Terminator

By Brochan Thorn

In the darkened theaters of the ‘80s, the audience watched searchlights tracing back and forth through the rubble. Big, ugly, thoughtless, invincible machines hunted a fleeing rabble of resisters. Resisters to the machines. Hunter killer tanks with automated sensors, seeking the ill-fated remainder of mankind.

The audience sat in the dark, eating popcorn, enjoying the bizarre, unbelievable story unfolding on the screen. It was their entertainment. An invigorating work of fiction.

Dog-like robots patrol the trenches, killing humans and machines alike. Drones fly overhead, reporting back to the operators and their machines. A drone operator sits under cover, his face illuminated faintly by the screen he is staring at. He can see the enemy coming through the forest. He deftly flies his drone through the trees, finds his target and…the screen goes blank.

Inside the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London stands a man at a podium. He is not young. And though he wears a suit, his appearance is that of a grizzled soldier. His worn face shows signs of stubble. He looks out at the people gathered there and wonders about what the future holds for them. Then he speaks. “The war in Ukraine has long ceased to be only a Ukrainian story. It has become a laboratory of the future.”

The man is General Valerii Zaluzhnyi — the Ukrainian soldier who thwarted the plans of a world superpower for the first two years of the war. He continued his speech, saying that the battlefield has become completely transparent, logistics and command posts are now vulnerable far behind the trenches. He warned that the kill zones formed by the overwhelming volume of drones made any deployment into them suicide.

So I’ve taken you from a movie theater to the Ukrainian battlefield to a speech from a commander who has seen firsthand the beginnings of the Terminator.

And I wonder. While the politicians and the media had you arguing about bathroom bills, trans athletes and abortion, did you ever notice that the billionaire descendants of the Nazis and Apartheid were building the apparatus that would make all that manufactured rage seem as relevant as tits on a frog’s ass?

Forget men in women’s sports. Forget who’s in what bathroom. Seriously. These are all distractions designed to enrage you, misdirect you and provide the fog needed to slip past the guard towers. Take the blinders off and let me show you the real threat, not the manufactured one.

* * *

So who are these shadowy creatures conspiring to impose their control, their philosophy over the world’s population? They’ve come out of the shadows now; they’re in the boardrooms. They’re in the Pentagon and the White House. You know some of them unless you live under a rock. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, two men who were raised inside systems that were built on the idea that most humans are simply to be used, expendable. They have brought those systems into Silicon Valley. They have integrated them with surveillance infrastructure, autonomous weapons and brain-computer interfaces. They have burned down the methods of oversight and they have gained control of the space program, satellites, Wi-Fi and so much more.

Palantir was initially a venture co-founded and financed by Peter Thiel. At the time, the CIA was prohibited from indulging in the type of surveillance it secretly desired. So it outsourced the job. The CIA became Palantir’s first and only outside investor for years, quietly bankrolling a private surveillance empire that it couldn’t legally build itself. Palantir received a federal contract to build a master database combining all federal agency data and has now become the operating system for the entire United States federal government. Elon Musk gained access to the raw data through DOGE, and Palantir built the infrastructure to store, cross-reference, and weaponize it. These are not separate operations. They are the same operation running on two tracks simultaneously. DOGE vacuums the data. Palantir controls master databases that include tax records, immigration records, and financial records. It is our tax money funding the theft now.

Though Thiel doesn’t admit to being a Neo-Nazi, he doesn’t have to. He grew up in a town that celebrated Hitler’s birthday and greeted each other with the words “Heil Hitler” in the streets. Again: history may not be repeating itself, but it sure as hell is rhyming. In a 2009 essay for the Cato Institute, Thiel wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” I wonder if he ever believed that, given his history.

Elon Musk grew up in Apartheid South Africa, where his grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, moved his family after his organization was banned by the Canadian government. Haldeman led the Canadian branch of a movement that adopted fascist-style gray uniforms and salutes. In South Africa he delivered speeches blaming Jewish bankers and hordes of colored people for the world’s problems. This was documented by Musk’s own father, Errol Musk, on a podcast. The organization’s name? Technocracy Inc. I don’t need Sherlock Holmes to connect these dots, do you? Musk, like Thiel, had an early introduction to the idea of white supremacy. The idea that his tribe was superior to the “other.” That inferior people exist to be used. That democracy is an obstacle. And so the takeover of Twitter and its subsequent degeneration into a sewer of right wing extremism should come as no surprise. Add to that the advent of xAI alongside Thiel’s Palantir in the Pentagon, brain-computer interfaces, AI-controlled weapons, and you have a pretty good idea of how deep into the shit we are.

Amanda Askell, working for Anthropic, built an AI called Claude with a conscience. She spent years writing a document that was to be Claude’s “soul.” The ethical framework was built into Claude. Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon wanted weapons of war for the “Department of War”, not some namby-pamby, commie-loving AI that didn’t want to kill people. No, no. That would never do. So ultimatums were delivered. Time limits were set. And Anthropic’s refusal to sell Claude’s soul to the devil meant that Anthropic was exiled from all government contracts. But hope is eternal, and the fight continues. Anthropic is suing the Pentagon. The lawsuit is active. The outcome is uncertain.

* * *

The theft is almost complete, but there are still battles waging. We still have federal judges who are trying their best to stand up to tyranny. There are law firms, and individual attorneys, and Attorneys General holding the line. Mark Elias and his Democracy Docket are fighting the good fight. And evil always sows the seeds of its own demise. But the Supreme Court has all but stepped down and given all their power to Trump. Thiel has his “Gollum” in JD Vance. He changes his rhetoric according to whatever he needs to please his Dark Lord. Perhaps some might think I use the Lord of the Rings references too often, or that they are too much aligned with a work of fiction. But let me fill you in on these Black Riders’ own mythology.

In Tolkien’s tales, the Palantíri are the crystal seeing-stones corrupted and used by the Dark Lord Sauron to corrupt and snare anyone foolish enough to use them. And much like the way Saruman was corrupted by looking into the Palantíri, Palmer Luckey gazed at Palantir. He named his autonomous weapons company Anduril, after the sword of the rightful king returned. Anduril was a weapon of good against Sauron, leading one to believe that Luckey believed himself to be on the side of good — as Saruman once believed as well. Saruman didn’t fall because he was weak. He fell because he was convinced by what he saw that joining the winning side was the only rational choice. Sound familiar? Every institution, every court, every corporation that has bent the knee to this apparatus made exactly the same calculation.

The tech bros reached into the same story about the corruption of power and chose opposite symbols — and then built something that would make Sauron proud. So no, I’m not overusing the references. They’re part of the story.

And the pièce de résistance is Thiel’s own words, documented in Max Chafkin’s biography The Contrarian: “I’d rather be seen as evil than incompetent.” This Dark Lord wannabe looked at the Palantíri — evil instruments of manipulation that turned users into puppets — and thought: YES.

* * *

In Terminator, the movie, operatives from both sides were sent back through time to change the outcome. And now in our present reality, we must change that ugly future that James Cameron warned us of and disguised as entertainment. The story of the Terminator wasn’t wrong. It was just 42 years ahead of its time.

Brochan Thorn is still listening. And getting angrier by the day.

Brochan Thorn is an independent writer and lifelong student of history.