Republican California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton continues to release videos exposing the extent of human trafficking when his Democrat opponent, Xavier Becerra, was HHS secretary and in charge of bringing unaccompanied migrant children into the United States under Joe Biden.

Becerra lost track of over 330,000 illegal alien children during the Biden open borders crisis. There is video of him complaining to his staff that they were not cycling children through fast enough, comparing the process to an “assembly line.” Basically, HHS would hand kids off to anyone who simply claimed to be a relative. It was all about rushing massive amounts of young foreigners into the United States, regardless of how many of them ended up with traffickers. One contractor who remembers how many children tried to fight being handed off to strangers is speaking out.

The interviewer asked, “Do you believe that under Becerra, some of the girls that were under your care might have now been sexually or labor trafficking inside the United States?” The whistleblower answered, “Yes, I believe it did happen. Like, 100% believe it. And possibly worse, honestly.”

The whistleblower introduced himself as Tarek Kadourah and explained that he “was a site supervisor for MVM, the summer of 2021. MVM received a contract with Health and Human Services, [for] kids that were rescued, obviously. Their job was to make sure that they were fed, kept healthy, and then transported to sponsors. But that transportation part is where we came in.”

Kadourah was a liaison. “Out of the four site supervisors, I was the one on site every day from morning till night, directly liaison between Health and Human Services and the White House,” he clarified. “I was a middleman. So I oversaw everything.” It didn’t take him long to realize something was very wrong and that, far from rescuing kids from traffickers, he was part of a process to hand them off to traffickers.

“The children always seemed to look like they were scared, and uncomfortable, and vulnerable when they were supposed to be safe,” Kadourah recalled. “To me, those kids look like — there's no other way to say it — they were still being trafficked.”

The interviewer asked him what federal immigration agents thought about what was happening. “They were worried, because, I mean, they felt like they were accomplices in a human trafficking operation,” Kadourah said. One agent “was telling me every time he was dropping off some of those kids, they would immediately cry and refuse to get in a van or the vehicle of that sponsor at the drop-off site.”

Kadourah asked the agent whether the children explained why they reacted that way. “And they said they didn't know who those people were. And I, when I said, ‘Well, you know, the agents had paperwork from HHS, saying that, Hey, this person was somehow related to that child, uncle, aunt, sister, whatever, right?’ None of it was verified.”

MVM was supposedly taking the contracts under the understanding that all of the illegal alien children were going to verified sponsors. But Becerra’s machine didn't meet that expectation. “Health and Human Services was giving us paperwork that was not frickin’ verified. All they were doing was pick up phone calls, and say, ‘Oh, okay, you're so and so's uncle,’ whatever, and then stamping it and moving it forward. They were treating it just like Becerra said, like an assembly line. That's exactly how it ran,” Kadourah exclaimed.

The federal agents were “noticing a pattern. When it's not just one or two children crying, refusing to get in a vehicle with strangers, but it's like 20, 30 of them crying, saying, ‘We don't know who these people are. That's not my aunt, uncle.’ That raised a lot of red flags, and I think that's when they completely shut me out,” Kadourah remembered. There was no room in the assembly line for any person with a shred of conscience.

Four decades ago, President Ronald Reagan launched the Strategic Defense Initiative to end the "suicide pact" known as Mutual Assured Destruction in case of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The SDI looked at all kinds of exotic technologies, including space-based missile systems and particle beam weapons that would someday keep a 24/7/365 watch for enemy missile launch — and then destroy them.

Space-based weapons were dismissed by figures like Sen. Ted Kennedy as "reckless Star Wars schemes," even though SDI was a shield, not a sword. Even so, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev understood that his country was both too broke and too technologically stunted to compete with SDI, and at a 1986 summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, offered total mutual nuclear disarmament if Reagan would just give up SDI.

Reagan stood firm, and three years later we won the Cold War. These events were not unrelated.

Under President Bill Clinton, SDI evolved in 1993 into the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization with more modest aims due in part to the demise of the Soviet threat. The BMDO "shield" (now the Missile Defense Agency) was limited to Earthbound interceptors and at a much smaller scale. While we've made some great advances, that's basically how things remained for the last 30 years or so.

Yet while nobody was looking, Reagan's dream of a space-based shield started coming true....

Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink announced Monday that the U.S. now operates what he described as "on-orbit space control weapons" during his keynote at the Air & Space Forces Association’s (AFA) 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference at the Gaylord conference center in Maryland.

“Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats, wherever they exist,” Meink said. “This is why the United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action.”

During a presser following his keynote, Meink said he wouldn't "go into specifics on the type of weapon" that might be deployed in orbit, adding that revealing the existence of such weapons "is important from a deterrence perspective, but on the other hand, me talking about the details of what we’re doing would actually not benefit that deterrence."

"So I’m not going to talk about the specifics of what we’re doing," he continued, "whether we’ve tested or not tested, or anything else."

That's exactly the kind of thing Meink has to say at a time like this, but I can't help but notice that his announcement coincided with... well, another coincidence.

On Friday, American officials linked satellite imagery supplied to Iran by China to an Iranian attack in July that killed three American troops based in Jordan.

"Tehran acquired high-resolution images of the installation both before and after the July attack, according to officials familiar with the incident," i24 reported Saturday, based on a WSJ story behind a paywall. "They described the findings as the strongest evidence yet that Chinese support for Iran during the war has had deadly consequences for American forces."

Not quite five weeks after the July attack, a Chinese reconnaissance satellite mysteriously broke up in orbit, "confirmed by U.S. Space Force trackers on Sept. 4-5," according to FOD News. "Analysts have floated three possibilities: a propulsion system failure, a battery failure or short, or a collision with another object already in orbit."

Just another Communist screw-up, or did Space Force send a message to Beijing? I'm inclined to believe the former, if for no other reason than that you don't add even more orbital debris unless you really must. Also, the satellite's retrograde orbit makes the debris more dangerous, due to the increased collision speed should it actually hit something.

So while I'm more or less certain China's loss of Yaogan-50 was an accident, it does align with Meink also saying that our current space weapons "can be employed for offensive and defensive purposes." My takeaway from that is that the Space Force isn't (yet) deploying an SDI-like antimissile shield, but systems designed to destroy/disable enemy satellites while protecting our own.

Still, I can't help but think that Reagan would smile in vindication.

In the course of these hebdomadal bulletins, I have often had occasion to mention Charles Mackay’s 1841 masterpiece Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The title should be inscribed as a talisman somewhere in the homes of the credulous. Mackay’s account of various “moral epidemics”—the South Sea Bubble, Tulipomania, Witch Hunting, etc.—is amusing until one steps back and realizes that we modern sophisticates are just as susceptible to the sorts of “folly and delusion” Mackay anatomizes as was any seventeenth-century Dutchman who mortgaged his house to purchase a single tulip bulb.

Certain insects undergo periods of dormancy before suddenly erupting in a destructive swarm. So it seems to be with society’s appetite for panic. How long can we go without indulging in the catharsis of a panic? How many society-wide panics have we witnessed in the last few decades? There was the “global cooling” scare when we were warned that a new ice age was upon us. Then there was the “global warming” scare, which is still going strong. “Some say the world will end in fire/Some say in ice.” Al Gore is going with fire. Chicken Little warned about a “population bomb” in which untold multitudes would precipitate mass starvation and lead governments to force sterilization upon their polyphiloprogenitive charges. Now we are being warned about a terrifying birth dearth. I can imagine that, should a new Charles Mackay arise, such episodes would be included in an updated edition of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

I do hope, however, that should a latter-day Charles Mackay be vouchsafed to us, it will be someone with a forensic, not to say cynical, state of mind. For the follies Mackay laid bare were essentially organic, self-generating affairs. Perhaps they were manipulated by unscrupulous actors in their evolution. But they depended for their initial fuel mostly upon those old standbys, human greed and what Mackay called the “imitative and gregarious” instincts of man.

What is novel in many of our current perturbations is the behind-the-scenes interventions of more or less malevolent, and in many cases malevolent foreign, actors. The extraordinary popular delusions and madness of the COVID crowds is a case in point. Four or five years on, we have largely forgotten the mask-wearing, social-distancing, economy-blighting harridans of both sexes who acted as the enforcers of the COVID hysteria that China bequeathed us. It will soon be the same as the windmill-championing net-zero lunatics who have worked assiduously to dismantle Western prosperity. Are you surprised that China, Russia, and the Arab states eagerly abet the Greta Thunbergs of the world?

The latest delusional entertainment is the “AI-is-the-Antichrist” brigade. Two things happened last week to make this new panic snap into focus. First, frenetic socialist loudmouth Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar, chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (yes, really), want to impose a moratorium on what they call “artificial superintelligence.” And what if the AI companies of the world ignore them and persist? Sanders and Casar want the state to come down on them with draconian force. “Entities,” they write, “shall be subject to the corporate death penalty, and persons shall be subject to not more than 20 years in prison, which is similar to existing penalties related to unlawfully developing nuclear weapons.”

What’s that chuckling you hear backstage to the left? Why, that would be the tittering of Chairman Xi and his posse of Chinese AI developers. Bernie Sanders is doubtless one of their favorite American politicians.

They are also fond of renegade software engineers like Jacob Coxon, whose story brings me to my second point. Coxon caused a firestorm last week when, after a couple of months, he quit his job at AI giant Anthropic. Why? Because (said he) he was worried that AI might destroy the world. Companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, he said, “are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” Gee whiz. “These will soon be superhuman systems,” Coxon skirled, “that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”

Rating-hungry talking heads like Anderson Cooper lapped this up. “If it bleeds, it leads,” you know, and what could be more sanguinary than the impending obliteration of humanity by machines or some souped-up abacus? I loved the CNN chyron: “Ex-Anthropic Researcher: AI could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Remember, this “ex-Anthropic researcher” is a 27-year-old former junior employee who was with the company for some eight weeks. Even the Washington Post recoiled from the panic. “AI Hysteria Jumps the Shark” ran as the title of their editorial. Indeed it does, and WaPo was quite right in noting the link between hysteria, on the one hand, and calls for government intervention and regulation, on the other.

The commentator David Friedberg cut to the chase when he noted that, with the panic over AI, we are “in another trust-the-experts moment” similar to the Karen-maxing moment of COVID. Anthony Fauci told us that COVID would kill everyone unless we had ourselves injected with poison, covered our faces, and stayed indoors by ourselves while the economy shut down and grandma died alone.

Commentators from Elon Musk on down are describing the AI-government-regulation shuffle as a “psy-op.” I think they’re right. The same thing goes for the Chinese-checkers hysteria about data centers. The resource hungry server farms are needed to power the AI revolution. China is racing to build them. And they are also racing to tell flaccid American leftists that such facilities are the devil incarnate. A chap called Kevin Bass has followed the trail and connected the dots. It’s an elaborate operation whose end is to hamper American technological innovation.

Two parting thoughts. Some commentators act as if the advent of artificial intelligence is something toto genere different from other technologies. It is not. Back in the seventeenth century, Descartes promised that using his new scientific method, man would make himself “the master and possessor of nature.” He envisioned all manner of wondrous things from the development of science-based technology. “Scientia potentia est,” said Francis Bacon, “Knowledge is power.” He was right, and Descartes outlined the rudiments of the techniques that would make good on that promise.

From this perspective, AI is not a departure from mankind’s toiling in the garden of natural knowledge but an extension of that knowledge. It promises breathtaking power, as do the technologies that gave us the internal combustion engine, electric and nuclear energy, nanotechnology, and software, to name just a few items on the menu of technological innovation. These techniques are powerful, which also means they are potentially dangerous. But think of how much they have benefited mankind. Advanced countries around the world are racing to develop and enhance AI. I hope that politically motivated luddites like Bernie Sanders will not stymie America’s capacity to be at the forefront of this inevitable technological progress.

Which brings me to my concluding thought, courtesy of Ronald Reagan. “Government’s view of the economy,” he noted in the mid-1980s, “could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” St. Paul told us that when we were children, we had to do with childish things, but that when we grew up, we should put aside childish things. It is childish to let our enemies define our fears. China and others, abetted by our own administrative state, have been assiduous about doing so. Let us hope we have put such juvenile susceptibilities behind us.