What Role Will Google’s Eric Schmidt Play in Election 2024?

At the end of the day, no matter which corporate party Americans vote for, a Bilderberg-backed candidate will be in the White House.

Originally Published at The Last American Vagabond

In early August, Reid Hoffman, a technology investor and billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, called for Silicon Valley to “get behind” U.S. Vice President and current Democratic Party Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris.

“In this moment, we need a leader who recognizes that innovation is the key to economic prosperity, national security and breakthrough progress on climate change and other pressing issues,” he wrote for the New York Times.

Hoffman, a former associate of Jeffrey Epstein who is also known for his funding of disinformation tactics, mostly made economic arguments for supporting Harris over Trump. He argued that a Harris administration would be more beneficial to the tech industry than a potentially chaotic 2nd Trump term.

“Whoever assumes the presidency in 2025 will do so when AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles, genetic engineering, blockchain and decentralized finance, advanced manufacturing and other key innovation industries will be playing an even greater role in creating economic prosperity and ensuring global competitiveness than they do now,” Hoffman said.

One of the Silicon Valley alums who Hoffman can count on to support Harris and the Democratic Party machine is Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and former board member of and advisor to Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google. Schmidt is generally seen as an expert on Artificial Intelligence, having written the book The Age of AI: And Our Human Future with Henry Kissinger, the now-deceased former U.S. Secretary of State and accused war criminal.

Schmidt is a long time Democratic Party funder. Although he has donated to Republicans as well, his donations tend to favor Democratic Party candidates. In 2020 and 2022 alone he donated millions of dollars to Democratic Party candidates. In 2014, Schmidt participated in a task force aimed at helping the Democratic establishment better understand how to win elections.

Although Schmidt has remained relatively quiet in the 2024 election season, he has discussed the potential for “misinformation” to disrupt the upcoming U.S. Presidential election and future elections.

Verifying Internet Users to Fight Misinformation

At an April event hosted by the Aspen Institute and the Institute for Global Politics, Schmidt spoke with former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton about the threats Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses to elections. Coincidentally, Schmidt currently sits on the board of the Institute for Global Politics, a think tank founded at Columbia University of which Hillary Clinton is currently the Faculty Advisory Board Chair.

“We need a different system, under which tech companies — and we’re mostly talking obviously talking about the social media — platforms operate,” Clinton said. “I think they will continue to make an enormous amount of money if they change their algorithms to prevent the kind of harm that is caused by sending people to the lowest common denominator every time they log on. You’ve got to stop this reward for this kind of negative, virulent content.”

Schmidt warned the problem of election misinformation caused by AI is only going to get worse in upcoming elections, potentially even the November 2024 elections. He also called for using blockchain technology to track content creation in an alleged attempt to stop the spread of fake news. As TLAV has reported over the years, blockchain technology has the potential to be a horribly tyrannical tool, as well as the ability to offer censorship free platforms like Odysee.

“There is infrastructure that would be very helpful. The best design that I am familiar with is blockchain based,” Schmidt stated. “So if everyone knew that this piece of information showed up here, you can then understand how did it get there? who pushed it? who amplified it?”

Overall, Schmidt couched his attempts to support regulation of the internet as an effort to stop the “damage that’s being done online to women and so forth“.

Only 4 months prior to the IGP meeting, Schmidt published an op-ed for MIT detailing his 6-point plan for “fighting misinformation”. While most of Schmidt’s recommendations can seem somewhat benign — identify deepfakes, invest in research, filter advertisers — he also suggests that internet users should have to identify themselves to prove they are not bots.

Under a section titled “Verify human users”, Schmidt writes, “We need to distinguish humans using social media from bots, holding both accountable if laws or policies are violated.” He claims this wouldn’t involve “divulging identities”. Instead, Schmidt claims, a new system similar to Uber’s driver verification should be adopted. This would mean social media companies “authenticate the human behind each account and introduce reputation-based functionality”.

Schmidt also calls for “knowing every source” by “using a time stamp and an encrypted (and not removable) IP address would guarantee an identifiable point of origin.” Bad actors could then be “deprioritized or banned”.  He also calls for stepping up “efforts to improve identification of VPNs” to prevent users from hiding their locations with VPN technology.

Schmidt, AI, and Election 2024

In 2023, Axios reported that Schmidt was “seriously considering” a proposal to “funnel roughly $1 million to explore new ways artificial intelligence could be leveraged to help Democrats win elections”. The proposal was presented to Schmidt from OneOne Ventures.

Despite Schmidt’s twin interests in helping Democrats win elections, and the potential benefits of AI, he ultimately rejected the deal. However, as Axios noted, Schmidt is “likely to continue looking into that venture in time for the 2024 elections”.

Schmidt’s interest in AI comes as no surprise due to his history within the tech industry, as well as his appointment to the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), or, simply, the AI Commission. Schmidt chaired the AI Commission alongside executives from Oracle Microsoft, Amazon, and the CIA’s venture capital firm In-Q-Tel.

The AI Commission was established by Congress in 2018 with the goal of “review[ing] advances in artificial intelligence, related machine learning developments, and associated technologies” and making policy recommendations to Congress and the President. The Commission has made promises of transparency and accountability, but has actually held most of its meetings and decision-making in secret.

Schmidt and the AI Commission issued their final report in March 2021 under the Biden Administration.

In addition to Schmidt being appointed to the AI Commission, Schmidt was also a presence in the Biden White House in early 2021 when Big Tech companies were chosen for Biden’s initial transition team. A 2021 investigation by The American Prospect revealed that Schmidt has ties to Rebellion Defense, a largely unknown AI contractor, and has used those ties to gain influence in the White House.

The report notes that during the Obama administration Google representatives were seen frequently enough at the White House that some “jokingly call the administration Google.gov”, with more than 250 Google employees moving between the government and the company throughout Obama’s presidency. Schmidt was one of these Google employees.

“From official positions, he has advocated for the Defense Department and intelligence agencies to adopt more machine-learning technology. Meanwhile, as a venture capitalist, he has invested millions of dollars in more than a half-dozen national-security startups that sell those very technologies back to the government,” the Prospect writes.

The ease of access that Schmidt and his Google colleagues enjoyed during the Obama years has continued during the Biden administration. Under the Biden Admin, Rebellion Defense was awarded a contract to create a single data-sharing network for the Air Force. Schmidt is a prominent investor in Rebellion Defense.

In March 2022, Politico reported that Schmidt’s “fingerprints are all over Biden’s science office”. The report noted that Schmidt’s charity, Schmidt Futures, indirectly paid the salaries of two employees the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. According to more than a dozen officials in the White House interviewed by Politico, Schmidt was playing an “extraordinary, albeit private, role” shaping White House policy on science and technology.

Eric Schmidt & the War Machine

Another area where Eric Schmidt continues to hold sway in American politics is his relationships with the U.S. military. In early 2024, Forbes reported that Schmidt was working on a “clandestine project” aimed at developing unmanned aircraft systems, or drones, to be used on the battlefield in conjunction with AI.

“Since leaving his chairman role at Google in 2017, Schmidt has poured much of his time and wealth into bridging the interests of Silicon Valley and the Pentagon through various advisory committees, think tanks and his vast startup portfolio,” Forbes wrote.

In 2023, Schmidt told Wired about his efforts to build a “more advanced DOD (Department of Defense)” that can “nimbly harness technology” like AI. Schmidt’s vision of a “better war-fighting system” sounds reminiscent of the most dystopian visions proposed by the folks at the World Economic Forum. Of course, Schmidt says the applications he describes are intended for the international battlefield not the American homeland.

“It would build a large number of inexpensive devices that were highly mobile, that were attritable, and those devices—or drones—would have sensors or weapons, and they would be networked together,” Schmidt said.

Schmidt’s interest in drones should come as no surprise since he was serving as a technical advisor at Alphabet in 2018 when thousands of Google employees walked out of the workplace to protest a contract with the U.S. Department of Defense. As per the arrangement, Google would allow the U.S. military to use its AI technology to analyze drone footage as part of Project Maven. Unfortunately, years after the protests made headlines, Project Maven continues to operate with funding from Schmidt and Big Tech bro’s like Peter Thiel.

The Illusion of Choice

Let’s reflect back on Reid Hoffman’s call for Silicon Valley tech companies and executives to embrace Kamala Harris. Hoffman wrote:

“Her background as a prosecutor also makes her an ideal choice to take on Donald Trump. Amid the carnival of chaos that has defined his tenure as presidential candidate, president, ex-president, and now, once again, presidential candidate, there’s one narrative thread that ties everything together: Donald Trump’s unfailing instinct to subvert the rule of law.”

Hoffman’s attempts to contrast Harris with Trump ring hollow when you recognize that both candidates and both parties receive funding and moral support from individuals with deep ties to the ruling class behind the political puppets. Namely, the Bilderberg Group.

Eric Schmidt is currently a Steering Committee Member of the secretive Bilderberg Group. He attended the latest meeting in May 2024 in Madrid, Spain. As did Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is also a Steering Committee Member of the Bilderberg Group as well.

I recently reported how Thiel and others in the right-wing of Big Tech have decided to go all-in on Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. They argue that this a defensive move to protect their industries from the encroachment of the Biden administration. Conversely, Reid Hoffman is also calling on the left-wing of Big Tech to support Kamala Harris to protect their industry.

This gives the appearance that there is a divide within Big Tech, with the left-wing rallying behind Harris, and the right-wing lining up behind Trump. While there may be some level of truth to this analysis, the reality is that this is simply the illusion of choice.

What’s important is that both Schmidt and Thiel are deeply involved in the Bilderberg Group and have been regular attendees of the secretive meeting for years. The members of Bilderberg and the invited attendees represent a closer approximation of the true power within the United States and the world at large. They are the true source of power behind Presidents and Prime Ministers.

At the end of the day, no matter which corporate party Americans vote for, a Bilderberg-backed candidate will be in the White House.

So much for being a representative Democracy….