Inside Google's latest ploy to reprogram your kids



A recent viral essay from the New Yorker details the virtual market lock Google and other AI companies have quietly, some might say underhandedly, gained on the coveted and highly vulnerable K-8 public school population.

While we’re watching oil prices, the border invasion, and trying to feed our families, Big Tech is already fully insinuated into the school system — via long-standing, highly corrupt but technically legal arrangements between corporate-industrial capital and the U.S. Department of Education.

John Taylor Gatto, the legendary New York schoolteacher, best-selling author, and titan in the struggle for human dignity, once warned, “Schools were designed ... to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled."

Lifelong customers are tough to create, unless you indoctrinate them.

He was correct, of course. And so the penetration of AI and Big Tech into public schools shouldn’t be a surprise. Rather, it is inevitable — as AI and Big Tech share many of these original ideas related to the management of human beings via cybernetics and technocracy. It’s almost as if the captive audience of young children was put into place to wait for the final insinuation of ultimate control through dumbing-down technology.

Consider the experience recounted in the New Yorker by writer Jessica Winter, a mother herself: "Students at my eleven-year-old daughter’s public middle school began receiving new Google Chromebooks, and that is when I heard the tap-tap of the cloven hooves approaching our doorstep. The Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: ‘Help me write.’ If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is ‘Help me visualize.’”

Lifelong customers are tough to create, unless you indoctrinate them at the most vulnerable and malleable stages of their lives. As our expectations have fallen concerning our social arrangements, companies like Google or Anthropic, in partnership with, say, Microsoft, are building a long play. They’re capturing the brand allegiance, building familiarity, and establishing “relationships” early — investments that will extend throughout life.

“No single company has a monopoly on A.I. in K-8 education,” Winter observes. But Google, thanks to its Chromebook, is well on the way.

"A report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group noted that, by the last quarter of 2020, year-on-year sales of the device were up by 287%," reports Winter. "In a national survey conducted by the Times last November, about 80% of K-12 teachers said that their districts use Chromebooks, which has created a vast captive market for Gemini and helped make A.I. in schools a near-universal prospect.”

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One senses a strange respect for the business acumen of these market virtuosos. After all, it wasn't long ago that their "progressive" bona fides and "good person" ethos were fully accredited by the country's all-too-well-established elite institutions. Those old habits and expectations die hard. But today the emerging picture concerning AI-forward Big Tech and our children’s minds, to say nothing of our own dwindling capacities, still remains too “conspiratorial” for most of the mass media apparatus.

However gingerly, Winter tiptoes toward the truth. She flags a new MIT study that concludes "the integration of LLMs into learning environments may inadvertently contribute to cognitive atrophy.” But again: Winter notes the study's timid authors "appended an FAQ to the paper with instructions on how to discuss its findings," begging readers not to use "the words like ‘stupid,’ ‘dumb,’ ‘brain rot,’ ‘harm,’ ‘damage,’ ‘brain damage,’ ‘passivity,’ ‘trimming,’ and so on."

Even if we didn’t have countless studies decrying the potential and proven deleterious effects of AI — on adults! — we should, and could if we wanted, simply sit back and apply Gatto's observations and warnings to the manner in which tax schemes and kickbacks have deluged the classroom with digital technology that seems built more to impair than inspire.

It isn’t at all up for debate as to whether the U.S. education system was purposely built to serve the needs of industrial capital for docile and compliant workers. We could, I suppose, debate the ethics of that government-corporate merger. But it has long been in effect.

What may still be debatable is whether we, as a people — we American are still a coherent people, right? — wish to radically amplify the depth and scope of that docility. The perverse logic at work in the unified sectors of American education, finance, technology, and government is geared for deeply anti-human outcomes. And those fed into the gears at a young enough age will never know any better.

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West Virginia Republicans are betraying their voters for AI special interests



There is a reason why most red-state Republican leaders fail to reflect the political values of their constituents. They represent the special interests they work for rather than the whole of the people.

Nowhere is this more evident than with the ravaging of West Virginia by generative AI data centers, promoted by people like House of Delegates Speaker Roger Hanshaw, who legally represents special interest groups fighting poor, local communities in court.

The same man who was instrumental in stripping localities of their ability to block data centers is now representing the people behind those data centers in court.

Remember the provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 that originally attempted to strip all state and local governments of any ability to block data centers from being built? Well, last year, West Virginia enacted just such a ban at the state level. Hanshaw shepherded HB 2014 to Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s desk.

Among many special tax and regulatory favors offered to data centers, this bill removed local jurisdiction over the siting, zoning, and operating of certified high-impact data centers and microgrids.

Thus, companies like Google, Meta, and OpenAI could work with state politicians bought into their pay-for-play and force their way into any community. And what better person to be fighting for them than the speaker of the House?

While serving as speaker, Hanshaw filed a notice of appearance in the appeal to the Department of Evironmental Protection’s Air Quality Board on behalf of his client MGS CNP1 LLC, which is an affiliate of Houston-based Fidelis New Energy working on a data center project in Mason County.

This was in the middle of the session and just one week after the state House of Delegates passed legislation making it easier for these projects to obtain certification with the Department of Commerce.

Then, just two days after the session ended, Hanshaw took on a case through his work at Bowles Rice for Fundamental Data, the company working on powering the data center bonanza in Tucker County.

So the same man who was instrumental in stripping localities of their ability to block data centers is now representing the people behind those data centers in court against local community groups appealing the DEP’s permit issuance.

It was the Tucker County fight that led me to speak out nationally against this mindless business model of raping red-state land, power, and water for a form of generative AI that serves nothing but chatslop and the surveillance state.

Last August, I vacationed in Tucker County, home to the gorgeous Blackwater Falls State Park and Canaan Valley. A county that voted for Trump by a 50-vote margin, these people are the forgotten men that MAGA was supposed to represent.

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I spoke with several locals who were irate beyond words about the injustice occurring in a state with barely any Democrat elected officials.

What’s worse is that West Virginia is also being violated with endless transmission lines to power the blue-state “data center alley” in northern Virginia. According to a report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysts, West Virginia energy consumers will be expected to pay $572 million in higher rates to fund the rope to hang themselves.

What is so offensive is that these projects are not even creating jobs. According to the February JOLT report from BLS, construction remains in the greatest recession since the Great Recession, despite these so-called data center projects. Oracle, which is at the center of the cloud computing in the data centers, is laying off 18% of its workforce.

Shockingly, Henshaw and his minions attempted to pass even greater handouts for data centers offered to no other industry, in addition to what was in HB 2014.

This session, they introduced SB 623, which offered a complete property tax exemption and sales tax exemption on all data center equipment. They also introduced HB 4013, which would have created a new tax credit available to data centers to offset all state income, sales/use, franchise, and payroll withholding taxes based on capital investments, construction costs, and wages.

How many jobs did they have to create to qualify? Just 10! Which, of course, is a tacit admission that these behemoths don’t create many jobs, despite their enormous footprint, cost, and consumption of power.

In other words, Agenda 2030 is being fulfilled right under our noses in a state where Republicans control both houses of the legislature with 32-2 and 91-9 majorities.

What West Virginia, with its mind-numbing GOP majorities, shows is that the lack of conservative outcomes under GOP control is not due to a lack of power or votes but too much access to money and special interests.

Google agrees to PAY $68 million to settle yearslong eavesdropping case



For decades, users suspected that Google was listening in on conversations through their smartphones, oftentimes serving ads for products that users spoke about in casual conversation but didn’t actually search for online. While no wrongdoing has been admitted or found, the suspicions are gaining new attention as Google has agreed — citing the "uncertainty, risk, expense, inconvenience, and distraction" involved — to settle a years-long illicit eavesdropping case for a cool $68 million.

The lawsuit

The class action lawsuit, which was filed all the way back in July 2019, alleged that any Google and/or Android devices with Google Assistant hotword detection enabled both recorded and transmitted anything it heard — including conversations — back to Google’s servers without users’ knowledge.

If you just want to kick Google out of your conversations, it’s easy to pull the plug.

A hotword is a phrase you can use to invoke the assistant on your smart devices without touching or otherwise interacting with them. To see if hotword detection is active on your phone, try this quick trick: Android users can say “OK, Google” or “Hey, Google” to bring up the virtual assistant, while iPhone users can say, “Hey, Siri” to invoke the Apple assistant. If your phone immediately lights up and starts to listen to your commands, then your phone could be spying on you.

Before jumping to conclusions, it’s important to note that hotword detection is only supposed to listen for those specific “Hey” or “OK” commands before actively capturing data to answer your query. The lawsuit, however, claims that Google and Android devices recorded data without invoking a hotword.

While the lawsuit specifically alleges Google Assistant is the big offender, Google has since abandoned that service for Gemini, its in-house AI. But Gemini works exactly like Google Assistant, letting users summon the service on an Android device with the same “Hey, Google” or “OK, Google” command. In other words, it has the capability to enable listening of the same kind.

Google has a whole eavesdropping ecosystem

The tricky part about Google Assistant — and now Google Gemini — is that it’s embedded in a wide range of devices. Hotword detection can be enabled on most Android handsets, including Samsung Galaxy phones and Google Pixel phones. For Android fans, that means you carry Google’s listening software in your pocket every day, waiting to hear those magic words that give it permission to record what you say.

But, of course, Google isn't limited to working through your phone. The same service works on Google’s family of smart home products, including those with the Google Home and Google Nest badge. You’ll find it on Android tablets too, as well as Wear OS smartwatches, such as the Google Pixel Watch and Samsung Galaxy Watches.

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It’s everywhere throughout Google’s broad first-party and third-party ecosystem, covering an install base of approximately four billion devices worldwide, giving it access to a massive expanse of data.

How to disable hotword detection on Android devices

Google’s hotword detection is helpful if you like to get information from your device completely hands-free, such as asking for directions to a location, playing a song from your favorite app, or sending a quick text message to your spouse on your way home from work. If you don’t care about these things though, or if you just want to kick Google out of your conversations, it’s easy to pull the plug on hotword detection entirely:

  • Open the Google app on your Android phone.
  • Tap your profile picture in the top right corner.
  • Then tap “Settings.”
  • In the Settings menu, tap “Gemini.”
  • Then “Talk to Gemini hands-free.”
  • Finally, uncheck the toggles beside “Hey, Google” and “While driving.”

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw

As for Google Home and Google Nest products, these all come with a physical microphone kill switch on the device. Simply turn the switch off to block microphone access, cutting off conversations for good.

The settlement

Per the terms of the settlement, Google has agreed to pay $68 million to users affected from May 18, 2016, to December 16, 2022, pending preliminary approval by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. If you believe the settlement applies to your use of Google products, you could be eligible for compensation up to $56 per device, with owners of first-party Google products more likely to receive a payout. To be considered, you must fill out a valid claim form, which at this time isn’t yet available.

Notably, Google isn’t the only company that has been accused of spying on users. Apple also recently settled a similar class action lawsuit for $95 million over Siri’s listening capabilities.

The lesson to take from this is that Big Tech is finally getting a firsthand look at what's at stake in invading users’ privacy. How much improvement awaits us remains to be seen.

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How the laptop revolution destroyed public education



A recent Fortune magazine article made waves with a grim admission: After more than $30 billion spent flooding classrooms with laptops and tablets, standardized scores keep sliding. Worse, neuroscientists now link more classroom screen time to lower performance. The device meant to modernize learning may be helping to unmake it.

Schools rushed into a technological revolution without asking the most basic question: What does this do to a child’s mind? Many teachers saw the answer firsthand and in real time. Administrators and “experts” ignored them because the fad sounded like “progress.”

A concerted push to remove screens from classrooms needs to begin now. Put the devices where they belong: limited tools, not the center of learning.

I taught history and civics in Florida public schools as the laptop trend took hold. Computers had sat in classrooms since my own childhood, but they played a supporting role. A few desktops in the back helped with research. A computer lab handled bigger projects. Most learning still happened on paper with books, notes, and conversation.

Then the Chromebook arrived: cheap, durable, limited, and perfect for one thing — living inside a web browser. Suddenly a district could put a machine not just in every room but in the hands of every student.

Buzzwords beat judgment

Public-school administrators love buzzwords. “Technological literacy” sounds noble, as if every ninth grader is training for Silicon Valley while working on their grammar assignment. Google did not just sell discounted laptops. It supplied a full ecosystem: Docs, Sheets, Slides, Classroom. The whole apparatus of schooling migrated into Alphabet’s software suite. Few people in the system asked why a private company wanted to become the operating system of childhood.

The laptop push also fit the religion of metrics. District offices love anything that produces dashboards, timestamps, and “engagement” graphs. A worksheet completed on paper frustrates the spreadsheet priesthood. A worksheet completed on a Chromebook generates data. The device did not just enter the classroom; it entered the managerial imagination, where metrics matter more than minds.

Once laptops became ubiquitous, the problems announced themselves. The deeper the integration, the harder it became to control.

Cheating became routine. Students searched answers in seconds. The larger problem went beyond quizzes. Googling replaced thinking. Kids refused to read because they assumed a quick search and a copy-paste counted as “learning.” Wikipedia became the default authority. Students stopped vetting anything because they treated the first search result as truth. Even writing shifted. Instead of building an argument, students stitched together paragraphs from the internet and hoped the teacher felt too tired to fight.

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The distraction machine

Schools tried parental controls. Teenagers treated those controls as a challenge. When thousands of bored adolescents share a building, they collaborate. A new filter went up; within days, kids found a workaround. Soon the screens again showed games, movies, even pornography — during class, in plain view, behind a pretense of “work.”

Students used shared Google docs as a covert messaging system. They gossiped, bullied, and planned actual crimes while keeping a document open to look studious. My school eventually held assemblies to remind students that everything typed into a document leaves a record and that bragging about criminal activity or sexual escapades can end up as evidence.

All of that raised another issue: privacy and capture. Google did not subsidize devices and software out of corporate charity. By making Google search and Google apps the center of a child’s information life, the system trained dependency. Google finds the truth. Google organizes the truth. Google presents the truth. A student’s education happens inside a Google ghetto. Pretend the company is not collecting that data if you want, but the incentives cut the other way.

Screens also fed the attention crisis. Administrators told teachers to stop showing videos longer than three minutes without pausing to explain because students could not stay focused. The device that was supposed to expand horizons kept shrinking attention spans. Teachers began competing with the entire internet for a child’s attention, and no lesson plan can win that contest for long.

Locked into the system

The system made escape difficult. Florida went all-in on Chromebooks and tied them to everything. Standardized tests moved entirely onto laptops. “Test prep” software got woven into daily coursework. Students with accommodations or limited English got pushed toward the device as a universal crutch. Denying a Chromebook got treated as denying an education. Teachers who resisted risked discipline.

I reached a point where my students mattered more than compliance. I rebuilt my classroom around paper, books, and discussion. Students used Chromebooks only for mandated testing and accommodations we could not meet otherwise.

The shift showed results fast. Students engaged more. Distraction dropped. Discipline improved. More assignments got finished. Grades rose.

Then COVID-19 struck.

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Remote learning turned the screen into the classroom itself. Even Florida, which resisted lockdown hysteria, shifted much of schooling online. Learning fell off a cliff. The lockdowns devastated achievement, but the damage did not end when students returned in person. After COVID, it became nearly impossible to pry students, parents, and administrators away from screen-based schooling. Digital integration became mandatory. No exceptions.

Now the corporate press arrives to play cleanup. Reporters discover the failure well after the money has been spent, the infrastructure has hardened, and a generation has been trained to treat a browser as a brain.

A way back

Public education is stuffed with managerial drones who chase consensus and trends while ignoring what helps students. The bureaucracy will keep this program alive through sheer inertia even as evidence piles up. Parents and lawmakers need to force a reset: paper-based instruction as the default, screens as a tightly limited accommodation, and tests that reward reading and writing instead of clicking. Districts should stop outsourcing childhood to Big Tech, stop laundering ideology through “digital citizenship,” and start treating attention as a scarce resource worth defending.

A concerted push to remove screens from classrooms needs to begin now. Start with elementary grades. Bring back books. Bring back handwriting. Bring back sustained attention. Put the devices where they belong: limited tools, not the center of learning.

Kids learn slower, but they learn for real.

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'Amateur hour': The Nancy Guthrie kidnapping case through the eyes of a security expert



Though the search is entering its 17th day for “Today” anchor Savannah Guthrie’s kidnapped mother, Nancy Guthrie, Spencer Coursen, founder and CEO of the Coursen Security Group and author of “The Safety Trap,” believes that officials are dealing with amateurs.

“What we do know is that she’s missing. What we do know is that there has been no proof of life. And after that, we really cannot verify much more because of the information flow,” Coursen tells Stu.

“But until there is proof of life, a lot of what we are seeing should be treated more as noise and less as signal,” he adds.

And in the recent door-camera video footage released of the alleged kidnappers, Coursen tells Stu that it looks like “amateur hour.”


“Professional kidnappers control communication. They control their environment. Amateurs engage in chaos. And what I am seeing looks more and more like that of chaos than that of control,” Coursen explains.

Stu points out that at one point in the recently released footage, it appears the kidnappers are “trying to block the ring cam with plants.”

“Exactly. If you’re a professional, you have done research and planning up until that point, and then you either know that there’s a Ring camera or a Nest camera or Google camera or some kind of security deterrent, and you either go in the back door where there isn’t one, or you walk up with a spray can,” he says.

“What you don’t do is walk up and go, ‘Oh, camera. Oh, what do I do?’” he continues.

“Professionals conduct an orchestra. Amateurs bang drums.”

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