Luke Thomas

But a political actor has a very different level of what they're trying to do in terms of manipulation.

They have a goal about what they want this experience to yield for them.

you have to treat them very skeptically and to me one of the things that was missing from his show more recently was that instinct something he used to have but the conspiracy theorists around palantir you know i don't know what exactly what some of these particular theories are but i would say building a surveillance database with the most modern technology and this is the key

where there used to be, for example, IRS data that was siloed off and not given to Homeland Security, right?

These things, for example, were very separate.

But what if you begin to combine these databases?

That's what the project of Doge was.

Doge was a project in data theft.

That's what it was.

It was data theft.

They cut out a minuscule amount of the budget.

It didn't matter anyway because the one big, beautiful act added potentially $5 trillion in extra debt to the budget.

It had nothing to do with doing any of those kinds of, like, we're going to shrink the federal government.

We're going to find waste, fraud, and abuse.

It was about data theft and data collection, but they did it, and now they have it.

And now, think about it, if you can combine data that Health and Human Services might have with the IRS, with, I don't know, DOJ, with you name it, you now, as a federal government, you can get a nice, clean look in one place at every American citizen.

Essentially, I'm not going to say all data, but then you throw in health data as well.

you can get a pretty good look at who's out there, what they're doing, and how they've lived their lives in ways that are deeply uncomfortable that I think for people who take privacy laws and restraint on federal power seriously.

Man, they sold a lot of people on Doge.

You know, it's kind of funny.