Welcome to the Age of Psyops: From Gavin Newsom to AI Doomerism, Nothing Is What It Seems

Question 1: A convergence of fears or a convergence of financial interests?

The AI oligarchs insist it’s the former — and if becoming a government-protected, legally-insulated cartel also happens to be in their financial interests, well, that’s just a wacky coincidence. Their motive is 100% public altruism.

Otherwise, AI will… KILL US ALL!

Question 2: An ultra-ambitious politician who’s been campaigning for president nonstop since 2024 suddenly announces he’ll step aside if Kamala Harris runs — because they’re both from California?

Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris aren’t allies. Their brands — and 2028 political base — are demographically and ideologically different. In fact, Newsom and Harris are so famously distant, Harris publicly kvetched about Newsom snubbing her in ‘24.

From Axios:

Kamala Harris writes in her explosive new book that California Gov. Gavin Newsom avoided her call the day Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and she was soliciting support from other Democratic lawmakers.

Why it matters: Newsom is one of many potential rivals for the 2028 Democratic nomination that Harris throws under the bus in her upcoming book "107 Days," a copy of which was obtained by Axios.

Driving the news: Harris recounts calling dozens of Democratic lawmakers in the hours after Biden dropped out on July 21, 2024, and endorsed her for the nomination.

• Quoting from her notes that day, she writes of trying to reach Newsom: "Hiking. Will call back" and then adds: "(He never did.)"

Yet that’s the current news cycle. The political world was rocked by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s “We Must Pace the Frontier” manifesto, which called for the top AI companies to voluntarily slow the rate of progress — while also demanding government-imposed guardrails and legal protections.

Intriguingly, the other AI oligarchs, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk, quickly agreed with Amodei’s proposal.

The political fallout was instantaneous: Almost all the top Democratic thought leaders and tastemakers, including Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and Kamala Harris, hopped aboard the regulatory bandwagon. Multiple commentators noted the speed and efficiency of the PR campaign. 

It seemed anything but organic.

But it wasn’t just Democrats. Plenty of Republicans hopped aboard the regulatory bandwagon, too.

Meanwhile, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) just threw the first political curveball in the 2028 Democratic presidential race by announcing he wouldn’t run for president if Kamala Harris ran. 

Why?

From the Independent:

“I wouldn’t run if [Harris] ran,” Newsom said while fly fishing in Montana with Tapper as part of a series where the news anchor chats with politicians in some of their favorite places. “Why would I? I wouldn’t do that to her. I wouldn’t do that to you. I wouldn’t waste everyone’s time.”

When Tapper asked Newsom to explain, the governor suggested that pitting two California Democrats against each other would force their shared base to choose between them, handing an advantage to the other candidates.

“Electorally, it’s a gift from God for everybody else. They’d enjoy the hell out of it — mutual assured destruction. It services no greater good,” Newsom said.

Lots to unpack. Let’s begin with the AI oligarchs:

Be deeply skeptical of those who insist it’s a national imperative to give them more money, more power, and more political protection!

(If that doesn’t trigger your bull-feces detector, trade it ASAP for a new model.) 

For the oligarchs, AI doomerism achieves five valuable objectives:

All marketing messages are based on either avoiding pain or pursuing pleasure. It’s part and parcel of the human psyche, and both messages are equally persuasive.

Which means there’s a financial motivation to market alarmism.

That’s not to say that all AI fears are unfounded. Any technology with the power to help has the power to hurt. By definition, transformational technology produces transformational results. Proceeding safely and responsibly is a very reasonable response.

But it also means the financial motive can’t be discounted.

Is AI doomerism a psyop? Of course it is. 

There are powerful forces — including private companies, billionaires, foreign nations, entrenched interests, and political actors — with a vested interest in controlling the AI industry. They have PR pros, too.

The X post that kicked off the latest round of doomerism, from a then-unknown employee named Jacob Coxon, wasn’t accidental. It was an orchestrated, preplanned PR salvo.

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

— Jacob Coxon (@hilbertspaess) September 9, 2026

According to media reports, the Wall Street Journal published its “exclusive” story about Coxon’s resignation not only before his social media message went viral — but before it was even posted. For an anonymous, low-level tech employee like Coxon, that’s highly unusual.

It hints at a high degree of planning, outside assistance, and PR sophistication.

What’s not surprising was how quickly the AI companies responded. It’s less likely that Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), and Sam Altman (OpenAI) were in cahoots and more likely they were all following the same crisis communications PR plan.

The entire point of a crisis communications PR plan is to act quickly. (That’s literally why we create ‘em ahead of time!)

Amodei’s 3,800-word manifesto wasn’t hastily written in response to Coxon. I’ll betcha a Diet Coke it was waiting on deck for the right time to drop — prewritten, preplanned, and preapproved by legal — because it was part of Anthropic’s crisis communications playbook.

And it worked beautifully, too. Amodei leveraged Coxon’s X post into a follow-up essay that positioned him (and his company) as responsible, thoughtful, safety-obsessed industry leaders. The conversation changed from “AI is extinction-level dangerous, and the end is near!” to “government guardrails will keep Americans safe and prosperous.”

Altman and Amodei may be bitter rivals who won’t even hold hands, but they’re in the same financial boat. Their future is tied to the success of their AI companies. They’re both frontier developers who are bleeding cash at an unsustainable rate.

OpenAI lost $39 billion in 2025. Anthropic is only “profitable” if you exclude the cost of training its models (which is almost certainly in the billions) and its revenue sharing with distribution partners.

No wonder both CEOs reached the same conclusion.

Elon Musk is in a different boat yacht. He’s far more diversified. Even if his AI side-project goes belly-up, Musk would still be worth hundreds of billions. His financial motivation is different.

But Musk has also been on the record as an AI doomer longer than almost anyone else. It’s why he’s tickled pink by a “solution” that gives him a seat at the oligarch’s table, letting him review and analyze the work of other AI companies.

This is exactly what he wanted all along.

Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 3, 2014

This is the way https://t.co/nzjhEERK02

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 15, 2026

So Coxon’s X post was fueled by clear and obvious outside PR help. Which led to a convergence of interests by America’s top AI executives, who amplified his message. Which then triggered a global buy-in from left-wingers, Chinese bots, special interests, and regulatory-happy politicos.

Most psyops aren’t comprehensively managed. (If they were, they’d be a helluva lot easier to orchestrate.) More often than not, you’re lighting a spark and letting nature take care of the rest. 

They’re more akin to a controlled burn: You light the match and cross your fingers.

And when everything goes right, the public reaches the conclusion that perfectly coincides with your PR goals.

The tech bros played the game perfectly. President Donald Trump is, apparently, the only American politician who sees through the PR fog, but his opposition will only increase support for AI regulations: Now, the Democrats can score political points AND hurt Trump by going gung-ho for guardrails.

Which means this issue ain’t going away.

The simpler solution, of course, is for Amodei, Altman, and Musk not to release AI models that are unsafe. Nobody’s forcing these companies to release harmful products. 

Claiming that they need to do it because a competitor just might beat them to the punch is self-serving nonsense. Oversight is their professional responsibility.

What they’re REALLY saying is that they’re under ungodly financial pressure to justify their sky-high burn rate.

It also beckons an obvious contradiction: If the AI CEOs are so untrustworthy that they’d recklessly release dangerous, civilization-ending AI models just to make a quick buck, then WHY THE HELL would we grant them special government protections and a permanent monopoly? Does that make any sense at all?

The deeper you dig, the more this feels like an extortion attempt.

Speaking of extortion, what can we say about the one-time frontrunner for the Democratic Party 2028 presidential nomination, the well-coiffed Gavin Newsom? For most of the last two years, he’s been the presumptive nominee, going as far as trolling President Donald Trump’s social media style. More than any other establishment Democrat, he embodied the anti-Trump #Resistance.

He’s taken all the right steps. Newsom hosted his own podcast. He wrote a book. (And then took a book tour through Democratic primary states.) He’s meeting with far-left Dems like Abdul El-Syed and campaigning on their behalf in high-profile elections.

And before he left office, he threw his hand in the midterm redistricting battle, which delighted left-wing grassroots supporters — and that’s not all it did. It also set Newsom up for the 2028 primaries.

Money, money, money!

Politico: Newsom’s Redistricting Campaign Unlocks a New Donor Army Ahead of 2028

Gavin Newsom’s redistricting campaign is supercharging his roster of grassroots donors, creating a powerful springboard for his likely 2028 presidential run.

The California governor brought in more than 100,000 new-to-Newsom contributors — people who had not given to his previous statewide campaigns or federal committee — as part of his blockbuster fundraising for Proposition 50, which would redraw the state’s congressional lines to favor Democrats. The new donors represent more than 93 percent of individuals funding Newsom’s committee backing the initiative, according to a POLITICO analysis.

The influx of new supporters, plus their email addresses, cell phone numbers and other coveted details, could give Newsom a significant leg up in what is widely expected to be a crowded Democratic primary.

And now, out of the blue, Newsom announced on CNN that he wouldn’t run for president out of deference to Kamala Harris — someone he’s never been particularly close to? Someone whose brand and base are very different from his?

As the kids say, “What up wid dat?”

Here are the top two theories.

One: Newsom knows that Harris isn’t going to run, so pretending to defer to her is a PR play to appeal to minority/female primary voters. In states like South Carolina, that could pay political dividends. 

Newsom + women + minorities would be tough to beat.

Two: Newsom can’t run for office because of a skeleton in his closet (perhaps related to the FBI investigation that involved a member of his inner circle wearing a wire). This gives him a handy-dandy excuse not to run — and hey, if the FBI investigation blows over and Harris wins in ‘28, maybe he’ll be rewarded with a plum cabinet spot.

But one thing it’s absolutely NOT is deference based on etiquette. Nor is it due to pragmatic concerns over competing against the #4 polling candidate. That doesn’t even pass the giggle test.

It’s a PR play. A psyop.

Just like AI doomerism.

Exclusively for our VIPs: PRedictions, PRojections, PRaise, and PRedators: Elon Musk Leaves Me Hanging, My Boys Bail Me Out

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