The Drill Down with Peter Schweizer

Foreign interference in our elections is the broad theme on today’s episode of The Drill Down, as hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers discuss birthright citizenship at the Supreme Court, ActBlue’s foreign donor problem, and a lawsuit in Virginia over allowing the foreign-born children of people who once lived in Virginia to vote in the state’s elections.

The Supreme Court looks ready to overturn a Mississippi law that allows absentee ballots to be collected as late as five days after the election. Meanwhile, Congress is struggling to consider a bill called the SAVE Act that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in all states and require voters to show a photo ID to vote. On the most recent episode of The Drill Down podcast, host Peter Schweizer asks “will either of these issues determine the outcome of November’s elections?”

Are there administration insiders profiting from knowing news about the war with Iran before the public does? Recent news stories from the world of “prediction markets” seem to indicate that may in fact be happening. That story and an interview with the author of a new book that details a barbaric crime by the Communist Chinese.

Elon Musk calls artificial intelligence “a supersonic tsunami headed toward humanity.” The CEO of Anthropic says we have about five years until half of all entry-level, white-collar jobs will be wiped out. Microsoft’s head of AI believes it will happen sooner than that. The hype around artificial intelligence (AI) is so thick and constant that people are fatigued by it. Unfortunately, though, that fatigue will allow bad actors to dominate the race to AI dominance, which would be a very bad thing. More than the quick answers AI can give us now, who controls the inputs it will use to provide those answers matters far more. That important question is the subject of a brand-new book by Wynton Hall, who speaks with host Eric Eggers on the most recent episode of The Drill Down.

“Birth Tourism” is a major national security threat, with as many as 1.5 million Chinese children who were born as “birthright” US citizens potentially becoming voters in US elections, author Peter Schweizer told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday. Sitting on a panel with three constitutional lawyers and a US Marine, Schweizer told senators that China has created an “industrial scale” way of creating American citizens who are born in the US and quickly whisked back to China where they are raised and indoctrinated in the Chinese Communist Party’s ways. He cited Chinese government and academic estimates that between 50,000 and 100,000 Chinese have been on US soil since 2013, meaning they are only a few years away from being old enough to vote.

How Trump's Iran Strike Reshapes Global Power Dynamics

Words like “mind control” and “brainwashing” get tossed around, but it is a very real science and a very dangerous game that former CIA operative and now conservative talk show host Buck Sexton calls by its scientific name of “menticide,” the murder of the mind.

Psychological attacks are real, and the concept of menticide dates to a Dutch psychologist who studied how totalitarian governments control the thoughts of their populations. Joost Meerloo witnessed and studied the way Josef Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong used the insights from Pavlov’s experiments on dogs against people. His most famous work is called The Rape of the Mind.

Did politics destroy journalism, or was it the other way around? Author and investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, host of The Drill Down, sees the case for both but believes journalism has done more damage to itself than politicians could manage to do to them. Schweizer says, “a friend of mine who used to be a producer on 60 Minutes said he thought that journalists became less interested in actual hard news coverage.” On the latest episode of the Drill Down podcast, his guest Mark Halperin, who had a front row seat to see it happening, agrees.

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