In this edition of Liberty Podcast, host Steve Woodward highlights an excellent piece of writing by scholar and author Victor Davis Hanson, and explores the dangers of artificial intelligence technology as it becomes integrated with search engines.
But first, Steve recounts an encounter with Transportation Security Administration (TSA) crew members at Raleigh-Durham International Airport. The world is more dangerous than ever but the TSA remains fixated on “security as theater”. Did you know that a six-ounce bottle of hair care product remains on the most wanted lists at our airports?
Your humble host endured the indignity of a TSA agent, masked like it’s 2021, pawing through a carry-on bag, determined to expose a violation of an entirely arbitrary limit on fluid ounces. And she nailed me. My options were to “surrender” the hair product (as if it were a weapon of mass destruction) or place it in a piece of luggage, leave the security area, and return to the terminal to tag it and check it to its final destination. I surrendered. Around $30, tossed into a bin.
Meanwhile, every day, thousands of illegal immigrants from across the globe pour into the U.S. homeland without identification or medical documents. They are pampered in holding centers and sent to airports with free one-way tickets to America’s once-great cities. (They are even sent to separate security checkpoints). When a government background investigation clears a U.S. citizen to qualify for TSA Pre-Check that process should absolve him from having personal effects examined by poorly trained “security” agents. Instead, my hair product is styling some TSA agent’s boyfriend. Or, perhaps, the TSA donates the thousands of apprehended skin and hair products to organizations equipping illegal invaders with complimentary backpacks and cell phones. Every day is a spa day.
In his latest cultural commentary, Victor Davis Hanson succinctly explains how double standards and lawfare are leveraged to damage and potentially destroy Donald Trump. The Left knows Trump will not be stopped from returning to the White House as President if a fair and orderly election is allowed to unfold. So they are trying every nuanced legal trick they can dream up to dismantle his business empire and tarnish his reputation.
Most frustrating, writes Hanson, is that numerous nefarious figures on the Left, if subjected to the same unrelenting scrutiny, would probably already be in jail or permanently sidelined from public life by now.
Finally, in a recent segment of the live-streamed Charlie Kirk Show, host Charlie reveals how tech oligarchs and their minions have “fine-tuned” artificial intelligence so that it is no longer a reliable alternative to traditional search engines but, instead, a guardian of diversity, equity, and inclusion and a “woke nuclear weapon”. While it is humorous to see what happens when asking Google’s Gemini AI search to provide examples of images of “happy white couples” (the search delivers images of multi-racial couples almost exclusively), a longer-term threat of manipulated AI is the complete hijacking of truth and knowledge by social justice warriors.
Like a virus with no cure, AI is spreading. Are we powerless to control it?