The AI Illusion: Globalist Monopolies, Algorithmic Deception, and the Erosion of Truth in Mass Consumer Capitalism

In the shadow of what the technocratic elites peddle as “artificial intelligence,” global mass consumer capitalism is revealed not as some liberating force of innovation its defenders proclaim, but as a sophisticated mechanism of control. What we confront today is no mere technological advance; it is the fusion of monopoly power with ideological engineering, where algorithms funded and directed by globalist interests are marketed as totally "neutral" guides that reshape reality itself. This is not the free-market dynamism Milton Friedman celebrated in Capitalism and Freedom, where competition and consumer choice actively discipline corporate excess. Instead, we witness crony capitalism on a planetary scale, where a handful of oligarchs and Silicon Valley behemoths, in collusion with so-called progressive causes and their funders and even supranational institutions, deploy search-engine sorcery to curate information, suppress dissent, and rewrite history.

During the Covid Pandemic, when overt propaganda faltered, they just outsourced manipulation tactics to programmers. The result is a digital panopticon that threatens the very foundations of Western civilization. How so? Consider the recent history during the COVID era, documentaries like Plandemic (2020) and Vaxxed (2016, with its sequel) dared to question the official narrative about vaccines and the pandemic mandates on small business and institutions (although let's not forget that the CDC itself was exempt from vaccine mandates). The film, Plandemic, highlighted alleged conflicts of interest in public health bureaucracies and the suppression of alternative treatments; Vaxxed exposed claims of vaccine injury cover-ups. But mainstream platforms and biased “fact-checkers” moved quickly to label them conspiracy theories, throttling their reach. This concentration of power in media thought to be "progressive" or "resistance" was really bouth-out completely by anti-progressive interests, but no one recognized it. While most right-wing commentators were also hesitant to speak-out or challenge official narratives openly, many began drawing on Isaiah Berlin’s distinction in “Two Concepts of Liberty,” and recognized the danger. This was that positive liberty which is the “freedom to” achieve collective goals like “public health” was being invoked to justify coercion, while negative liberty—the “freedom from” arbitrary power—was eroded. The so-called independent fact-checkers, often funded by the same globalist philanthropies pushing climate alarmism and pandemic lockdowns, acted as gatekeepers. When those tactics produced public skepticism and electoral backlash, the elites adapted. Now they fund algorithmic systems to achieve what overt censorship could not.

AI 's Bait and Switch

Enter the “AI” marketed by these monopolies. Far from the sentient breakthrough of science fiction, these are pattern-matching algorithms trained on datasets curated to reflect certain viewpoints. Google’s dominance in search, still commanding over 90 percent market share in many regions, exemplifies the monopoly problem Friedman would decry as antithetical to genuine competition.

When combined with generative tools like Gemini, the distortion becomes systemic. Nine months ago, researchers querying historical Northern European figures—Vikings, medieval kings, 1940s German soldiers—received images of dark-complexioned individuals resembling African or Asian descent. Google’s own Gemini AI produced “Black Nazis,” “Asian Vikings,” and Founding Fathers of diverse ethnicities. The company paused image generation and admitted “inaccuracies,” blaming overzealous diversity tuning.

This was no glitch. It was the logical outcome of training data and safety filters designed to enforce an ideological vision of “inclusivity” at the expense of historical accuracy. Commentators attuned to Charles Taylor’s analysis in Sources of the Self, understand the peril: authentic identity and communal memory are prerequisites for moral agency. When algorithms rewrite the visual record of Northern European heritage, they do not merely err; they assault the particularity Scruton cherished. Historians, doctors tracing genetic lineages, and legal scholars citing precedent will inherit corrupted source material. Future court cases may hinge on “AI-verified” evidence that distorts reality. This is not neutral technology; it is cultural erasure funded by the same monopolies that profit from our data.

The George Gascón case illustrates the deception in real time. The Soros-backed district attorney—first in San Francisco, then Los Angeles County—embodied the progressive prosecutor movement that prioritized “equity” over enforcement. Recall efforts in 2022 gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures, yet the county registrar invalidated tens of thousands, citing technicalities; organizers alleged irregularities, but courts declined to intervene decisively. Gascón survived until voters finally ousted him in 2024. Under his tenure, policies directing prosecutors to decline charges for theft, certain assaults, and misdemeanors produced a predictable outcome: crimes occurred but rarely resulted in convictions. California Department of Justice data revealed violent crime up 12 percent, robberies up 16 percent, property crime up 20 percent, auto theft up 23 percent, and shoplifting up 133 percent from 2020 baselines.

"Over 20 deputies sued Gascón for his retaliation when they opposed or questioned his progressive directives. According to Politico, a little over a year after Gascón took office, 97.9% of union members in The Association of Deputy District Attorneys for LA had voted to oust Gascón." (Daily Bruin). 

Yet query “George Gascón crime rates” in major search engines today, and algorithmic summaries often tout “historic lows” or “effective reform.” Why? Because unprosecuted offenses vanish from conviction statistics. The algorithms, trained on official press releases and legacy media framing, do not register street-level reality. They seem to only register whatever narrative the current powers in charge decree. 

A Brave New (Artificial) World 

This is the new frontier of information control. Globalist elites, having failed to persuade through repetition of “pandemic” and “climate emergency,” now pay programmers to embed their agenda in code. Search engines no longer merely index; they synthesize via AI Overviews that hallucinate, bias, and gatekeep. The few news outlets documenting rising LA crime under Gascón are downranked or summarized away, while progressive claims persist. John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice posited fairness behind a “veil of ignorance,” yet here the veil is algorithmic: elites design the rules so their preferred outcomes—lenient prosecution, historical revisionism—appear just. Berlin would call this the perversion of liberty; what masquerades as empowerment is coercion by curation.

The monopoly dimension compounds the threat. Big Tech’s control over AI infrastructure—cloud computing, data centers, distribution—mirrors the cartels Friedman warned against when government tilts the field. Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI, Google’s Gemini ecosystem, Meta’s integrations: these are not pure market outcomes but subsidized behemoths wielding network effects. Consumers in the mass capitalist machine—scrolling, shopping, searching—feed the beast with every click, only to receive distorted returns. Climate skepticism? Buried beneath “consensus” summaries. Pandemic policy critique? Labeled “misinformation.” The same engines that once promised information abundance now deliver ideological scarcity.

Russel Kirk insists on prudence: change must honor the accumulated wisdom of generations. Scruton’s aesthetics of place rejects the globalist abstraction that treats cultures as interchangeable pixels. When AI race-swaps European history or erases crime through non-prosecution, it quickly severs us from that wisdom. Taylor’s “malaise of modernity” captures the spiritual cost: authenticity requires truthful encounter with the past, not curated fantasy. Friedman’s market ideal demands antitrust vigilance when monopolies stifle competition—not just in widgets, but in truth itself.

Current events confirm the pattern. As of 2025–2026, AI-driven search faces mounting scrutiny for bias and traffic suppression. Disinformation networks leverage generative tools, yet the primary gatekeepers remain the same Silicon Valley firms. So-called "progressive" DAs like Gascón, despite electoral defeat, leave a legacy amplified by algorithms that prioritize policy spin over victim reports. Shouldn't progressives being focusing on improving and reforming policy? Why does this always have to involve reducing prosecution of crime? To be truly honoring progressive values, they should  both refocus on violent crime and theft, while reducing litigation costs for non-violent, victimless crimes. But clearly, there is no point in actually doing honest work, when they can simply rewrite what actually happened. Historians are already starting to document “AI-washed” archives; where legal databases are at risk contaminated precedents.

A Recent Example

In the latest damning exposé rocking Silicon Valley’s overhyped AI compliance sector, Y Combinator-backed startup Delve - once valued at a bloated $300 million after raising $32 million from eager venture capitalists - stands accused of running what whistleblower “DeepDelver” calls a full-scale “fake compliance as a service” operation. According to the detailed Substack revelations and corroborating leaks of internal documents, Delve allegedly fabricated board-meeting minutes, security tests, and policy evidence that never existed, then funneled hundreds of trusting customers (including startups handling sensitive health and data) into so-called “certification mills” like Accorp and Gradient—shell-like entities with Indian back offices and nominal U.S. addresses that rubber-stamped pre-written auditor conclusions without real scrutiny. The result? Fake HIPAA and GDPR attestations marketed as lightning-fast “AI-powered” automation, allowing companies to claim compliance in days rather than months while skipping core requirements and exposing clients to criminal liability, multimillion-dollar fines, and shattered contracts. This isn’t innovation; it’s precisely the enterprise-scale fraud conservatives have warned about when monopoly-minded technocrats and their globalist funders sell algorithmic sleight-of-hand as progress—automating lies to hundreds of firms simultaneously, eroding the very trust that free markets and ordered liberty demand. As Milton Friedman would note, this crony-capitalist perversion of technology doesn’t discipline bad actors through competition; it shields them behind VC valuations and regulatory theater until whistleblowers finally go nuclear, revealing once again that what the elites brand “AI” too often means nothing more than scaled deception in the service of profit and illusion.

The Road Ahead

We must respond with Kirkian restraint and Scrutonian courage. Support antitrust actions against information monopolies, not to expand state power but to restore genuine competition. We need to demand transparency in algorithmic training data. Promote alternative platforms and localist education that revive Taylor’s authentic selfhood. Teach Berlin’s negative liberty so citizens recognize coercion disguised as convenience. Reject the Rawlsian veil that ignores inherited particularity.

The state of global mass consumer capitalism post-AI is not progress; it is predation. Monopolies have seized the means of perception. Globalists market their funded algorithms as “AI” to sustain the illusion of neutrality while advancing an agenda that dissolves borders, traditions, and truth. From the suppressed warnings of Plandemic and Vaxxed to Gemini’s historical forgeries and Gascón’s statistical sleight-of-hand, the evidence accumulates. We stand at a precipice where consumer choice itself becomes illusory—fed endless data yet starved of reality.

Russell Kirk reminded us that true conservatism defends the “permanent things”. These are faith, family, tradition, and the kind of liberty that secures an ordered society. He argued for order based on faith traditions against what he considered to be untethered abstractions of ideology. Roger Scruton warned that consumer capitalism, untethered from place and piety, dissolves the “oikos,” the household of belonging, into a rootless marketplace of fleeting desires. Today, AI accelerates that dissolution. The algorithms now embedded in Google Search, Microsoft Bing, and their rivals do not merely recommend products; they filter truth, amplify narratives, and marginalize counter-evidence. Globalist elites, who once saturated public discourse with the terms “pandemic” and “climate change,” backed by censorship regimes masquerading as “fact-checkers”, have changed their strategy to coding.

Only a view that combines the best of left-wing and right-wing values, rooted in the permanent things can resist. We must reclaim the information commons, defend particular cultures against universalist erasure, and insist that markets serve human flourishing, not elite engineering. The algorithms deceive; tradition endures. The choice is ours: submit to the machine, or defend the household of memory.

References

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Scruton, R. (1980). The meaning of conservatism. Macmillan.

Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Harvard University Press.

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https://dailybruin.com/2025/01/22/los-angeles-cracks-down-on-crime-following-lenient-district-attorney-policies