Glenn Beck’s recent sit-down with investigative reporter Whitney Webb should be a wake-up call for every American who values liberty and common sense. Webb makes no attempt to sugarcoat the threat artificial intelligence poses when wielded by the same corporate and government elites who already spy on us and censor dissent.
Webb is blunt and unapologetic about her personal choice: she largely refuses to use AI because she sees it as part of a system designed to harvest our data, shape our perceptions, and train a digital architecture that will eventually act on people rather than for them. She warns that convenience is the bait behind a broader strategy to manufacture consent for technologies that consolidate power in the hands of a few.
Her reporting exposes how AI isn’t simply a neutral tool for efficiency — it’s a data-hungry engine that feeds predictive analytics and surveillance systems which can be turned toward social control. Webb describes scenarios where algorithms decide who is worthy of freedom, services, or even safety based on behavior scores and mined personal data, a nightmare straight out of dystopian fiction now being sold as progress.
That dystopia, she argues, will be socially stratified: a small technical elite who design and maintain these systems, and the vast majority who are subject to them — cognitively diminished, nudged, and profiled without meaningful recourse. Webb points out that this isn’t abstract: the people building these systems are deeply entangled with power structures and questionable figures, and their incentives are seldom aligned with individual liberty.
She also drags into the light what every patriot should find chilling: AI’s military and policing applications can scale repression and even enable atrocities with minimal human oversight. Webb’s horror at the potential for automated targeting, predictive policing, and emotionally manipulative algorithms is not paranoia but a sober reading of where the tech is already headed when left unchecked by the people it will ultimately affect.
Conservatives should not reflexively cheer every “innovation” pitched by Silicon Valley. Webb’s advice — to preserve critical thinking, teach our children analog skills, and refuse to outsource our moral and civic judgment to opaque systems — is exactly the kind of common-sense resistance America needs right now. The question isn’t whether technology can do something, but whether it should be given the power to decide for us.
The path forward is straightforward: push back on the normalization of surveillance tech, reject digital IDs and cashless systems that give centralized actors control over our lives, and demand transparency and accountability from the companies and agencies racing to weaponize AI. Webb’s warning is a rallying cry — if we don’t defend the institutions and habits that make free citizens capable of self-government, convenience will quietly become captivity.
At the end of the day, this is about who we are as a people. We can either meekly hand our choices to code and corporations, or we can revive the rugged independence and civic courage that built this country. Whitney Webb’s refusal to be seduced by Silicon Valley’s siren song is a small but powerful example for those determined to keep freedom alive.
