Billionaire Peter Thiel had a fascinating televised moment the other day when asked by Piers Morgan what he thought about the public making a hero of the man suspected of murdering health insurance CEO Brian Thompson. The way he stumbled and stuttered when trying to answer the question gives a lot of insight into how terrified such people are of the public turning against them one day.
“And to those who think this shooter is a hero, because he did it because he said this healthcare executive is presiding over a healthcare system which kills thousands of Americans by denying them cover, what would you say to them?” Morgan asked.
Thiel paused for a long time, and then stuttered for a long time, and then eventually got out the words, “It’s, I don’t know what, what to say? I, I think I still think you have, you should try to make an argument. And I, I think this is, this is you should, you know, there may be things wrong with our health care system, but you have, you have to make an argument, and you have to try to find a way to convince people and and change, change it by by that, and this is, you know, this is not going to work.”
For those who don’t know, Thiel is a proper deep state oligarch who owes his vast fortune to his enmeshment within the US military-intelligence machine. His company Palantir is a CIA-backed surveillance and data mining tech company with intimate ties to both the US intelligence cartel and to Israel, playing a crucial role in both the US empire’s sprawling surveillance network and Israeli atrocities against Palestinians. He backed Trump in 2016, and Vice President-Elect JD Vance was a protégé of his, so this man is thoroughly entrenched in the halls of power.
Thiel’s blustering response when asked what he thought about the public support we are seeing for the practice of assassinating health insurance CEOs reveals a lot about the kinds of things that keep men like Peter Thiel up at night.
Plutocrats like Thiel are constantly thinking about the fact that ordinary people vastly outnumber them and can kill them at any time. They think about it way more often than ordinary people do. It’s a point that they are acutely aware of at all times. It consumes their attention. They are always working on manipulating public consciousness to ensure that we don’t think as much as they do about how many more of us there are of them, and how we don’t have to put up with their domination of our society if we don’t want to.
As Michael Parenti once put it:
“I tell students when they say, ‘Oh they don’t care what we think. They ignore us’, and all that, and I say, ‘Oh no, no. That’s the only thing they care about you. The only thing they care about you is what you’re thinking. They don’t care if you eat correctly, they don’t care how your living conditions are, they don’t care that they’ve built up an inhuman and irrational traffic system that’s strangulating us and polluting our air, they don’t care about anything. The only thing about you they care about is what you’re thinking. In the morning, they start, ‘What’s going to be the story today? How do we manipulate, how do we control, how do we contain, how do we influence, how do we act upon what it is that they have in their minds?’”
Manipulating public consciousness is of existential importance to the ruling class, because no matter how many billions of dollars you amass, at the end of the day you’re still a soft skin sack of blood and bones like anybody else, and you share a society with huge numbers of people who can very easily hurt you if they want to. That’s why our minds are constantly being hammered with propaganda into accepting the status quo politics upon which our rulers have built their kingdoms.
But we’re seeing the propaganda losing its grip on our minds. Hollywood tried to train people to believe heroes look like soldiers and cops, or billionaires using their wealth to become Iron Man and Batman, and then the people chose as their hero a guy who was arrested for shooting a health insurance CEO. The other day a DJ threw up pictures of the suspected shooter Luigi Mangione during his concert and drew cheers from the crowd — and this was at a Disney-themed show.
So that’s why the empire managers are pushing to get their killer robots up and running as quickly as possible.
Israel is reportedly preparing to deploy dozens of weapons systems in the West Bank which are capable of firing deadly rounds without human intervention, meaning fully autonomous killing machines as opposed to remote-controlled. These killer robots have already been in use on Israel’s border with Gaza.
Various military robots have been tested in Gaza since Israel’s onslaught on the enclave began last year, and now they’re expanding the field testing of their murderbots to the West Bank as well. Of all the horrible things Israel and its western backers do to the Palestinians, among the most evil is the way they use them as lab rats to field test new weapons systems so the rest of the empire can learn how effective those systems are.
You may be sure that empire managers like Peter Thiel are watching these developments with keen interest. Militarized robots are the anti-guillotine. They’re the final solution to the ancient “there are a lot more of us than there are of our rulers” problem. Everyone with wealth and power has been eyeing their incremental rollout with intense interest while trying to play it cool.
So at this point we’re essentially looking at a race to see if the oligarchic empire can manufacture the necessary environment to allow the use of robotic security forces to lock their power in place forever before the masses get fed up with the increasing inequalities and abuses of the status quo and decide to force a better system into existence.
