“Together We Rise”: Conor McGregor Wants His Country Back
A massive anti-immigration protest unfolded in the city streets of the Dublin City Centre on Saturday as public concerns surrounding mass migration backfired.
The Irish Alliance is one of the groups behind the demonstration and shared footage of UFC legend Conor McGregor at the Parnell Square site ahead of the protest.
McGregor also shared a video on X, stating, “Together we rise. Together we win. God bless us all. God bless Ireland.”
In the heart of sacrifice, I stand and speak for those who fought, and for those still fighting.
Have a great, peaceful, and productive day everyone!
Local media outlets said several thousand people turned out for the anti-immigration protest, while X videos show anti-immigration protesters were significantly higher…
Holy sh*t!
More than 100,000 Irish patriots just conquered Dublin in one of the biggest Protests Ireland has ever seen
Drone footage of the demonstration in Dublin this afternoon. Thousands showed up to protest the government’s handling of migration.
👇👇👇pic.twitter.com/SEtHQWOBc4
During a St Patrick’s Day visit to the White House, McGregor blasted the Irish government for running an “illegal immigration racket.”
“Our government has long since abandoned the voices of the people of Ireland,” McGregor urged, adding, “Our money is being spent on overseas issues that have nothing to do with the Irish people,” adding, “The illegal immigration racket is ravaging our country.”
As we have previously highlighted, the UFC star has persistently spoken out against mass migration and has made enemies with the unstable globalist liberal elite of Europe Brussels.
Britain’s highest court has ruled that the words “woman” and “sex” refer to “a biological woman and biological sex,” in a landmark decision that follows years of confusion, anger, and campaigning.
The case sought to clarify the question of whether a person who holds an official certificate recognizing their gender as female is entitled to the same women’s rights protections under the law.
A commonly cited example was the question of whether women-only services—such as a rape crisis support group—were allowed to exclude men with a gender recognition certificate.
A gender recognition certificate means that a person’s chosen gender identity is legally recognized.
Obtaining the certificate requires a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, having lived as the identified gender for at least two years, and the intention to live as that self-identified gender until death.
More than 8,000 gender recognition certificates have been granted in the United Kingdom since their introduction under the Gender Recognition Act of 2005.
1. How Case Was Sparked
The case was instigated by campaign group For Women Scotland in 2022, who brought a series of legal challenges, beginning in Scotland and culminating in the UK Supreme Court, over the definition of the word “woman” in the Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018.
This legislation was passed by the Scottish Parliament and mandated that 50 percent of individuals on public boards be female, including in its definition males who identify as women.
Lawyers for For Women Scotland argued that not tying the definition of sex to its “ordinary meaning” could have far-reaching consequences for sex-based rights, as well as “everyday single-sex services” such as bathrooms, changing rooms, hospital wards, and domestic violence and rape crisis centers.
Counsel for the Scottish government argued at the Supreme Court hearing in November 2024 that a person with a gender recognition certificate is “recognized in law” as having changed sex.
On April 15, the Supreme Court ruled that sex is rooted in biology, not whether a person has chosen to identify as a certain gender.
Delivering the judgment, Lord Patrick Hodge, deputy president of the UK Supreme Court, said the central question is how the words “woman” and “sex” are defined in the Equality Act of 2010.
“The terms woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex,” Hodge said.
This means that men who identify as women and who hold a gender recognition certificate may be excluded from single-sex spaces if “proportionate.”
The judges said that while the word “biological” does not appear in the definition of man or woman in the Equality Act, “the ordinary meaning of those plain and unambiguous words corresponds with the biological characteristics that make an individual a man or a woman.”
The decision stated that if the word “sex” did not mean biological sex in the 2010 legislation, providers of single-sex spaces—including changing rooms, homeless hostels, and medical services—would face “practical difficulties” and any other interpretation would render rules against discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation meaningless.
The court said that this interpretation of the law does not disadvantage people who identify as transgender, who were described as a “potentially vulnerable group.”
They said the group is still protected from discrimination, and “would be able to invoke the provisions on direct discrimination and harassment, and indirect discrimination” if needed.
The justices also said that transgender-identifying people are protected from discrimination on the grounds of gender reassignment.
The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom is the final court of appeal for all civil cases in the UK and of all criminal cases originating in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
It also covers a limited number of criminal cases from Scotland, which technically has a separate legal system.
However, a Supreme Court judgment in the UK carries a lot less weight than it would in the United States.
Lawmakers in the UK are not bound by a codified constitution that can only be changed through a super majority and other hurdles to ratification.
Rather, parliament can effectively negate a supreme court ruling by voting in new legislation.
So a simple majority vote by lawmakers is all that would be required to repeal that legislation and pass a new law that requires males who identify as women to be treated exactly the same as women.
4. Unanswered Questions
Since the decision, many public bodies and institutions have updated their rules, while others are still waiting for clarity.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission, which has responsibility for the promotion and enforcement of equality and non-discrimination laws in Britain, is expected to put an updated statutory code of practice before Parliament by the summer, and said it is working “at pace to incorporate the implications of this judgment” into the code for public bodies setting out their duties under the Equality Act.
This means that, currently, despite the Supreme Court ruling, the situation is far from clear.
5. Police Strip Searches
The British Transport Police became the first public body to take action when it changed its strip search policy a day after the judgment, saying that it had adopted a new “interim position” that will see transgender-identifying people in custody strip searched by an officer in line with their biological sex.
This means males in custody will be searched by male officers, while male officers who identify as trans women will no longer be able to search female detainees.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council has said it will be reviewing its policies, but “will need time to consider the full implications of the court’s decision, as will many other public bodies.”
Share Of European Cardinals Declines Ahead Of New Pope Vote
With the funeral out of the way, the conclave begins and every vote will count.
During the pontificate of the late Francis, the number of cardinals worldwide shifted somewhat away from a heavy focus on Europe. However, European cardinals continue to be overrepresented when considering the share of the world’s Catholics that live on the continent. The change could have implications in the vote for the next pope, which could start in a few weeks’ time.
Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports that, according to various sources collected by Pew Research Center, 41 percent of cardinals eligible to vote for a new pope upon Francis’ death Monday are from Europe. This is down from 50 percent in 2013, the time of the last vote.
The pope appoints cardinals and under Francis, the number of cardinals from the Asia-Pacific region grew from 10 percent to 18 percent.
The relative share of cardinals from Sub-Saharan Africa also grew from 8 percent to 12 percent.
While the share of the world’s Catholics that lives in Africa is even higher, at 19 percent, it is Latin America and the Caribbean which is the most underrepresented in terms of cardinals.
According to Vatican records, 41 percent of the world’s Catholics live in the region. Under Francis, the share of Latin American and Caribbean cardinals only rose slightly, from 17 percent to 18 percent.
So, predictably, Captain Chaos did blink first. As much as he – and his sprawling media circus – could not possibly admit it.
It all started with “tariff exemptions” – from smartphones and computers to auto parts – on products imported from China. Then it veered towards carefully manicured leaks implying tariffs “could” be reduced to a range between 50% and 65%. And finally a terse admission that if there’s no deal, a “tariff number” will be unilaterally set.
China’s Ministry of Commerce was unforgiving: “Trying to trade away others’ interests for temporary gains is like bargaining with a tiger for its skin – it will only backfire”.
And it got fiercer. The Ministry was adamant that any Trump 2.0 claims of any progress on bilateral negotiations have “no factual basis” – de facto depicting the US President as a purveyor of fake news.
Tigers, tigers burning bright: the image does not recall poetry superstar William Blake, but Mao’s legendary depiction of the US Empire as a “paper tiger” – a flashback that struck me over and over again last week in Shanghai. If the US Empire was a paper tiger already in the 1960s, the Chinese argue, imagine now.
And the pain will increase, not only for the paper tiger: any dodgy deals made by foreign – vassal – pussycat governments at the expense of Chinese interests simply will be not be tolerated by Beijing.
Last week in Shanghai I was reminded over and over again – by academics and business people – that the weaponized Trump Tariff Tizzy (TTT) goes way beyond China: it is a desperate offense ordered by the US ruling classes against a peer competitor that scares the hell out of them.
The best Chinese analytical minds know exactly what’s going on in Washington. Take for instance this essay originally published by the influential Cultural Horizon magazine breaking down the “triangular power structure” of Trump 2.0.
We have all-power Trump forming a “super-establishment”; Silicon Valley money politics, represented by Elon Musk; and the new right-wing elite represented by VP J.D. Vance. End result: a “governance system that is almost parallel to the federal government.”
European chihuahuas – caught in the crossfire of Trump 2.0 – are simply incapable of such synthetic and precise conceptualization.
Paper tiger meets fiery dragon
What a deep dive in Shanghai has revealed is that China has been handed over a rare earth-like opportunity by Trump 2.0 to consolidate its strategic initiative solidifying the role of leader of the Global South/Global Majority, at the same time carefully managing the risk of a New Cold War.
Call it a Sun Tzu move that may paralyze the Empire in its tracks. Professor Zhang Weiwei, with whom I had the pleasure to share a seminar in Shanghai on the Russia-China strategic partnership, would agree.
China is on the move across the spectrum. Chinese Premier Li Qiang sent a letter to Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishibe urging a joint drive, right now, to counteract the tariff dementia.
President Xi’s top message in his Southeast Asia tour last week was to stand up against “unilateral bullying”.
Xi deftly moved between Malaysia – current rotating chair of ASEAN, always avoiding taking sides – and Vietnam – with its “bamboo diplomacy” always hedging between US and China.
Xi told Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, directly: “We must safeguard the bright prospects of our Asian family”. Translation: let’s create an exclusive sphere of influence close to the ‘community of shared destiny’ but that does not include outside powers such as the US.
In parallel, there has been a strong debate – from Shanghai to Hong Kong – that transcends the role of China as the world’s factory: what matters now is how to redirect some of China’s astonishing manufacturing capacity towards the domestic market.
Of course there are problems – such as the lack of purchasing power among scores of Chinese domestic consumers, even as the bulk of national China income is directed to fixed-asset investments. A great deal of China’s rural elderly population survives on a monthly pension of roughly $30 a month, and the hourly rate for the gig economy has stagnated at around $4.
Meanwhile, in several high-tech fronts, China just built the fastest high-speed train on the planet: 400km/h, soon to run between Beijing and Shanghai. China is already receiving orders for the C919 commercial wide-bodied airliner. And China has come up with the world’s first thorium-powered nuclear reactor. Translation: unlimited cheap and clean energy is at hand.
The Mafia way of doing business
Hong Kong is a very special case. HSBC executives, for instance, worry about a possible decoupling between US and China – and wonder whether Hong Kong may survive without US trade.
Yes, it can. The US is Hong Kong’s third largest trade partner; yet Hong Kong’s export and import to the US are only 6,5% and 4%, respectively, of its total global exports and imports, including transshipment of goods back and forth from the mainland.
HK is a world-class logistics hub and free port. So as long as Trump 2.0 does not forbid trade with Hong Kong – well, anything can happen – imports should not be affected. Anyway, most of what HK exports – electronics, luxury goods, clothes, toys – can easily find alternative markets in Southeast Asia, West Asia and Europe.
The crucial point is that over half of Hong Kong trade is with the mainland. And the key fact is that China can easily survive without US trade. Beijing has been carefully preparing for it since Trump 1.0.
From Shanghai to Hong Kong, the best analytical minds are in tune with the inestimable Michael Hudson, who has emphasized, over and over again, how “the United States is the only country in the world that has weaponized its foreign trade; weaponized its foreign currency, the dollar; weaponized the international financial system; and treated every economic relationship in an adversarial way, to weaponize it.”
A self-confident, high-tech savvy China, from academics and business people to xiao long bao and pulled noodles vendors, graphically understands that the Empire of Chaos, in its drive to “isolate” China, is only isolating itself (and its chihuahuas).
Moreover it’s such a joy to see Michael Hudson also referring to the same “paper tiger” syndrome that I witnessed in Shanghai these past few days: “Well, America has become a paper tiger financially today. It doesn’t really have anything to offer except the threat of tariffs, the threat of suddenly disrupting all of the trade patterns that have been put in place over the last few decades.”
In Shanghai, I heard serial implacable dismissals of the so-called “Miran plan” – as in the paper published last November by Trump’s economic advisor “restructuring the global trading system”. Miran is the brain behind the Mar-a-Lago accord – whose rationale is to weaken the US dollar by forcing major economies – from China to Japan and the EU – to sell US dollar assets and swap short-term US Treasuries for 100-year bonds with zero interest.
Miran’s brilliant idea boils down to nations having only two options:
1.Meekly accept these US tariffs, without retaliation.
2. Write cheques to the US Treasury.
Zhao Xijun, co-dean of the China Capital Market Research Institute at Renmin University, destroyed the scheme succinctly: transferring money to the US Treasury like this is like “collecting protection money on the streets”. Translation: that’s the Mafia way, “a thuggish and domineering act, merely dressed up with the lofty justification of providing public goods”.
Meanwhile, in the Grand Chessboard, Beijing keeps working steadily side by side with Russia towards a Eurasian-wide security architecture anchored on a balance of powers: it’s all about the new Primakov triangle (RIC – Russia, Iran and China).
Top BRICS members Russia and China will not allow the Empire to attack fellow BRICS member Iran. And support comes in more ways than one. Example: more imperial energy sanctions on Iran? China will increase imports via Malaysia, and invest even more in Iran’s infrastructure, in tandem with Russia in respect to the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).
In a nutshell: Captain Chaos definitely does not have the cards – which as even South Pacific penguins know, are all made in China.
* * *
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.
Here’s the video link to my recent talk at Hillsdale College on AI and Transhumanism. I’m including below the text of the speech if you prefer to read rather than watch it.
AI and Transhumanism
Hackable Animals
My friends, let me introduce you to Yuval Noah Harari, a man chock full of big ideas. He explained during the covid crisis: “Covid is critical because this is what convinces people to accept, to legitimize, total biometric surveillance. If we want to stop this epidemic, we need not just to monitor people, we need to monitor what’s happening under their skin.” In a 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper, Harari repeated this idea: “What we have seen so far is corporations and governments collecting data about where we go, who we meet, what movies we watch. The next phase is the surveillance going under our skin.” He likewise told India Today, when commenting on changes accepted by the population during covid:
We now see mass surveillance systems established even in democratic countries which previously rejected them, and we also see a change in the nature of surveillance. Previously, surveillance was mainly above the skin; now we want it under the skin… Governments want to know not just where we go or who we meet. They want to know what’s happening under our skin: what is our body temperature; what is our blood pressure; what is our medical condition?
Harari is clearly a man who wants to… get under your skin. He just might succeed. Another recent interview finds him waxing philosophical: “Now humans are developing even bigger powers than ever before. We are really acquiring divine powers of creation and destruction. We are really upgrading humans into gods. We are acquiring, for instance, the power to re-engineer human life.” As Kierkegaard once said of Hegel when he talks about the Absolute, when Harari talks about the future, he sounds like he’s going up in a balloon.
Forgive me, but a few last nuggets from Professor Harari will round out the picture of his philosophy, and his lofty hopes and dreams: “Humans are now hackable animals. You know, the whole idea that humans have this soul or spirit, and they have free will and nobody knows what’s happening inside me, so, whatever I choose, whether in the election or in the supermarket, that’s my free will—that’s over.” Harari explains that to hack human beings you need a lot of computing power and a lot of biometric data, which was not possible until recently with the advent of AI. In a hundred years, he argues, people will look back and identify the Covid crisis as the moment “when a new regime of surveillance took over, especially surveillance under the skin—which I think is the most important development of the 21st Century, which is this ability to hack human beings.”
People rightly worry that their iPhone or Alexa have become surveillance “listening devices”, and indeed, the microphone can be turned on even when the device is turned off. But imagine a wearable or implantable device that, moment-to-moment, tracks your heart rate, blood pressure, and skin conductance, uploading that biometric information to the cloud. Anyone with access to that data could know your exact emotional response to every statement made while you watch a presidential debate. They could gauge your thoughts and feelings about each candidate, about each issue discussed, even if you never spoke a word.
I could go on with more quotes from Professor Harari about hacking the human body, but you get the picture. At this point you may be tempted to dismiss Harari as nothing more than an overheated, sci-fi obsessed village atheist. After years binging on science fiction novels, the balloon of his imagination now perpetually floats up somewhere above the ether. Why should we pay any heed to this man’s prognostications and prophesies?
It turns out that Harari is a professor of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His bestselling books have sold over 20 million copies worldwide, which is no small shake. More importantly, he is one of the darlings of the World Economic Forum and a key architect of their agenda. In 2018, his lecture at the WEF, “Will the Future Be Human?” was sandwiched between addresses from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron. So he’s playing in the sandbox with the big dogs.
In his WEF lecture Harari explained that in the coming generations, we will “learn how to engineer bodies and brains and minds,” such that these will become “the main products of the 21st Century economy: not textiles and vehicles and weapons, but bodies and brains and minds.” The few masters of the economy, he explains, will be the people who own and control data: “Today, data is the most important asset in the world,” in contrast to ancient times when land was the most important asset, or the industrial age when machines were paramount. WEF kingpin Klaus Schwab echoed Harari’s ideas when he explained: “One of the features of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is that it doesn’t change what we are doing; it changes us,” through gene editing and other biotechnological tools that operate under our skin.
Even the dreamy-eyed Harari admits there are some potential dangers with these developments: “If too much data is concentrated in too few hands, humanity will split not into classes but into two different species.” That would not, one supposes, be a good thing. But all things considered, he is more than willing to take these risks and forge ahead with this agenda. To be fair, Harari does not advocate for a future totalitarian state or rule by all-powerful corporations, but hopes to warn us of coming dangers.
In an exceptionally naïve proposal, however, Harari believes that the obvious problems posed by a tyrannical biosecurity state can be solved with more surveillance, by having citizens simply surveil the government: “Turn it around,” he said in a talk at the Athens Democracy Forum, “Surveil the governments more. I mean, technology can always go both ways. If they can surveil us, we can surveil them.” This proposal is—not to put too fine a point on it—incredibly stupid. As most of us learned in kindergarten, two wrongs don’t make a right.
The WEF made waves a few years back by posting on their website the slogan, “You will own nothing. And you will be happy.” Although the page was later deleted, the indelible impression remained: it provided a clear and simple description of the future envisioned by Davos Man. As the WEF savants predict, at the last stage of this development, we will find ourselves in a rent-only/subscription-only economy, where nothing really belongs to us. Picture the Uberization of everything.
To get a sense of this future, imagine the world as an Amazon warehouse writ large: a mandarin caste of digital virtuosos will call the shots from behind screens, directing the masses below with the aid of ever more refined algorithmic specificity. The prophetic Aldous Huxley foresaw this Brave New World in his 1932 novel. These changes will challenge not only our political, economic, and medical institutions and structures; they will challenge our notions of what it means to be human. This is precisely what its advocates celebrate, as we will see in a moment.
Corporatist arrangements of public-private partnerships, which merge state and corporate power, are well suited for carrying out the necessary convergence of existing and emerging fields. This biological-digital convergence envisioned by the WEF and its members will blend big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. Schwab refers to this as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which will follow and build upon the first three—mechanical, electrical, and digital. The transhumanists—who we will meet in a moment—have been dreaming of just such a merging of the physical, digital, and biological worlds for at least a few decades. Now, however, their visions are poised to become our reality.
Mechanisms of Control
The next steps in hacking human beings will involve attempted rollouts—which we should vigorously resist—of digital IDs, tied to fingerprints and other biometric data like iris scans or face IDs, demographic information, medical records, data on education, travel, financial transactions, and bank accounts. These will be combined with Central Bank Digital Currencies, giving governments surveillance power and control over every one of your financial transactions, with the ability to lock you out of the market if you do not comply with government directives.
Using biometrics for everyday transactions routinizes these technologies. We are conditioning children to accept biometric verification as a matter of course. For example, face IDs are now used in multiple school districts to expedite the movement of students through school lunch lines. Until recently, biometrics such as fingerprints were used only for high-security purposes—when charging someone with a crime, for example, or when notarizing an important document. Today, routine biometric verification for repetitive activities from mobile phones to lunch lines gets young people used to the idea that their bodies are tools used in transactions. We are instrumentalizing the body in unconscious and subtle, but nonetheless powerful, ways.
Those with economic interests in creating markets for their products (whether vaccines, digital surveillance hardware and software, or harvested data) will continue to deploy the carrots and sticks of access to medical care and other services to strongarm acceptance of digital IDs in underdeveloped nations. In developed nations they will initially use a velvet glove approach of nudges, selling digital IDs as convenience and time-saving measures that will be hard for many to turn down, like skipping long TSA security lines at airports. The privacy risks, including the possibility for constant surveillance and data harvesting, will fade into the background when you’re about to miss your flight if you can’t skip to the front of the line.
Unless we collectively decline to participate in this new social experiment, digital IDs—tied to private demographic, financial, location, movement, and biometric data—will become mechanisms for bulk data harvesting and tracking of populations around the globe. We should resist—including by opting out of the new face ID scans at TSA airport screening checkpoints, which we can still legally do.
Once fully realized, this surveillance system will offer unprecedented mechanisms of control, allowing the regime to be maintained against any form of resistance. This technocratic dream would entrench the most intransigent authoritarian system the world has ever known—in the sense that it could maintain itself against any form of opposition through monopolistic technological and economic power. The suppression of dissent will happen in large part through the system’s financial controls, especially if we adopt Central Bank Digital Currencies. Try to resist or step outside the system’s strictures and the doors to markets will simply close. This means that once this system is in place, it could prove almost impossible to overthrow.
Microwaved Eugenics
Harari—who I cited extensively at the beginning of this talk—is among the more prominent members of a new species of academics, activists, and “visionaries” that refer to themselves as transhumanists. These folks aim to use technology not to alter the lived environment, but to fundamentally alter human nature itself. The goal is to “upgrade” or “enhance” human beings. This is both possible and desirable, as Harari explains, because all organisms—whether humans or amoebas or bananas or viruses—are at bottom just “biological algorithms.” This is the old materialist, social Darwinist ideology turbocharged and techno-upgraded with the tools of gene editing, nanotechnology, robotics, and advanced pharmaceuticals. Transhumanism is microwaved eugenics. There is nothing new under the sun.
The 20th-century eugenicists referred to disabled persons as “useless eaters.” Echoing this rhetoric on multiple occasions, Harari has puzzled over the question of what to do with people in the future who will refuse AI-mediated enhancement—folks he refers to as “useless people.” “The biggest question maybe in economics and politics in the coming decades,” he predicts, “will be what to do with all these useless people?” He goes on to explain, “The problem is more boredom, what to do with them and how will they find some sense of meaning in life when they are basically meaningless, worthless.”
Harari suggests one possible solution to the problem of what to do with useless people: “My best guess at present is a combination of drugs and computer games.” Well, at least we have a head start on that, a fact that does not escape Harari’s attention: “You see more and more people spending more and more time, or solving their time with drugs and computer games, both legal drugs and illegal drugs,” he explains. This is where Harari predicts those who refuse to be hacked for AI-enhancement purposes will find themselves.
Encountering Harari’s thought was not my first brush with the transhumanist movement. Several years ago, I spoke on a panel at Stanford University sponsored by the Zephyr Institute on the topic of transhumanism. I critiqued the idea of “human enhancement,” the use of biomedical technology not to heal the sick but to make the healthy “better than well,” i.e., bigger, faster, stronger, smarter, etc. The event was well attended by several students from the Transhumanist Club at Stanford.
We had a cordial discussion, and I enjoyed chatting with these students after the talk. I learned the symbol of their student group was H+ (“humanity-plus”). They were exceptionally bright, ambitious, and serious young men and women—typical Stanford students. Some of them had read their Plato in addition to their Scientific American. They sincerely wanted to make the world better. Perhaps there was a closet authoritarian or two among them, but my impression was that they had no interest in facilitating world domination by oligarchic corporatist regimes empowered to hack human beings.
Nevertheless, I got the impression that they did not comprehend the implications of the axioms they had accepted. We can choose our first principles, our foundational premises, but then we must follow them out to their logical conclusions; otherwise, we deceive ourselves. These Stanford students were not outliers, but representative of the local culture: transhumanism is enormously influential in Silicon Valley and shapes the imagination of many of the most influential tech elites. Proponents include the Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom, Harvard geneticist George Church, the late physicist Stephen Hawking, Google engineer Ray Kurzweil, and other notables.
The Transhumanist Dream
Returning to Harari’s 2018 talk at the WEF, he admits that control of data might not only enable human elites to build digital dictatorships, but opines that hacking humans may facilitate something even more radical: “Elites may gain the power to re-engineer the future of life itself.” With his Davos audience warmed up he then waxes to a crescendo: “This will not just be the greatest revolution in the history of humanity, it will be the greatest revolution in biology since the beginning of life four billion years ago.”
Which is, of course, a pretty big deal. Because for billions of years, nothing fundamental changed in the basic rules of the game of life, as he explains: “All of life for four billion years—dinosaurs, amoebas, tomatoes, humans—all of life was subject to the laws of natural selection and to the laws of organic biochemistry.” But not anymore: all this is about to change, as he explains:
Science is replacing evolution by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design—not the intelligent design of some god above the cloud, but our intelligent design, and the design of our clouds: the IBM cloud, the Microsoft cloud—these are the new driving forces of evolution. At the same time, science may enable life—after being confined for four billion years to the limited realm of organic compounds—science may enable life to break out into the inorganic realm.
The opening sentence here perfectly echoes the original definition of eugenics from the man who coined the term in the late 19th Century, Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin: “What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly [evolution by natural selection], man may do providently, quickly, and kindly [evolution by our own—or by the cloud’s—intelligent design].” But what is Harari talking about in that last sentence—life breaking out into the inorganic realm?
It’s been a transhumanist dream from the dawn of modern computing that someday we will be able to upload the informational content of our brains, or our minds (if you believe in minds), into some sort of massive computing system, or digital cloud, or other technological repository capable of storing massive amounts of data. On this materialist view of man, we will then have no more need for our human body, which, after all, always fails us in the end. Shedding this mortal coil—this organic dust that always returns to dust—we will find the technological means to… well, to live forever. Living forever in the digital cloud or the mainframe computer in the sky constitutes the transhumanists’ eschatology: salvation by digital technology.
This project is physically (and metaphysically) impossible, of course, because man is an inextricable unity of body and soul—not some ghost in the machine, not merely a bit of software transferable to another piece of hardware. But set that aside for now; look instead at what this eschatological dream tells us about the transhumanist movement. These imaginative flights of fancy have obviously moved well beyond the realm of science. Transhumanism is clearly a religion—indeed, a particular type of neo-Gnostic religion. It attracts adherents today—including educated, wealthy, powerful, culturally influential adherents—because it taps into unfulfilled, deeply religious aspirations and longings. It is an ersatz substitute religion for a secular age.
That Hideous Strength
I cannot emphasize enough the importance for our time of C.S. Lewis’s book, The Abolition of Man. Lewis once remarked that his dystopian novel, That Hideous Strength, the third installment in his “space trilogy,” was The Abolition of Man in fictional form. Those who have learned from Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four would do well to also read That Hideous Strength, an underappreciated entry in the dystopian fiction genre. Back in 1945, Lewis foresaw Yuval Harari and his transhumanist ilk on the horizon. He brilliantly satirized their ideology in the novel’s character of Filostrato, an earnest but deeply misguided Italian scientist.
In the story, a cabal of technocrats take over a bucolic university town in England—think of Oxford or Cambridge—and go to work immediately transforming things according to their vision of the future. The novel’s protagonist, Mark Studdock, is recruited away from the university to the technocrats’ new institute. Mark desires above all to be part of the progressive set, the “inner ring” that is steering the next big thing. He spends his first several days at the N.I.C.E (National Institute for Coordinated Experiments) trying in vain to ascertain exactly what his new job description entails.
Eventually, he figures out that he has been retained mainly to write propaganda explaining the Institute’s activities to the public. Somewhat dispirited—he is a scholar of the social sciences, after all, and not a journalist—he sits down at lunch one day with Filostrato, a member of the N.I.C.E. inner circle, and learns a bit about this scientist’s worldview.
It happens that Filostrato has just given orders to cut down some beech trees on the Institute’s property and replace them with trees made of aluminum. Someone at the table naturally asks why, remarking that he rather liked the beech trees. “Oh, yes, yes,” replies Filostrato. “The pretty trees, the garden trees. But not the savages. I put the rose in my garden, but not the brier. The forest tree is a weed.” Filostrato explains that he once saw a metal tree in Persia, “so natural it would deceive,” which he believes could be perfected. His interlocutor objects that a tree made of metal would hardly be the same as a real tree. But the scientist is undeterred and explains why the artificial tree is superior:
“But consider the advantages! You get tired of him in one place: two workmen carry him somewhere else: wherever you please. It never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and mess.”
“I suppose one or two, as curiosities, might be rather amusing.”
“Why one or two? At present, I allow, we must have forests, for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then, why any natural trees? I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth. In fact, we clean the planet.”
When asked if he means that there would be no vegetation at all, Filostrato replies, “Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the English fashion, you shave him every day. One day we shave the planet.” Someone wonders what the birds will make of it, but Filostrato has a plan for them too: “I would not have any birds either. On the art tree I would have the art birds all singing when you press a switch inside the house. When you are tired of the singing you switch them off. Consider again the improvement. No feathers dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt.”
Mark replies that this sounds like abolishing pretty much all organic life. “And why not?” Filostrato counters. “It is simple hygiene.” And then, echoing the rhetoric of Yuval Harari, we hear Filostrato’s soaring peroration, which would have been right at home in World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos:
“Listen, my friends. If you pick up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not say, ‘Oh, the horrid thing. It is alive,’ and then drop it?… And you, especially you English, are you not hostile to any organic life except your own on your own body? Rather than permit it you have invented the daily bath…. And what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic? Minerals are clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms—sweat, spittles, excretions. Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example? The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions…. After all, we are organisms ourselves.
“I grant it… In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that, we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mold—all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course. Slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation.”
Someone interjects that this last part does not sound like much fun, but Filostrato responds, “My friend, you have already separated the Fun, as you call it, from fertility. The Fun itself begins to pass away…. Nature herself begins to throw away the anachronism. When she has thrown it away, then real civilization becomes possible.” Keep in mind that this was written decades before the invention of in vitro fertilization and other assisted reproductive technologies, as well as the sexual revolution that brought widespread acceptance of the oral contraceptive pill. As Lewis reveals at the end of the novel, however, the N.I.C.E is not controlled by brilliant men of science but is ultimately under the sway of demonic forces.
In both the real character of Harari and the fictional character of Filostrato we find men who embrace, indeed celebrate, the idea that human beings can shed the messy business of organic life and somehow transfer our bodily existence into sterile inorganic matter. We encounter in both characters the kind of man who wants to bleach the entire earth with hand sanitizer. Were we not nudged, perhaps a bit too far, in the direction of Filostrato’s dream during covid, as we attempted to fully disinfect and sanitize our lived environments, and transfer all our communications to the digital realm? Have we not also moved in this direction by spending more waking hours glued to screens in a virtual world than interacting with people in the real world, while reams of behavioral data are extracted from our every keystroke and click for predictive analysis by AI?
Organic matter is alive, whereas inorganic matter is dead. I can only conclude that the transhumanists’ dream is, in the last analysis, a philosophy of death. But we must grant that it has become an influential philosophy among many of today’s elites. In one way or another, all of us have been seduced by the mistaken notion that by massively coordinated vigilance and the application of technology, we could rid our lived environments of pathogens and scrub our world entirely clean—perhaps even thwarting death.
As the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce pointed out, philosophies that begin from faulty premises not only fail to achieve their purpose, they inevitably end up producing the exact opposite of their stated goals. Transhumanism aims at superior intelligence, superhuman strength, and unending life.
But because it is grounded in an entirely false notion of what it means to be human, if we recklessly embrace the transhumanist dream, we will find ourselves instead in a nightmare dystopia of stupidity, weakness, and death.
Brett Adcock, founder of Archer Aviation, who left the flying taxi company to pursue humanoid robotics and the deployment of Artificial General Intelligence, recently shared how his team at Figure AI developed a humanoid robot in just 31 months, achieving the robot’s first successful walk within a year.
Adcock recently spoke at the 2025 Abundance360 summit in Los Angeles and described how humanoid robots are the ultimate “deployment vector” for AGI, comparing what’s happening in robotics to an “iPhone moment”– a game-changing breakthrough when a new product suddenly transforms an industry.
Adcock said that Figure AI designs a new hardware platform every 12 to 18 months. He noted that his startup has secured commercial customers like BMW…
BMW x Figure Update
This isn’t a test environment—it’s real production operations
Real-world robots are advancing our Helix AI and strengthening our end-to-end autonomy to deploy millions of robots pic.twitter.com/p8a7OD7r3U
He forecasts that Figure AI’s humanoid robots will be affordable, around $20,000 to $30,000, allowing for widespread adoption in both the workplace and the home.
Meet Helix, our in-house AI that reasons like a human
Robotics won’t get to the home without a step change in capabilities
Here’s a summary of Adock’s conversation about humanoid robotics and how the industry is in the midst of an “iPhone moment”:
(00:00–01:42): Brett Adcock, founder of Figure, rapidly launched humanoid robots from scratch in 31 months. He sees humanoid robots as the ultimate “deployment vector” for AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), comparable to an “iPhone moment” happening now.
(02:21–03:30): Adcock stresses that giving AGI a physical body is critical to avoid dystopian outcomes where powerful AI remains trapped in servers. Humanoids allow AGI to learn and act through transfer learning and multitasking.
(06:24–07:54): Commercial robots are already operating at BMW’s largest US plant (Spartanburg, SC), autonomously performing repetitive manufacturing tasks. Demand is growing, with a second logistics customer signed.
(08:28–09:58): Long-term goal: humanoid robots for home use, priced around $20,000–$30,000, leasing for about $300/month. At that rate, Adcock envisions multiple robots per home doing chores like dishwashing, laundry, dog-walking.
(10:40–12:28): Figure’s success is attributed to assembling a world-class, hardworking team with a laser-focused, high-intensity culture (working 5–7 days a week in person) and a shared “ship-product” mindset.
(14:30–15:43): To succeed, Figure had to solve three hard problems: build ultra-reliable humanoid hardware, teach humanoids through neural nets (not hand-coded controls), and generalize actions to unfamiliar tasks via language instructions.
(16:51–19:17): Figure abandoned external AI vendors like OpenAI and built its own large vision-language-action AI model called Helix. Robots using Helix can generalize and complete new tasks, like putting groceries away without prior training.
22:04–25:45): Workforce applications (manufacturing, logistics, healthcare) are booming, with massive demand. Home deployment is harder but accelerating rapidly. Internal alpha tests in engineers’ homes are planned this year, with full rollout projected within this decade.
Watch Here:
As we’ve previously described, AI, semiconductors, eVTOL, and photonics—are poised to define the great power nations in the 2030s and why the US needs to urgently re-shore or at least friend-shore those critical supply chains.
The US kicked off its largest annual military drills alongside the Philippines days ago this week, simulating a full-on war with China. A total of 17,000 troops from 20 countries participated in the drills, dubbed Balikatan 2025, including 9,000 American soldiers and 5,000 Filipino servicemen.
US Marine Corps Forces Pacific commander Lt. Gen. James Glynn said this year’s drills “will showcase a full battle test, the purposeful integration of real world security situations relevant to the region with live, virtual and constructive training opportunities that will give the Philippines and the US a collective opportunity to demonstrate capabilities across all domains, across all services and all forces.”
A statement from the Philippine military likewise said that the exercises would simulate a “full-scale battle scenario.” Many nations sent observers to the Philippines for the drills. For the first time, Japanese soldiers were full participants in the war games.
General Romeo Brawner, chief of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, noted that Balikatan would take place in the northern Philippines, near the South China Sea and Taiwan. “Across the vibrant expanse of Luzon, Palawan, the Visayas and Mindanao, we will assess our readiness in all domains,” he said.
The South China Sea and Taiwan are flashpoints in a potential conflict between the US and China, which sees the island as part of its own sovereign territory.
A press release from the US Navy explained that the war games were proof that Washington would honor its defense treaty with Manila. Balikatan is a “testament to the ironclad alliance and enduring friendship between the Philippines and the United States,” it said.
Chinese and Philippine vessels have collided around disputed rocks and reefs in the South China Sea on several occasions in recent years. While the incidents have not led to direct hostilities, Washington often restates its pledge to go to war on Manila’s behalf as a warning to Beijing not to attack the Philippines.
Along with additional participants in the drills, Balikatan 2025 will feature integrated air and missile defense. This includes one of the first live-fire tests of the Marine Air Defense Integrated System (MADIS), a short-range anti-drone platform.
Naval forces from the Philippines and the United States successfully conducted a Division Tactics (DIVTACS) drill on 26 April 2025, 21 nautical miles west off the coast of San Felipe,… pic.twitter.com/qqbyjDLdtL
— Armed Forces of the Philippines (@TeamAFP) April 26, 2025
During Balikatan 2024, the US deployed the Typhon launcher – a covert system that is concealed in a 40-foot shipping container and fires Tomahawk and SM-6 missiles – to the Philippines. In a major provocation to Beijing, Washington kept the system in the country’s north, where it was capable of striking Taiwan or even mainland China. A Typhon launcher will be deployed again for this year’s Balikatan.
U.S. Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer warned states of losing federal funding if they fail to comply with President Donald Trump’s directives on rewarding illegal immigrants with tax dollars, according to an April 25 statement issued by the Department of Labor.
“Our nation’s unemployment benefits exist solely for workers who are eligible to receive them,” Chavez-DeRemer wrote in a letter addressed to state governors.
“To qualify for unemployment, one must be able and available to work, actively seeking work, and be legally authorized to accept employment in the United States. Unemployment benefits are not a handout for those in our country illegally.”
The secretary reminded all states that failing to fulfill existing legal obligations will result in the loss of federal funding through the Title III UI administrative grant.
The warning is pursuant to presidential memorandum, “Preventing Illegal Aliens from Obtaining Social Security Act Benefits,” and executive order 14218, “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Open Borders.”
Chavez-DeRemer also reminded states of an earlier communication by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, based on which, states can access the DHS immigration database called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), at no cost and use it to verify the immigration status of benefit claimants.
This is a “critical tool” to ensure “illegal immigrants do not access our nation’s unemployment benefits,” said the labor secretary.
“As a result of this change, I instructed the Employment and Training Administration (ETA) to send a letter to all State Unemployment Insurance Administrators urging them to immediately start using SAVE for every initial and continued claim filed by an individual who indicates that they are not a U.S. citizen,” he said.
The SAVE database is aimed at helping agencies at federal, state, local, and tribal levels to confirm the immigration status and citizenship of individuals before issuing benefits.
A presidential memorandum signed on April 15 directed multiple federal agencies to take steps to prevent ineligible people, such as illegal immigrants, from receiving social security benefits.
An executive order issued on Feb. 19 asked agencies and departments to take action to ensure that “no taxpayer-funded benefits go to unqualified aliens” and to “prevent taxpayer resources from acting as a magnet and fueling illegal immigration to the United States.”
According to a Department of Government Efficiency finding released earlier this month, 6,300 illegal immigrants on the terror watchlist had been receiving Medicaid and unemployment insurance.
The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts have been met with challenges.
On April 24, a federal judge issued an order blocking the administration from stripping federal taxpayer funding for cities that have adopted “sanctuary” policies with regard to illegal immigrants.
State and local governments with sanctuary policies block or restrict local officials from enforcing federal laws such as those related to immigration.
The lawsuit was filed by over a dozen cities that would be affected by the cancellation of federal funding for “sanctuary” cities.
In his order, the judge said the administration’s attempt amounts to a violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers principles and banned the government from any further funding cuts.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is looking to prevent illegal immigrants from accessing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or food stamps.
On April 24, the Department of Agriculture asked states to take steps to this effect.
States were asked to check the identities of people who apply for SNAP, collect their social security numbers, and verify their legal status in the United States.
“Bloodbath”: Panic Ensues After Trump Admin Takes Wrecking Ball To DOJ’s Woke Civil Rights Division
Harmeet Dhillon – Trump’s hand-picked choice to lead the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, has been taking a wrecking ball to the woke government entity – forcing out ‘a majority of career managers and implementing new priorities’ that have radically altered its mandate, NBC News‘ swamp scribe Ken Dilanian reports.
“It’s been a complete bloodbath,” one senior DOJ lawyer told Dilanian. Other sources said that over a dozen senior lawyers – “many with decades of experience working under presidents of both parties,” have been reassigned, while others have resigned in frustration after they were shuffled around.
Dhillon kicked the hornet’s nest last week – issuing a series of memos outlining the shifting priorities, which include (gasp!) “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports,” and “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.”
“This is a 180 shift from the division’s traditional mission,” one former senior official said – declining to be named “in fear of retaliation.”
“These documents appear to have been created in a vacuum completely divorced from reality,” the former official continued. “The division can only enforce statutes that have been passed by Congress, and these orders seem to contemplate division attorneys’ executing on work that fundamentally departs from the division’s long-standing mission.”
Translation:
Dhillon, meanwhile, said the changes were no different than what happens anytime there’s a change in administration, along with a quest for efficiency.
“Each new administration has its own priorities, and allocates resources accordingly,” said Dhillon. “The Trump administration is no different. When I assumed my duties as Assistant Attorney General, I learned that certain sections in Civil Rights had substantial existing caseloads and backlogs, and that formed the basis of temporary details to assist those sections in getting, and staying, caught up.”
10 ‘current and former officials’ in the Civil Rights Division told NBC Newsthat several division chiefs have been transferred to roles unrelated to their legal backgrounds, including handling complaints, as well as the office that handles public requests (lol). So, customer service.
“Every presidential administration has its own policy priorities,” said former employee Stacey Young, who spent 18 years in the division before resigning in January, “but I don’t think there’s any precedent for an administration almost completely refocusing the civil rights division’s enforcement priorities the way this one has.”
So sad.
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The true scandal of current American fiscal governance needs be commented on. Or, better still, hammered upon good and hard.
To wit, the American electorate apparently doesn’t give a shit about runaway government spending because as a practical matter the overwhelming share of voters don’t pay the taxes to fund it. Aside from social insurance taxes, which most payroll taxpayers still believe to be a premium for a government-sponsored retirement annuity, the bottom 90% of households fund only a tiny fraction of Federal spending.
That’s right. The bottom 145 million US income tax filers (out of 161 million total filers) currently pay just $500 billion in Federal income taxes. That’s barely $3,500 per return and even then approximately 50 million of these returns owe zero taxes or actually get tax credit refunds for taxes they haven’t paid!
In the grand scheme of things, therefore, direct tax payments by the bottom 90% of income tax filers amounted to only 12% of Federal spending in FY 2024 outside of social insurance trust funds. To wit, Federal spending ex-social insurance was $4.82 trillion in FY 2024 and upwards of $4.3 trillion of this was paid for by the top 10% of income tax payers, corporations, minor excise and import duty payers and borrowing—of which there was $1.8 trillion of the latter in FY 2024.
Needless to say, the top 10% got soaked good and hard, paying $1.538 trillion of Federal income taxes and as a practical matter nearly the entirety of the $530 billion corporate income tax, which in today’s globally competitive world gets mainly pushed back to shareholders. In effect, $2.1 trillion or 43% of Federal spending outside of social insurance is paid for by the top 10%.
Needless to say, that’s just plain unfair and economically counter-productive, too. The current marginal rate for top bracket taxpayers is 40.8% when you include the Medicare surcharge and the so-called NIIT (net investment income tax). That’s already extortionate because in a free society there is no way that the government should grab 40% of anyone’s income—especially since that’s only the Federal take, which can easily grow to 50% after state and local income and property taxes.
Moreover, when the TCJA act of 2017 expires at year-end 2025, the top marginal rate will jump to truly confiscatory rate of 43.4%, and well beyond 50% in most states after state and local levies are layered on.
In short, America desperately needs to raise more revenues to fund even a downsized government after the DOGE treatment. But the income tax is more than tapped out, and 90% of the public is getting a hall pass on the latter.
Accordingly, what needs to happen is a sweeping reform, which would shift the Federal revenue base overwhelmingly to consumption and sales tax levies. That would ensure that the economic damage is limited and that 100% of the voting public would have skin in the game and feel the pain of spending via commensurate tax extractions. Then they might well demand fiscal sanity from their elected representatives in a manner that rarely occurs under the current defective fiscal regime.
We will elaborate more on the needed sweeping tax base reform in Part 2, but suffice it here to say that not only is the current Federal income tax grossly unfair to the productive classes and tapped out as a practical matter of revenue generation, but it is also unadministratable. Accordingly, more than half of the massive 100,000 man IRS bureaucracy could be eliminated even without a sales/consumption tax replacement, while upwards of 90% could be eliminated if the income tax were mainly substituted by a sales tax.
Needless to say, we are not talking about just bureaucratic nannies and meddlers in the case of the current 83,000 IRS employees—-a figure which is heading for 102,000 by the end of the decade under the still unrepealed Biden revenue grab. In the ranks of what amounts to a small city’s worth of Federal bureaucrats are also a goodly phalanx of tax cops, gumshoes, enforcement lawyers and tax filing proctologists.
So the question recurs: What has generated this massive bureaucracy in the first place, and what fundamental policy shifts are needed to cut the IRS headcount by 50% (42,00 jobs) and upwards of $5 billion of compensation and other operating costs?
The answer starts with calling the IRS’ bluff. When you look at the actual tax filing data it is damn evident that the Deep State bureaucrats are faking mightily when it comes to their massive staffing demands. We discovered the scam way back in our OMB days while jousting with the Treasury Department over the sacred cows in its budget. But nothing is different 40-years later—so here’s the smoking gun that points the way.
In the most recent complete tax-year (2022) there were 161.336 million individual income tax returns filed, which reported $14.83 trillion of Adjusted Gross Income (AGI). But fully 146.045 million of those filings, which reported $10.025 trillion in AGI, did not claim any itemized deductions.
Moreover, among these non-itemizers about 97 million owed taxes and used the standard deduction to calculate taxable income and the amount owed before tax credits. And another 49 million standard deduction users owed no Federal income taxes at all due to low taxable income or child and other tax credits.
In short, you absolutely do not need a giant IRS bureaucracy—and, indeed, hardly any labor-intensive operation at all—to administer the IRS code in the case of 92% of annual tax filings and the overwhelming share of US income taxpayers. That’s because virtually all the relevant data for completion of these non-itemized filings is machine readable and available on other IRS reporting systems, as shown below.
For want of doubt, here is the entirety of the tax computation for a couple earning wages at the US median income of $80,000, using the $13,850 standard deduction for a joint return and claiming two $2,000 child tax credits. The fact is, with today’s technology 99.999% of the work of processing, examining and adjusting (if necessary) non-itemized tax returns of this type should be accomplishable by IRS computers, with nary a bureaucrat’s finger-prints evident in the whole shebang.
That’s especially the case because the overwhelming share of the $10 trillion of AGI among non-itemizers is for wages and salaries reported to the IRS on W-2s; and, also, for interest, dividends, rents, royalties, independent contractor earnings, stock sales, pensions, annuities, IRAs and taxable Social Security earnings—all of which are also reported by the payers of these amounts on Form 1099s.
In the illustration below, any alert machine—to say nothing of an AI-enabled one rigged-up by Elon & Co.—could cross check the W-2s, calculate the taxable income, apply the three relevant tax brackets, deduct the $4,000 of child credits, verify the tax liability of $6,243 and subtract the taxpayer’s withholding amounts to determine whether a payment or refund was required.
All in literally a nanosecond. Presto!
Step-by-Step Calculation of $80,000 Wage-Earning Couple With 2 Kids And The Standard Deduction
Gross Income: $80,000
Standard Deduction: $13,850 (for married filing jointly in 2023)
Taxable Income: $80,000 – $13,850 = $66,150
Tax Liability Calculation
Taxable Income: $66,150
Tax Rates:
10% on income up to $22,000
12% on income from $22,001 to $38,600
22% on income from $38,601 to $66,150
Tax Calculation
10% on the first $22,000: $22,000 * 0.10 = $2,200
12% on the next $16,600: $16,600 * 0.12 = $1,992
22% on the remaining $27,550: $27,550 * 0.22 = $6,051
Total Tax Before Credits: $2,200 + $1,992 + $6,051 = $10,243
Child Tax Credits
2 Child Tax Credits: $2,000 per child
Total Credits: 2 * $2,000 = $4,000
Tax Liability After Credits: $10,243 – $4,000 = $6,243
So how in the world can they justify 83,000 bureaucrats and a budget of $16.1 billion when the overwhelming share of returns involve what can be aptly described as “machine work 101”?
The answer, purportedly, lies in the balance of filings—the 15.29 million itemized returns. But even here the overwhelming bulk of the relevant income items and deductible expense items are not so complex or opaque at all. Indeed, they too are available on other IRS reporting systems and are machine readable at the individual taxpayer ID level.
Specifically, in 2022 the amount of AGI reported on these itemized returns was $4.809 trillion or about 32% of total AGI. But within this total there was included the following amounts which are all machine readable from W-2s and 1099s:
Wages and salaries: $2,345 billion.
Taxable interest: $78 billion.
Taxable dividends: $230 billion.
IRAs: $110 billion.
Pensions and annuities: $176 billion.
Taxable Social Security $82 billion.
Unemployment benefits: $3 billion.
Subtotal: $3.024 trillion.
Above Income As % of AGI on Itemized Returns: 63%.
When it comes to verification on a machine-readable basis, the above income items are all check, check and check. This means that when you combine the above machine-readable AGI amounts from itemized returns with the $10.025 trillion reported on non-itemized returns, it works out to 88% or $13.049 trillion of the $14.834 trillion of total AGI reported for 2022.
None of this AGI should require any significant labor-intensive administration, examination, adjustment or enforcement. The IRS computers should be aware of every dime of AGI from the above categories and whether it was filed accurately by the taxpayer or in need of the proverbial IRS-ordered “adjustment”.
So it is hard to figure out why on the AGI/income side of the equation there is a need for anything remotely like the headcount and budget magnitudes shown below. For instance, the 22,000 headcounts in “enforcement” and “compliance” should be as idle as the proverbial Maytag repairman when it comes to standard deduction returns and the machine-readable sources of income filed on itemized returns. In these instances, there is nothing material for taxpayers to cheat on that wouldn’t be flagged by a properly programmed computer instantly upon filing.
And the same is true in the case of the 33,000 headcounts in “taxpayer services”, “operations support” and “administrative support”. Virtually none of these bureaucrats are needed to process the $10 trillion of AGI on the 146 million non-itemized returns and the $3 trillion of AGI on 15 million itemized returns that is already reported independently by the underlying payers of these income sources.
To the contrary, that’s work for 24/7 machines, not 6.5 hours per day (after civil service required breaks and lunch) government bureaucrats who get 35 vacation, personal leave and sick days per year, on average. And a high share of whom in the post-pandemic era don’t deign to come into the office even on workdays, anyway!
Breakdown of IRS Budget and Headcounts By Function:
For want of doubt, here are the other arguably more complicated categories of AGI reported on itemized returns. But even in these cases, there is plenty of work for the machines to do with respect to examination and verification. For instance, $845 billion or nearly half of the total below is owing to capital gains. But that source of income is already reported by issuers on Form 8940 and Schedule D of 1040s. So Elon’s machines should be on top of that, as well.
At the end of the day, most of the complexity and opacity of the IRS code relates to the $106 billion of net profits reported for business and professional income and the $704 billion reported by sub-chapter S corporations. Here the complexity arises not just from gross income reporting, but more especially from the timing and amounts of allowable business expenses incurred in getting to the net profits figures shown below.
Still, the total amount of AGI involved in these two sources at $950 billion is just 6.5% of total AGI. Even if returns with heavy sub-chapter S or professional and business earnings involve a lot of digging, checking, reconciling and verifying by humans, it is hardly likely to be anything close to 83,000 bureaucrat’ worth.
So, yes, there may well be 2,650 pages of IRS code and another 9,000 pages of IRS regulations, and the whole thing may have 25 times more words than the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But when it comes to the overwhelming bulk of income tax filings and the AGI reported on them, 98% of this legal labyrinth is largely irrelevant. It’s unfortunate existence is merely cited as a smokescreen to justify a massive, unnecessary tax collection bureaucracy.
Other Sources of Income Reported on Itemized Returns in 2022
Business and professional profits: $106 billion.
S-corporation net income: $704 billion.
Capital Gains: $845 billion.
Property sales: $26 billion.
Rents and royalties: $20 billion.
Estate and trust income: $29 billion.
Gambling income: $29 billion.
Other, net: $5 billion.
Total of above: $1.785 trillion.
Nor does the itemized deduction side of the ledger change the picture. Upwards of 91% of itemized deductions, which amounted to $669 billion in 2022, were accounted for by the first five line-items shown below. These are largely machine readable based on standard reporting forms that originators of these deductions are required to file with the IRS.
For instance, mortgage interest deductions are reported on Form 1098; charitable contributions are reported in Form 990 and deductions for state and local taxes paid are available from IRS information sharing reports by the states. Yet in 2022 these three deductions alone amounted to nearly $500 billion or 75% of the total.
Major machine-readable itemized deductions in 2022:
Medical deductions after floor: $93 billion (gross deductions of $121 billion less $28 billion floor effect).
Taxes paid deduction: $125 billion.
Mortgage interest deduction: $147 billion.
Investment interest deduction: $23 billion.
Charitable contributions deduction: $222 billion.
All other itemized deductions: $59 billion.
Total Itemized Deductions: $669 billion.
In short, upwards of 90% of the AGI reported in 2022 for all returns was machine readable from independent reporting sources and more than 90% of itemized deductions were also machine readable. Accordingly, the preponderant share of income and deduction data coursing through 161 million annual income tax filings is essentially riding in a self-driving vehicle. The work of processing, assessing, validating and adjusting it, where necessary, does not likely require more staff than the current headcount of the Capitol Hill Police (2,400).
Moreover, even a few small intelligent changes in the IRS code would narrow even further the number of returns and amounts of AGI that need labor-intensive review and verification. For instance, among the 15.29 million itemized returns filed in 2022, the overwhelming share were at the lower and moderate ends of the income scale where disputed deduction amounts are inherently limited.
2022 Distribution Of Itemized Deduction Returns By AGI Level:
$100,000 and under: 5.755 million (37.6%).
$100,000 to $500,000: 8.076 million (52.8%).
$500,000 to $1,000,000: 0.903 million (5.9%).
$1,000,000 and over: 0.558 million (3.7%).
Total Itemized Returns: 15.292 million (100%).
As indicated above, 13.831 million of itemized returns, or more than 90%, reported AGI of $500,000 or lower–including 5.8 million at $100,000 or lower.
In turn, these $500,000 and under filings reported an aggregate of $1.960 trillion of AGI and $475 billion of itemized deductions. So a “variable standard deduction” allowance of roughly this ratio—24% of AGI— for currently itemized returns up to $500,000 would be revenue neutral. But by eliminating upwards of 90% of itemized deduction filings, an income based “variable standard deduction” would also surely reduce the need for several thousands of examiners, service personnel and overhead managers, as well.
After all, there are only 1.461 million returns with AGI of $500,000 or higher, which reported the amounts shown below for 2022. We absolutely do not believe, for instance, that you need a bureaucracy of 83,000 to examine $213 billion of itemized deduction taken by the wealthy, when $126 billion of these were owing to charitable contributions and $41 billion to investment interest deductions. That’s nearly 80% of the total deductions taken by the wealthy, yet every dollar of this is machine readable and verifiable because it is reported independently to the IRS by the charitable institution recipients and interest-receiving banks, respectively.
Likewise, 71% of the $2.78 trillion of AGI is due to W-2 salaries ($931 billion), investment interest ($62 billion), ordinary dividends ($170 billion), capital gains ($774 billion) and rents and royalties ($40 billion). As indicated previously, all of these items are also reported to the IRS separately and are machine readable by its computers at the taxpayer ID level.
So even in the insane nest of complexity which is the US tax code as it applies to the wealthy, the case just isn’t there to justify the egregiously padded payrolls at the IRS. Not even remotely—and that’s before taking a legislative scalpel to the tax code with the aim of drastically broadening the base and flattening the rates.
Key Tax Data for The 1.461 Million Filings with AGI of $500,000 or Higher:
Total AGI: $2,780 billion.
Itemized Deductions: $213 billion.
Other Adjustments: $86 billion.
Taxable Income: $2.481 billion.
Taxes Paid: $708 billion.
Itemized Deductions as % of AGI: 7.6%.
Taxes Paid As % of Taxable Income: 28.5%.
So can the DOGE find a way to cut the IRS staff by upwards of 50% and 42,000 bureaucrats at a budget savings of $5 billion per year? We’d say, yes, just dig into the rich drove of data in the IRS Data Book for recent tax years and the degree of the current scam will become more than evident.
In that context, DOGE might well consider a technologically modern version of the old postcard-based approach to simplification of the Federal income tax. Thus, there is no reason why upwards of 150 million filers with AGIs under $500,000 could not simply receive an “E-Card” from the IRS at their personal email address in which the IRS machines have already done all the work. The E-Card would:
Calculate and sum all sources of AGI.
Apply the standard deduction and child credits.
Compute the tax liability owed.
Calculate the amount of either payment or refund due after crediting taxpayer withholdings.
Provide an option to “accept” the E-Card outcome or elect to file different amounts in the regular way.
Again, based on the IRS filing data it is likely that at least 90% of E-Card recipients would check the “accept” box and be done with tax time, with no expense on their end and no IRS bureaucrats on the other end.
Our confidence in the conclusion is based on these considerations from the 2022 IRS data. Only 4.7% of the 120 million returns with AGI under $100,000 claimed itemized deductions and the amount of AGI on these returns was just 7% of AGI on all returns under $100,000.
Summary of Filings with AGI of $100,000 or Under:
Returns With No Taxes owed: 47.048 million returns with $922 billion of AGI.
Standard Deduction Returns: 66.865 million returns and $3.424 trillion of AGI.
Itemized Deduction Filers: 5.755 million returns with $345 billion of AGI:
Likewise, 1.88 million or 22% of filings in the $100,000 to $500,000 range used itemization, but it is likely that the aforementioned variable standard deduction approach would limit the number of itemizers very sharply.
Finally, even without sweeping tax reform and the substitution of tariff and consumption taxes for the income tax, as has been vaguely proposed by President Trump, a huge share of the $550 billion that taxpayers now absorb to figure and file their taxes and contest with the IRS bureaucracy could be readily and substantially reduced.
Of course, the prospect of 42,000 IRS agents and hundreds of billions of filing and record keeping expenses should be more than welcome.
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