Category: Blaze Media
Texas school kept predator coach on staff after abuse allegations, suit claims
A shocking new lawsuit claims Celina ISD in Texas covered up allegations that its middle school football coach Caleb Elliot was a sexual predator — before he got the job as a middle school football coach.
Elliot is alleged to have been moved to the middle school after an “improper” relationship with a high school senior, instead of being fired and labeled as a predator.
The lawsuit also alleges that Elliot was caught during the 2024–2025 school year placing cameras in the Moore Middle School locker room and captured the teenage boys as they undressed — which resulted in the coach being banned from the locker room.
In defense of himself, Elliot claimed that “he did not know it was illegal and was trying to deter theft.”
“Now obviously, we know that’s not the case because again, predator is going to predator. Obviously, this child predator was only enabled and emboldened by this district. And he decided to just get more brazen with his exploitation,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales says, disgusted.
“Should have been fired but once again was not. He still was not fired. Instead, Celina ISD continued to harbor a child predator, because football, man,” Gonzales continues, noting that Elliot was a very successful coach’s son.
“It is unfathomable and unconscionable that this district would have covered up multiple instances of sexual exploitation of children because of football, because they wanted to win games, because they wanted to be the state champs,” she adds.
After Elliot’s cameras and footage were discovered, he was banned from the locker rooms.
“You’re going to be shocked to hear this, as a child predator would do. Caleb ignored the rule. And since the rule was never communicated, allegedly, according to the lawsuit, the rule was never communicated to the eighth grade team, they didn’t know that Caleb wasn’t supposed to go in there,” Gonzales explains.
“He just started entering the locker room after the coaches had left and returned to their offices,” she adds, noting that it gets even more disturbing.
“I’m going to read this directly from the lawsuit,” Gonzales says. “‘Beginning in September, the boys noticed Elliot standing around the locker room and staring as they undressed and showered, often holding his cell phone with the camera pointed toward the students.’”
“Plaintiffs allege that Elliot took one of the boys’ backpacks and said that he had to quote ‘do jumping jacks fully nude,’ end quote, to get it back. ‘The boy complied while Elliot watched the child’s penis,’ end quote,” Gonzales reads.
“I would probably be in jail if anyone had engaged in this sort of conduct with my son,” she says.
“These are young boys who have been traumatized, who’ve been exploited in their most vulnerable time by a sick ass pervert freak,” she adds.
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Chicago violence: Almost 20 shot — 3 fatally — over weekend, police say
Nearly 20 people were shot — three of them fatally — in Chicago over the weekend, police told WBBM-TV.
The station said the shooting victims’ ages range from 18 to 70.
A woman of an unknown age was found unresponsive in an alley behind the 11000 block of South Mackinaw Avenue at 10:18 a.m., WBBM said. She had been shot twice in the head and was pronounced dead at the scene, the station said.
Police reported only one shooting on Friday. It took place just before 6:30 p.m. in the 5500 block of South Lafayette Avenue where police said an unknown person shot a 43-year-old woman on the street multiple times, WBBM noted. The woman was taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center in critical condition, the station said.
The shootings ramped up on Saturday, as police said a dozen people were hit by gunfire — two of them fatally, the station said.
In one of the fatal shootings, police told WBBM that individuals in a red Dodge Charger were traveling westbound in the 4400 block of West Augusta Boulevard just before 5:30 a.m. when they were struck by gunfire, after which the vehicle crashed. The driver, a 37-year-old man, was shot in the back while his 29-year-old male passenger was shot multiple times in the head, the station said. Both victims were taken to Mt. Sinai Hospital where the 29-year-old was in critical condition — but the 37-year-old, later identified as Mauro Josemartin, was pronounced dead, WBBM said.
Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune
In the other fatal shooting, a 23-year-old man was in a vehicle in the 4100 block of West Jackson Boulevard at 3:10 p.m. when he was hit in the chest by gunfire, the station said. He was taken to Stroger Hospital of Cook County where he was pronounced dead, WBBM noted.
On Sunday, six people were shot, one of them fatally, the station said. In the fatal shooting, a woman of an unknown age was found unresponsive in an alley behind the 11000 block of South Mackinaw Avenue at 10:18 a.m., WBBM said. She had been shot twice in the head and was pronounced dead at the scene, the station said.
Among the nonfatal shootings, four unknown gunmen approached a 43-year-old man in the 1500 block of East 75th Street just before 4 p.m. Saturday and opened fire at him, WBBM said. The man was hit in the ankle area and taken to a hospital in good condition, the station said.
On Sunday, two men — ages 18 and 19 — were in a business in the 100 block of East 51st Street just before 6 a.m. when a man came up and shot them both, WBBM said. The 18-year-old was shot in the upper right leg and transported himself to Provident Hospital of Cook County, the station said, adding that the 19-year-old was shot in the left calf and was taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center; both were in fair condition. Police told WBBM that the shooter was wearing a gray jumpsuit and fled east on foot.
Also on Sunday, police told the station that multiple people exited a dark-colored SUV outside a business in the 800 block of East 79th Street around 10:45 a.m. and shot two men, ages 66 and 70. The 66-year-old was hit in the right wrist, chest, and groin, police told WBBM, adding that the 70-year-old was hit once in the buttocks. Both victims were taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center where the 66-year-old was reported in critical condition, and the 70-year-old was in fair condition.
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‘Carrie’ and the monster who raised me
The devil and his minions have haunted me all my life.
As far back as I can remember, I’ve been visited by the unquiet dead, the hungry ghosts, and even Old Scratch himself in my dreams. Perhaps these nighttime visitations were spiritual attacks, perhaps they were the predictable manifestation of the violence and instability of my upbringing.
Like Piper Laurie in ‘Carrie,’ my mother forced me to kneel while she stood above me bellowing. ‘Humble yourself before me!’ she shrieked. ‘GodDAMN you, humble yourself!’
Maybe they were both; maybe the kind of moral derangement that afflicted my parents was a kind of demonic possession.
The devil I know
I’m not sure I believe in God, but I’m getting closer to believing in the devil. That’s a confused position, admittedly, but that’s what you get from a guy who believed as a child until it was punished out of him and then spent too many years as an obnoxious “new atheist” adult.
Whatever the answer may be, I’ve been terrified and fascinated by the supernatural, the uncanny, and the grotesque all my life. The kinds of spooky stories that gripped me were the type you find in Victorian English ghost story anthologies. Authors like E.F. Benson, M.R. James, and Elizabeth Gaskell.
If you like these too, no one reads them better than English podcaster Tony Walker. His “Classic Ghost Stories Podcast” is one of the few I find so good that I voluntarily pay for it. This is no amateur sideshow; Walker’s narration is professional grade. Why he’s not rich reading books for Audible, I’ll never know.
Weeping and wailing women in veils who glide down hallways. Rain-bedraggled brides hitchhiking on the side of the road who disappear from their ride’s passenger seat as he drives past Resurrection Cemetery. Fingerprints that appear on the windows of automobiles that cross the railroad tracks where a locomotive hit a school bus long ago killing the children on board. Their spirit fingers gently push your car along to make sure you don’t meet their sad and untimely fate.
In search of … belief
Like many kids of the 1970s and 1980s, I grew up watching shows like the cryptid/aliens/spook-filled “In Search Of,” narrated by Leonard Nimoy. My library card was full many times over with every book on Bigfoot, extra-sensory perception, telekinesis, poltergeists, and the Bermuda Triangle.
Have you heard about the moving coffins of Barbados? That’s top-quality spine tingles. As the story goes, a wealthy family living on the Caribbean island built a family vault in the cemetery. Every time a member died, the crypt was opened to accept a new coffin. And every time the crypt was opened, the coffins that were already there were tossed about helter-skelter.
Maybe it was flood waters. Except that there was no evidence of water incursion. Maybe pranksters did it. But the family sealed the stone door and sprinkled sand on the floor, and there was never a footprint betraying a (living) human presence.
For a proper classic haunting, you can’t beat the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall. Nearly everyone with a passing familiarity with the spirit world of 20th-century popular culture has seen the photograph of this long dead woman, a translucent, begowned figure descending the grand staircase of the palatial home in Norfolk, England, built during the reign of James I in 1620.
According to two photographers who were documenting the inside of the estate in 1936, as they were setting up a shot, they looked up at the stairs in astonishment. A veiled specter was float-walking silently down the stair treads, and they had just enough time to open the shutter on their plate camera and capture the most famous ghost photograph of all time.
Was she the shade of Lady Dorothy Walpole? Lady Walpole was said to have been immured in a room in Raynham Hall for the rest of her life at the hands of her husband, Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend, who was angered by her unfaithful dalliances.
Or was this just the first and best example of trick-ghost photography, a double-exposed photographic plate? In the early days of photography, the public was not wise to the trickery available to a skilled image-maker. Long before Photoshop and AI, the public believed the camera never lies.
I want to believe. There’s something magnetic, romantic, and almost erotic about the possibility that a curtain separates us from the realm of the dead and that it thins at certain times, like now. As a child, I delighted in being scared so badly I didn’t dare turn off the flashlight under the covers I used for my clandestine and very-much-not-allowed post-bedtime reading.
Joy interrupted
Yet the possibility of an ethereal realm where the dead who refuse to acknowledge their condition “live,” a plane where real devil cavorts are not merely fun and games. If that plane exists, and if it’s populated by any of the henchmen attributed to Satan, then the other side is very serious business indeed. I’m not so sure I want to believe, in that case, but I’m also not so sure that I don’t.
When I was 8 years old, my family took a rare trip to a sit-down restaurant on Christmas Eve. We were poor, and a night out at Demicelli’s Italian Restaurant was so special that Christmas would have been joyful even if we didn’t get a single present. As we walked toward Placentia Boulevard in Fullerton, California, I looked at the night sky and saw the brightest star I’d ever seen.
“Mommy, look!” I said, tugging at my mother’s sleeve. I pulled on her cigarette hand, which annoyed her. “It’s the star of Jesus, Mommy. It’s the star that guided the Wise Men to the baby Jesus!”
It was wondrous. It made me feel light-headed with a joy I’d never felt.
My mother made a derisive sniggering noise as she blew out smoke. “Oh, no it isn’t, Josh,” she mocked. “It’s just a star. Probably Venus.”
My face went red with embarrassment, and I stayed quiet the rest of the night. I felt stupid. Unsophisticated. Dumb. Childlike. Naive. And substandard. This was a problem that repeated itself over the years. My mother was the resentful “victim” type, and she was at war with God.
I convinced her to take us to the Presbyterian church where I’d been (to her reluctance, as she recalled it) baptized as an infant for Christmas Eve services in 1986. Mother spent the walk home railing about those “Goddamned hypocritical Christians! Where were they for this single mother when I needed a little help to put food on the table?”
I can’t repeat the rest of what she said in a respectable publication.
Maternal monster
It wasn’t until my 40s that I realized why I had been captivated to the point of obsession with certain dark characters in disturbing films like 1976’s “Carrie.” This was an adaptation of Stephen King’s debut novel of the same name, a book that still ranks among his finest work. It’s only nominally about a teen girl with telekinesis, the psychic ability to move objects with her mind. The story is really about a frightened girl who grew up with a maternal monster.
If you’ve seen the movie, you remember Piper Laurie’s almost kabuki performance as Margaret White, a religious fanatic tormented by her own sense of failure and sin. Seeing herself as a fallen woman who fornicated with a man, she uses extreme interpretations of scripture to berate and subjugate the result of that union, her daughter, Carrie. Just as Margaret believes she can never be forgiven, she can never forgive her daughter for being born, for embodying her mother’s sin in too-real flesh.
So she screams at Carrie, beats her, forces her to confess sins the girl has never committed (they were Margaret’s sins), and worst of all, locks her in a “prayer closet.” The scene that terrified me the most was the vignette in the dining room when Margaret forces Carrie to her knees as she intones about how God had loosed the raven on the world, and the raven was called sin.
“Say it, woman! Say it!” Margaret screams. “Eve was weak. Eve was weak!”
She drags Carrie to the prayer closet, a black cloak whirling about her like the wings of the raven, and babbles insanely while her daughter screams for mercy. Lighting a candle in the dark, Carrie looks up to a figure of St. Sebastian on the wall, a grotesque effigy with agonized eyes reflecting the pain of his arrow wounds.
Fascinated by fear
Margaret White obviously had a severe condition called Borderline Personality Disorder, which also afflicted my mother. While my mother was not a religious fanatic, she treated me the way Margaret White treats Carrie. Just as in the movie’s dining room scene, my mother forced me to kneel while she stood above me bellowing. “Humble yourself before me!” she shrieked. “GodDAMN you, humble yourself!”
My mother did not want what she claimed she wanted: respect and filial piety. She wanted to be worshiped. My mother created herself God in her own image.
So I prayed to God to be delivered from my mother’s prison, but I never got an answer, or one I recognized. I was more certain that the world was full of angry entities, though, and to say I felt haunted wouldn’t go far enough.
That which terrorizes also fascinates. Over my life, I’ve tasted and re-tasted the fear through movies like “Carrie” and “Mommie Dearest.” Fictional versions of my real-life horror were a poison candy; they hurt so good, like the compulsion to thrust the tongue repeatedly into a canker sore that won’t heal.
I still don’t know what I believe about God, the soul, heaven, or hell.
I knew what I saw
No Halloween story would be complete without a personal anecdote of an encounter with the unexplained. This is the first time I’ve told this story to anyone, let alone in print. Like I do myself, you may doubt me. I admit that I was halfway to drunk when it happened. But in the moment, I knew what I saw and heard, I knew I was only buzzed on three beers, not falling-down drunk. I wasn’t hallucinating pink elephants or anything else.
It was 1992. I was 18 years old and sharing an apartment with my best friend, Lisa. It was movie night in the living room, and it was my turn to fetch fresh Molson Goldens from the refrigerator. I put the sweating bottles on a round cocktail tray with a rubber no-slip bottom I’d brought home from the restaurant I worked at.
I was a skilled waiter who could hold a tray with four entrees and several cocktails without spilling. And though I’d had a few beers, I was not drunk. In the hallway as I was about to enter the living room, one of the standing beer bottles on the tray violently flipped over to the horizontal with a thud. It wasn’t the kind of soft thud that happens when something tips over. It was a THUD, as if someone had thrown the bottle into the tray.
Remember, it was a rubberized tray. It was actually difficult for a glass on such a tray to slide, let alone tip over. I had not tilted the tray; I was not weaving drunkenly as I walked. The other beer bottle didn’t tip over. The two mugs on the same tray didn’t move. More, the same thing happened a few minutes later in the living room. My (replaced) beer bottle on the side table, three feet from reach, loudly tipped over on a perfectly level table and made a loud rap.
I remember so clearly stopping still as the blood drained from my head. Did I really just see what I thought I saw? I did. And I felt it, too.
In that moment in the hall, I said this in my head: “What you just saw and heard really happened. You’re not drunk, and you’re not hallucinating. But no one will believe you, and over time, you will not believe you either. Your memory will soften, and you will convince yourself that you were drunk and that you somehow caused these bottles to tip over in apparent defiance of the laws of physics and friction.”
That’s exactly what happened. As I tell you this story, I doubt myself. At the same time, I remember the warning I spoke to myself in my head about doubt there, in the moment, and I know I wasn’t crazy.
Happy Halloween.
States Need To Stop AI Chatbots From Warping 70 Percent Of American Teens (And Counting)
Our nation is in desperate need of legislation that protects children from the dangerous interactions of exploitative AI companion chatbots.
Live By The Media, Die By The Media
Karine Jean-Pierre, like everyone in the Biden administration, allowed the media to use her. They’re still being used, but she’s finding out that it comes with a price.
Here Are 8 Creepy Ways Biden’s Handlers Tried To Hide His Mental Decline To Keep A Grip On Power
Anyone connected to the scheme to hide Biden’s mental decline should never be appointed or elected to a federal position again.
Liberals, heavy porn users more open to having an AI friend, new study shows
A small but significant percentage of Americans say they are open to having a friendship with artificial intelligence, while some are even open to romance with AI.
The figures come from a new study by the Institute for Family Studies and YouGov, which surveyed American adults under 40 years old. Their data revealed that while very few young Americans are already friends with some sort of AI, about 10 times that amount are open to it.
‘It signals how loneliness and weakened human connection are driving some young adults.’
Just 1% of Americans under 40 who were surveyed said they were already friends with an AI. However, a staggering 10% said they are open to the idea. With 2,000 participants surveyed, that’s 200 people who said they might be friends with a computer program.
Liberals said they were more open to the idea of befriending AI (or are already in such a friendship) than conservatives were, to the tune of 14% of liberals vs. 9% of conservatives.
The idea of being in a “romantic” relationship with AI, not just a friendship, again produced some troubling — or scientifically relevant — responses.
When it comes to young adults who are not married or “cohabitating,” 7% said they are open to the idea of being in a romantic partnership with AI.
At the same time, a larger percentage of young adults think that AI has the potential to replace real-life romantic relationships; that number sits at a whopping 25%, or 500 respondents.
There exists a large crossover with frequent pornography users, as the more frequently one says they consume online porn, the more likely they are to be open to having an AI as a romantic partner, or are already in such a relationship.
Only 5% of those who said they never consume porn, or do so “a few times a year,” said they were open to an AI romantic partner.
That number goes up to 9% for those who watch porn between once or twice a month and several times per week. For those who watch online porn daily, the number was 11%.
Overall, young adults who are heavy porn users were the group most open to having an AI girlfriend or boyfriend, in addition to being the most open to an AI friendship.
RELATED: The laws freaked-out AI founders want won’t save us from tech slavery if we reject Christ’s message
Graphic courtesy Institute for Family Studies
“Roughly one in 10 young Americans say they’re open to an AI friendship — but that should concern us,” Dr. Wendy Wang of the Institute for Family Studies told Blaze News.
“It signals how loneliness and weakened human connection are driving some young adults to seek emotional comfort from machines rather than people,” she added.
Another interesting statistic to take home from the survey was the fact that young women were more likely than men to perceive AI as a threat in general, with 28% agreeing with the idea vs. 23% of men. Women are also less excited about AI’s effect on society; just 11% of women were excited vs. 20% of men.
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Bill Gates quietly retires climate terror as AI takes the throne
For decades, Americans have been told that climate change is an imminent apocalypse — the existential threat that justifies every intrusion into our lives, from banning gas stoves to rationing energy to tracking personal “carbon scores.”
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates helped lead that charge. He warned repeatedly that the “climate disaster” would be the greatest crisis humanity would ever face. He invested billions in green technology and demanded the world reach net-zero emissions by 2050 “to avoid catastrophe.”
The global contest is no longer over barrels and pipelines — it is over who gets to flip the digital switch.
Now, suddenly, he wants everyone to relax: Climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” after all.
Gates was making less of a scientific statement and more of a strategic pivot. When elites retire a crisis, it’s never because the threat is gone — it’s because a better one has replaced it. And something else has indeed arrived — something the ruling class finds more useful than fear of the weather.
The same day Gates downshifted the doomsday rhetoric, Amazon announced it would pay warehouse workers $30 an hour — while laying off 30,000 people because artificial intelligence will soon do their jobs.
Climate panic was the warm-up. AI control is the main event.
The new currency of power
The world once revolved around oil and gas. Today, it revolves around the electricity demanded by server farms, the chips that power machine learning, and the data that can be used to manipulate or silence entire populations. The global contest is no longer over barrels and pipelines — it is over who gets to flip the digital switch. Whoever controls energy now controls information. And whoever controls information controls civilization.
Climate alarmism gave elites a pretext to centralize power over energy. Artificial intelligence gives them a mechanism to centralize power over people. The future battles will not be about carbon — they will be about control.
Two futures — both ending in tyranny
Americans are already being pushed into what look like two opposing movements, but both leave the individual powerless.
The first is the technocratic empire being constructed in the name of innovation. In its vision, human work will be replaced by machines, and digital permissions will subsume personal autonomy.
Government and corporations merge into a single authority. Your identity, finances, medical decisions, and speech rights become access points monitored by biometric scanners and enforced by automated gatekeepers. Every step, purchase, and opinion is tracked under the noble banner of “efficiency.”
The second is the green de-growth utopia being marketed as “compassion.” In this vision, prosperity itself becomes immoral. You will own less because “the planet” requires it. Elites will redesign cities so life cannot extend beyond a 15-minute walking radius, restrict movement to save the Earth, and ration resources to curb “excess.” It promises community and simplicity, but ultimately delivers enforced scarcity. Freedom withers when surviving becomes a collective permission rather than an individual right.
Both futures demand that citizens become manageable — either automated out of society or tightly regulated within it. The ruling class will embrace whichever version gives them the most leverage in any given moment.
Climate panic was losing its grip. AI dependency — and the obedience it creates — is far more potent.
The forgotten way
A third path exists, but it is the one today’s elites fear most: the path laid out in our Constitution. The founders built a system that assumes human beings are not subjects to be monitored or managed, but moral agents equipped by God with rights no government — and no algorithm — can override.
RELATED: How Bill Gates and friends turned global health into a profit machine — at your expense
AvigatorPhotographer via iStock/Getty Images
That idea remains the most “disruptive technology” in history. It shattered the belief that people need kings or experts or global committees telling them how to live. No wonder elites want it erased.
Soon, you will be told you must choose: Live in a world run by machines or in a world stripped down for planetary salvation. Digital tyranny or rationed equality. Innovation without liberty or simplicity without dignity.
Both are traps.
The only way
The only future worth choosing is the one grounded in ordered liberty — where prosperity and progress exist alongside moral responsibility and personal freedom and human beings are treated as image-bearers of God — not climate liabilities, not data profiles, not replaceable hardware components.
Bill Gates can change his tune. The media can change the script. But the agenda remains the same.
They no longer want to save the planet. They want to run it, and they expect you to obey.
Cybernetics promised a merger of human and computer. Then why do we feel so out of the loop?
It began in the crucible of a world at war. The word cybernetics was coined in 1948 by the MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener, a man wrestling with the urgent problem of how to make a machine shoot down another machine. He reached back to the ancient Greek for kubernétes, the steersman, the one who guides and corrects. Plato had used it as a metaphor for governing a polis. Wiener used it to describe a new science of self-governing systems, of control and communication in the animal and the machine. The core idea was feedback, a circular flow of information that allows a system to sense its own performance and steer itself toward a goal.
The idea was not about mechanics but about behavior. The focus shifted from what things are to what they do. A thermostat maintaining the temperature of a room, a human body maintaining homeostasis, a pilot correcting the flight path of an airplane; all were, in this new light, functionally the same. They were all steersmen. The conciseness of the concept was seductive, its implications unsettling. It suggested a universal logic humming beneath the surface of both wired circuits and living tissue, blurring the line between the made and the born.
You shape the algorithm, and the algorithm shapes you.
The primordial cybernetic device was James Watt’s centrifugal governor, that elegant pirouette of spinning weights that tamed the steam engine in 1788. As the engine raced, the rotating balls swung wide, closing a valve to slow it; as the engine slowed, they fell, opening the valve again. It was a perfect, self-contained conversation.
But it was the Second World War that gave birth to the theory. Human reflexes were no longer fast enough for the new calculus of aerial combat. Wiener and his colleagues were tasked with solving the “air defense problem,” which was really a problem of prediction. They treated the enemy pilot, the gun, and the radar as a single, closed-loop system, each reacting to the other in a lethal dance. By the war’s end, as one analyst starkly put it, autonomous machines were shooting down other autonomous machines in the “first battle of the robots.”
In the Cold War that followed, cybernetics became a tool of ideological contest. In the West, it was the logic of the military-industrial complex, of corporate automation and the game theory of nuclear deterrence humming away in the computers at Project RAND. It promised optimization and control.
Yet the idea proved too fluid to be contained. While men in uniform were designing command-and-control networks, Stewart Brand was on the West Coast, publishing the Whole Earth Catalog. He filled its pages with cybernetic theory, reimagining it not as a tool for top-down control but for bottom-up, self-regulating communities. The catalog itself was a feedback loop, constantly updated by its readers. For a generation of commune-dwellers and future Silicon Valley pioneers, cybernetics was the grammar of personal liberation and ecological harmony. Computers, Brand wrote in Rolling Stone, were “coming to the people.”
RELATED: ‘They want to spy on you’: Military tech CEO explains why AI companies don’t want you going offline
Photo by Matt Cardy
The Soviets, meanwhile, followed a more jagged path. Initially denouncing cybernetics as a “bourgeois pseudoscience,” they performed a complete reversal after Stalin’s death. Here was a science, they realized, that could perfect the planned economy. Visionaries like Anatoly Kitov and Victor Glushkov dreamed of a vast, nationwide computer network called OGAS, an electronic nervous system that would link every factory to a central hub in Moscow. It was an ambitious plan for “electronic socialism,” a rational, data-driven alternative to the brute-force dictates of the past. The system, they hoped, would offer a technocratic antidote to personal tyranny. OGAS was never fully built, stalled by bureaucracy and technical limits, but the dream itself was telling. Both superpowers saw in the feedback loop a reflection of their own ambitions: one for market efficiency, the other for state perfection.
Perhaps the most popular incarnation of the cybernetic dream was Project Cybersyn in Salvador Allende’s Chile. From 1971 to 1973, the British cybernetician Stafford Beer designed a nerve center for the Chilean economy. In a futuristic operations room that looked like a set from “Star Trek,” managers sat in molded white chairs, surrounded by screens displaying real-time production data fed from factories across the country via a network of telex machines. It was an attempt to steer a national economy in real-time, to keep it in a “dynamic equilibrium” against the shocks of strikes and embargoes. Cybersyn was a short-lived project, ending with the 1973 coup, but it remains a powerful symbol of the cybernetic ideal: a society as a single, responsive, controllable system.
The feedback loop was not confined to the physical world. It began to shape our fictions, which in turn shaped our reality. William Gibson, who knew famously little about computers, coined the word “cyberspace” in his 1984 novel “Neuromancer.” The vision was so compelling it seemed to will itself into existence, providing the language and the imaginative blueprint for a generation of technologists building the early internet and virtual reality. Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel “Snow Crash” gave us the “metaverse” and the “avatar,” terms that have since migrated from fiction to corporate strategy. Cyberpunk literature provided the prototypes for the world we now inhabit.
Today, the word “cybernetics” feels archaic, a relic of a retro-futurist past. Yet its principles are more deeply embedded in our lives than Wiener could have imagined. We are all entangled in cybernetic loops. The social media algorithms that monitor our clicks to refine their feeds, which in turn shape our behavior, are feedback systems of astonishing power and intimacy. You shape the algorithm, and the algorithm shapes you. A self-driving car navigating city traffic is a cybernetic organism, constantly sensing, processing, and acting. Our smart homes and wearable devices are nodes in a network of perpetual, low-grade feedback.
We have built a world of steersmen, of systems that regulate themselves. The question that lingers is the one Wiener implicitly asked from the beginning. In a world of automated, self-correcting systems, who, or what, is charting the course?
Hegseth announces more lethal boat strikes to eradicate drug traffickers
The Trump administration performed strikes in international waters in the eastern Pacific on Monday to stop several boats carrying illegal narcotics, according to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
‘We will track them, we will network them, and then, we will hunt and kill them.’
He announced on Tuesday the results of “three lethal kinetic strikes on four vessels,” claiming that they were operated by “Designated Terrorist Organizations.”
In January, President Donald Trump designated international cartels as foreign terrorist organizations for flooding the U.S. with “deadly drugs, violent criminals, and vicious gangs.”
Monday’s strikes killed 14 narco-terrorists, Hegseth said. No U.S. forces were harmed.
“Eight male narco-terrorists were aboard the vessels during the first strike. Four male narco-terrorists were aboard the vessel during the second strike. Three male narco-terrorists were aboard the vessel during the third strike,” he explained. “The Department has spent over TWO DECADES defending other homelands. Now, we’re defending our own. These narco-terrorists have killed more Americans than Al-Qaeda, and they will be treated the same. We will track them, we will network them, and then, we will hunt and kill them.”
Hegseth noted that there was one survivor.
“Regarding the survivor, USSOUTHCOM immediately initiated Search and Rescue (SAR) standard protocols; Mexican SAR authorities accepted the case and assumed responsibility for coordinating the rescue,” he added.
RELATED: ‘We will stop you cold’: Trump announces successful strike against ‘narcoterrorist’ vessel
Pete Hegseth. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Tuesday condemned the most recent strikes.
“We do not agree with these attacks, with how they are carried out,” Sheinbaum stated. “We want all international treaties to be complied with.”
RELATED: Trump’s Caribbean ‘drug wars’ are forging a new Monroe Doctrine
Photographer: Will Oliver/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images
A separate strike was carried out at President Donald Trump’s direction in the Caribbean Sea last week against a vessel reportedly operated by Tren de Aragua.
“The vessel was known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, was transiting along a known narco-trafficking route, and carrying narcotics,” Hegseth stated on Friday. “Six male narco-terrorists were aboard the vessel during the strike, which was conducted in international waters — and was the first strike at night. All six terrorists were killed, and no U.S. forces were harmed in this strike.”
The U.S. has performed more than a dozen strikes since September. At least 57 people have been killed, according to the Associated Press.
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