at a lot of other issues. We've played clips of him before. His name's Alex Newman. Alex Newman.

Alex Newman. Award-winning investigative journalist. CEO of Liberty Sentinel Media. Also the author of Inductrinating Our Children to Death. You serve as the director of G. Edward Griffin's Red Pill University. What role should public education be playing in the lives of the American people? In my opinion, the government really should have very little to no role in the educating of our children. They all told us what their agenda was.

It was to turn the children into little socialist, little communists, little humanists, and away from traditional American values, biblical morality, and these really cornerstones of what America was founded on. I think the best option that a parent has is to just make the decision right now. I'm going to reclaim control over the education of my children. and I really believe that homeschooling is the gold standard. Agenda 2030 was signed by every national government in the world in 2015 on behalf of the United States.

It's a plan to totally transform every element of our lives. In fact, the head of the UN General Assembly at the time called it the master plan for humanity. You've got to transform agriculture. You've got to transform the food supply. You've got to transform every element of life. You're trying to subtly, through deception, through fraud, to overthrow our political institutions, overthrow our freedom, not openly,

not by saying, hey guys, my idea is we should all give up our freedom and live in a collective society, but surreptitiously by indoctrinating young people. They are building what I call a digital global gulag, a digital panopticon where everything you do will not just be surveilled, that's a big part of it, but also manipulated. We're talking about a control grid here

that is beyond, I think, anything that a normal person could even begin to imagine. All right, I am joined now by Alex Newman. Alex, thank you for joining me. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much, Jeffrey. Alex, I want to jump right into this. Artificial Intelligence, we were told that this was kind of an idea like the Jetsons before COVID.

It was coming for decades before COVID. At some point, we'd have this technology that's going to make our lives better. There's always been this promise by government or by industry or both that this technology is going to come. and it's going to just revolutionize society. And it was dropped in our laps directly after COVID. Now here it is. What have you found looking at artificial intelligence and the dangers this poses?

Well, thank you, Jeffrey. And I do think this is one of the most consequential stories, probably of all of human history. This is so huge. It's very difficult for a person to comprehend who hasn't really been studying this for years because it is going to transform every element of life. Now, looking at it from my life,

a most basic and fundamental level, it is a tool. And it can be used for good purposes and it can be used for evil purposes. And that's true of any tool. A hammer could be used to build a house or a hammer could be used to murder somebody. A firearm could be used to defend innocent people. It could be used to murder innocent people. And I think the same is true for artificial intelligence. When used properly as a tool, it can help mankind ease the burden of labor, produce more material prosperity, solve some of the big problems that humanity has been facing for basically all of its distance. But, and there's a big but here, it's kind of like nuclear weapons. It also has more destructive potential than probably anything else in the entire history of mankind. You know,

nuclear bomb could take out a city. Here we're talking about a tool, a technology that could take out the world, that could take out humanity. And when you look at the people who are creating this, when you look at the people who are designing this, when you look at the most basic level, we're talking about computer code here. When you look at the people who are coding this, Many of them have documented incredibly nefarious intentions. They believe there's too many of us on the planet. They believe that we're better off without individual rights, that we're better off being ruled by them.

And so when you take a tool that powerful and you put it in the hands of people that evil, you're asking for trouble, Jeffers. And what you just described there at the end, that impulse, that human impulse for control has always been with us, you know, in modern humanity. There's always been groups of people that have that thought, but they've never had a tool this powerful to achieve that thought. And so I want to drill that point home.

This is a supercharged tool to do this, and that's what you're pointing at. It absolutely is. And this is true in so many different respects. We wouldn't even have time if we had a week to talk about this. It can surveil you and monitor everything you do. Every click you make on the internet, every text message you send, all of it. gathered up into supercomputers, processed through algorithms, run through artificial intelligence to determine the significance of it. Not only can it monitor and surveil all of that, it can then

start manipulating the physical environment when you start combining it with robotics, when you start combining it with weapons systems, when you start combining it with the education of our children, which is one of the big areas that I have looked at. People don't realize the AI has already invaded the classroom. In 2019, the UN brought together governments in Beijing. They came out with the Beijing Consensus Agreement on Artificial Intelligence and Education. And they're openly calling for, governments are openly calling for here with the help of the UN using AI, not just to gather all this data on what your children believe, what they think, how they think, but also using these tools to manipulate and change their attitudes, their beliefs, their fundamental worldview. So we're talking about something here that can not just watch and surveil everything you do, but that also can start manipulating the things that you do. And so a lot of the central planners of previous decades, previous generations who thought,

hey, we'll control everything. They said, well, we don't have enough data. We don't have enough computing power. We're now crossing that Rubicon. And for humanity, this is an incredible time and the time filled with incredible danger. And I find the timing is fascinating because the agenda 2030 of the United Nations, this push, this sustainable push that's seeing farmers get kicked off their land, that's seeing hillsides get covered with solar panels.

you're seeing this push really being rejected by European countries. You're seeing this push being rejected by the politics here in the United States in this cycle. So here comes AI to almost save that agenda. Do you see it that way? Absolutely. And I think that is what the totalitarians are going to eventually try to use AI for, to save their agenda for global tyranny. I mean, if you listen to them carefully, they've been pretty open about this now for several decades.

They want a one-world political, economic, and even religious system. And they've been telling us this openly for a long time. I've been going to UN summit since 2009. I've watched them talk about these kinds of things. But frankly, people are not all that interested in this. They're not interested in giving up their national sovereignty. They're certainly not interested in giving up their individual liberty.

And so in comes artificial intelligence, this incredible tool that has the ability to manipulate people down to a personalized level. And again, to go back to the classroom, you see this so clearly in schools. The big trend now is personalized learning and socially emotional learning. What they're doing here is through the artificial intelligence devising individual programs targeted to a particular individual with all his or her quirks and preexisting attitudes and biases and beliefs. They're targeting these programs to manipulate what they think. And so in comes these technologies informing what's happening in the classroom, informing what is going to appear on your television screen with a very, very advanced understanding.

of what it takes to manipulate people to get people to surrender their freedoms, whether it be fear, whether it be ignorance, whatever it takes. You combine all of that together. And I think it is absolutely clear. I don't know that it's clear that they will succeed, Jeffrey, but it is absolutely clear that they will attempt to use these technologies to eliminate human freedom, to eliminate human privacy, and to basically move us in a direction that is so radical, you almost sound crazy talking about it, but these people do. You listen to Yuval Noah Harari, who says that within 100 years, humanity is essentially not going to exist anymore. Earth is going to be dominated by these creatures that are a fusion of technological components

with biological components. I mean, it gets really weird. They think they're going to evolve into gods, Homo Deus, as Yuval Noah Harare has put it at the World Economic Forum and in his book. That goes into my next point. You have artificial intelligence that has been built, has been marketed to us as, well, it's just going to make your workflow a little easier. It's going to transcribe your Zoom calls.

Isn't that going to be great for you? But again, like you said, the people that are pushing this behind the scenes or now out in public, they have a lot of different goals. And there's a clip right here, I don't know if you can see this, but there's a clip right here of some of these luminaries talking about like, like, you have a Horari. Take a look at this. You're working to build basically an interface to the brain. Yeah, electrode to neuron interface at a micro level. Okay, what is it?

I'm going to have like a plug in my head that's going to fit into a hard drive? Like, how does that work? Yeah, yeah. A chip and a bunch of tiny wires. This would be implanted surgically. And it would do what could you input? Could you download Jim? Yes.

What do you think? The long-term aspiration with neural linguists would be to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence. What we have seen so far, it's corporations and governments collecting data about where we go, who we meet, what movies we watch. The next phase is the surveillance going under our skin. COVID is critical because this is what convinces people to accept, to legitimize total biometric surveillance. And Alex, I want to bring to a point, a finer point on what you were saying is we've always had this space where human

creation was by our own volition. We created something, it was in reality and we would use it to better our reality. Computing came along, we created computing, and it was always kind of relegated to the computer sector. But now we have this switch. We have the computer sector in the form of our official intelligence reaching out, almost like this hand coming out of the TV or the computer, to influence our environment. And as you're seeing with those people that just played on that montage, they're saying not only is it going to influence your environment and control your environment, it's going into your body and reaching into your body. and the human now is getting absorbed almost like the matrix into this cyberspace.

Yeah, and again, Jeffrey, this stuff sounds so crazy. You know, somebody who hadn't heard of AI suddenly, you know, pops into this conversation and says, what are you people talking about? But this is the reality. They have been talking about this openly for years now. Elon Musk years ago was talking about how NeurLink would have the ability, not just to predict what your brain was going to do, not just to read your activity in your brain, your brain waves,

but also to write on your brain. And he was talking about this years ago. And so we're moving very rapidly now toward what Klaus Schwab described in his book on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the fusion of our biological systems with technological systems, which results in the creation of a whole new world, right?

And so now you have this kind of convergence between things that like new agers and occultists have been talking about with a one-world brain converging with technological realities. And I don't expect that, you know, next year or even 10 years from now, the federal government's going to come out and demand that you insert a neuralink chip or whatever competitor comes along within your brain. But the pressure we're going to see over the next 10, 20, 30 years to upgrade ourselves,

to improve ourselves, to avoid becoming obsolete is going to grow progressively stronger and stronger to the point where it's going to take a rock hard will, an incredibly solid spine, to say, no, I'm not going to participate in that. Thank you. I'm going to retain my humanity. even understanding fully that that may cause you to have a serious handicap as far as the rest of the world is concerned. So this is very dangerous stuff, and I would recommend, Jeffrey, that people not be scared of these things, but that they start thinking about them now, start talking about them now, because we need to have not just a national discussion anymore, but a global discussion about what this means and the future of humanity.

Yeah, and I would add to that a discussion within your own families with your children. We covered a study. There was an MIT study that showed the large language learning models, is basically artificial intelligence. They took college students and they were writing essays and they had a group write it with AI or a group write it basically with their own brain. They found, you know, not spectacularly,

that the AI people, it just basically shut down their brain. It downregulated their brain. Where people that use their brain, actually it created all this new creativity and these new linkages in their brain and they learned and they could remember what they learned and restate it. So do you think children, as they're interacting with this, Obviously, you're stating the risks and how they're being targeted specifically.

Do you think parents, by holding their children back from this, will have a competitive disadvantage if the rest of the world's doing it? Is there a safe level of interacting with this AI? I mean, I don't even know if that it can be answered right now. Yeah, I think you're right, Jeffrey. That's a very difficult question to answer. And I think you're right also about families need to start discussing this right now. AI, like I said at the beginning, can be a valuable tool.

It can help us as individuals and it can help us as societies. do some important things that would have been very difficult, if not impossible, prior to the development of these technologies. But at the same time, I mean, that MIT study showed us what should have already been intuitive, right? If you allow an artificial system to do your thinking for you, just like what happens if you lay in a hospital bed for a month, your muscles atrophy, well, your brain is going to start atrophying if you don't use it for thinking. And so as far as I'm concerned, I've got six children, we are not going to incorporate AI

in a major way into their education. They know what it is. They know how to interact with it. they know some of the risks. And it's something that, of course, we talk about at the dinner table. But we're not going to allow AI to become a substitute for research, for thinking, for analysis, for logic, or for reason. And I think way down the line, once you have a good education, once you know how to think, once you know how to use your brain, AI can then come in and supplement that in a way that is beneficial. But if you start substituting your thinking for AI, it's going to lead to disaster. And this is a question that school boards and school districts all across the

country are wrestling with right now. We've got, of course, the executive order from Donald Trump to inject AI into all public education across the country. We've got the UN calling for all education systems around the world to integrate AI and communist China. They have now mandated it as of this year. So that is now already in the classrooms. And frankly, I don't think people are talking enough about the risks here, the risks of losing our personalities, losing our own cultures, losing our families, and even losing our humanity. And so I hope that people will seriously think about these things, maybe tap the brakes a little bit. I don't know that this can be stopped anymore at this point, but I know that we really need to be having these discussions

now rather than once it's too late to do anything. What do you say to the people that can say, like you just said, there may be no way stopping it. So let's try. We can train it. We can train it to be empathetic. We can train it to be creative like humans. We can train it to love humans. What do you say to that kind of mindset knowing about how you mentioned the control grid that is bringing some of this in and the people behind it? Well, and I think it's important that we do have efforts to kind of put guardrails on AI that would keep it within ethical boundaries. But one of the big problems that we have is that the main companies that are at the forefront of this are run by people who we know come from a very different perspective. I mean, even if you go back and look at that early press conference that Donald Trump called where they were talking about, using AI to kind of map you as an individual,

determine what kind of MRNA concoction you ought to be injected with. I mean, this stuff is, in my opinion, absolutely ridiculous. And one of the pretexts that they've used, Jeffrey, to kind of argue against any kind of regulation, any kind of controls is the idea that, well, if we don't allow these people to do

whatever they want with this technology, then Communist China is going to use it for evil purposes. And this argument, I think, falls short on several levels. First of all, commonest China is mostly copying our technology. They're really not doing a lot of innovation. They're really just ripping off what American taxpayers and American institutions and research and development departments are producing. So that's not a good argument. And even if it were true that commonest China might use these technologies for nefarious purposes,

that is certainly not an argument for not allowing these people to use these technologies against us in the United States for nefarious purposes. So I think we really need to look very carefully at these arguments that are being made. We do need, I think, different kinds of controls, and especially when we're talking about military applications here. I mean, the AI is that we have available to autonomous drones, basically, yeah. Absolutely. And now with drones becoming the size of mosquitoes, they've got technologies people can't even dream about. We've got to have some public oversight of this. And I think Congress and state legislatures are appropriate places for these discussions. And I guess one last question. Do you think there is, is there any truth to the idea that, you know, AI was dropped. upon us right when we exited COVID.

So you had a population we had Dr. Michael Nils on, and he said that COVID changed the brain of a lot of people to, you know, it was traumatic. And do you think this idea AI was rolled out and kind of thrown in our face after COVID as a plan? Or do you think this was just, we've been working on this for decades

and it just happened to come out in 20 whatever? Yeah, very good question, Jeffrey. And I'm not a coincidence theorist. I don't like it. I don't like to try to use coincidence to explain things. The reality is, if you look at, for example, what the head of the IMF was saying, Cristallina Georgieva, if you look at what Klaus Schwab was saying, if you look at what these people were arguing, even early on during COVID and even before,

they knew these things were coming. Ray Kurzweil, Chief of Engineering at Google, they knew these technologies were coming. And they were actually very pleased that COVID forced everything into the digital world from the classroom to the work environment. These things were manipulated behind the scenes. Your average person has no clue. But behind the scenes, there are powerful people working. together to take your freedom and to run your life for you. And the sooner we all realize that,

the better off we will all be.