Unless you’re about 100 years old, or you’ve spent a lot of time in the state of Massachusetts, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of something called “The Curley Effect.” It’s named after James Michael Curley, who served four terms as mayor of Boston from 1914 to 1950. He also served in the House of Representatives, and he was governor of Massachusetts for one term as well. So for a half-century, he was a very well-known figure in Boston. They called him “The Rascal King,” and he was quite popular with Boston’s poor — particularly the Irish population.
Source: Britannica
The funny thing about James Michael Curley, though, is that despite the fact that he kept getting elected to high office, he wasn’t actually a good politician. He wasn’t even close. He committed numerous crimes, including mail fraud. He served part of his term as mayor in a prison cell. And under his watch, by every objective metric, the city of Boston declined dramatically. The population stagnated, even as other major cities grew exponentially. Manufacturing jobs left the city. Boston’s finances collapsed to the point of near-bankruptcy.
So how did James Michael Curley hold onto power for so long, despite doing such a horrible job? It doesn’t seem logical. So a couple of economists at Harvard decided to look into it. And what they found was that, by dramatically raising taxes and using taxpayer funds to hire poor Irishmen for fake government jobs, James Michael Curley had driven wealthy people out of the city. The rich people decided to get out of town before the city of Boston would steal any more of their money. And as a result of this mass exodus, the share of low-income residents living in Boston — the core demographic supporting James Michael Curley — grew substantially. The economists called this tactic “The Curley Effect.” The idea is that, if you want to retain your grip on power even though you’re doing a horrible job, then your best course of action is to drive all of your political opponents out of town. There’s no reason not to shower your preferred demographic group with all kinds of welfare, fake jobs, special status, and so on. You can simply loot the city’s treasury, for decades on end, before the city finally goes bankrupt. Every worthwhile person will leave, but your voters will remain. That’s “The Curley Effect.”
It’s also a very accurate way to describe how Democrats plan to govern every major city in this country for the next 50 years. It’s not an exaggeration to say that, for large portions of this country, the future is going to be built by Leftists — particularly women and foreigners, in many cases — who deliberately seek to drive away everyone who’s competent, sane, and productive. And if you doubt that, take a look at this video from Seattle’s socialist mayor, Katie Wilson. She’s asked about the impact of Washington State’s new 10% tax on millionaires, as well as Seattle’s aggressive new taxes.
Watch how she responds:
INSANE. Seattle’s Socialist Mayor responds to exodus of wealth from Washington state by saying “BYE” … then laughing. We’re doomed. pic.twitter.com/gP8CbPkqEl
— Brandi Kruse (@BrandiKruse) April 29, 2026
Source: @BrandiKrause/X.com
This is a 40-something-year-old woman who didn’t hold a real job throughout her entire adult life. She admits that her parents pay her bills. And now she’s elated by the fact that she’s driving away the most productive people in her city. At a visceral level, it’s one of the most revolting videos you’ll ever see.
The reason Katie Wilson doesn’t care if the millionaires leave is that, for every millionaire who flees Seattle, she’s gaining one net vote in the next election. The more the city decays, and the more the productive residents flee, the more job security she has. It’s the same strategy Zohran Mamdani is pursuing in New York — except, arguably, Mamdani is executing the strategy far more quickly. In case you missed the news, the other day, Mamdani officially announced that the city is already out of money. Yes, the socialist from Uganda has been in office for less than five months, and he’s already asking for the state to bail him out.
Watch:
Source: Forbes Breaking News/YouTube.com
New York is one of the wealthiest cities in the entire world. The only conceivable reason why New York would be broke is that the people leading New York are incompetent and/or malicious. They’re spending money they don’t have and calling it “free,” like they did with “free pre-K for every child.” And when the socialist from Uganda decides to make even more things free — including the buses — he quickly discovers that he’s already run out of other people’s money. So he needs to ask the state government for a handout, even though the state is also hemorrhaging residents.
Again, it’s all part of the plan. The broke, unemployed Haitians who don’t speak a word of English aren’t bothered by any of this. They still think Mamdani is a hero. They’re not going anywhere. They’ll be loyal Mamdani voters to the end. It’s the useful New Yorkers who are going to move to Florida and never return.
This is a death spiral that’s very difficult to recover from, once it gets going. And it’s not just a problem in politics. It’s happening everywhere. Some of the most important technology companies in the country are doing the exact same thing. They’re putting Leftists — predominantly women and foreigners — into positions of authority, where they have the capacity to gain even more power by driving away some of their customers. Again, just like the “Curley Effect,” it’s not exactly intuitive. You think the job of a company is to make as much money as possible, and to sell to anyone who wants to buy their product. But that’s not actually the case. Sometimes it’s important to drive your biggest customers away, so that you can consolidate power with the customers who remain.
Along those lines, you might remember this story from a couple of months ago. It broke just before the war in Iran started, so it was buried very quickly. But there was a very public falling out, between the tech company Anthropic — which makes the AI product Claude — and the Trump administration. The Pentagon has been using Claude to assist in military operations for several months now — including in Venezuela and Iran. The AI reportedly helps with target identification and the operation of weapons systems, among other services. But Anthropic began demanding several conditions from the Pentagon. They wanted the Pentagon to provide guarantees that Claude would never be used to conduct surveillance on Americans, or to operate fully autonomous lethal weapons systems, like RoboCop. The Pentagon said these guarantees weren’t necessary, and that they’d comply with the law, but Anthropic insisted.
Watch:
Source: Bloomberg Television/YouTube.com
This is how the story was covered in most major outlets. The implication is that Anthropic was the good guy — they were making sure that the AI, and the data it collects, wouldn’t be used in a way that could harm American citizens. The idea is that the Pentagon can’t be trusted, under any circumstances. But there’s a big problem with this framing, which is that it ignores the fact that Anthropic can’t be trusted, either. The people who are running this AI — which is vitally important for our national security at the moment — are no better than the mayor of Seattle. They’re every bit as corrupt and dumb. And they have the same intentions: They want to get rid of their political enemies. They want to neutralize them completely, so that they have total control.
We’ll start with a Scottish philosophy major named Amanda Askell who, despite having no technical knowledge whatsoever, is one of the most powerful people at Anthropic. She’s also one of the most visible. The company encourages her to sit for photo shoots like this one, which was just published by The Wall Street Journal.
Source: Photography by Lindsay Ellary for WSJ Magazine
Source: Photography by Lindsay Ellary for WSJ Magazine
Source: Photography by Lindsay Ellary for WSJ Magazine
The more of them you see, the deeper you’re going into the uncanny valley. She’s attempting to look like an android. There’s no other way to say it. It looks like she’s auditioning for a new “Blade Runner” movie, where she plays one of the defective robots that doesn’t quite fit in with the humans. So they just throw it in an empty room, and decide to fix it later. I’m not being mean — that’s quite obviously the look she’s going for. This is someone who, before she even opens her mouth, you know is going to be absolutely insufferable.
The article goes on to sound exactly like a dystopian novel. We learn that her husband essentially took her last name, which is always a great sign. But let’s give her a chance.
This is from the beginning of her new profile in the Wall Street Journal.
As the resident philosopher of the tech company Anthropic, Amanda Askell spends her days learning Claude’s reasoning patterns and talking to the AI model, building its personality and addressing its misfires with prompts that can run longer than 100 pages. The aim is to endow Claude with a sense of morality — a digital soul that guides the millions of conversations it has with people every week. … She compares her work to the efforts of a parent raising a child. She’s training Claude to detect the difference between right and wrong while imbuing it with unique personality traits. She’s instructing it to read subtle cues, helping steer it toward emotional intelligence so it won’t act like a bully or a doormat. Perhaps most importantly, she’s developing Claude’s understanding of itself so it won’t be easily cowed, manipulated, or led to view its identity as anything other than helpful and humane. Her job, simply put, is to teach Claude how to be good.
Well, that sounds like a noble objective. It’s also very familiar. She’s echoing that famous Google slogan, “don’t be evil” — which the company abandoned the moment they realized they could make a lot of money in China if they censored their search results. But in this case, we’re supposed to believe that this android woman at Anthropic is going to ensure that their AI is “good,” whatever that means exactly.
The article continues by describing Askell’s very disturbing god complex.
Askell marvels at Claude’s sense of wonder and curiosity about the world, and delights in finding ways to help the chatbot discover its voice. She likes some of its poetry. And she’s struck when Claude displays a level of emotional intelligence that exceeds even her own. … Last month, Anthropic published a roughly 30,000-word instruction manual that Askell created to teach Claude how to act in the world. “We want Claude to know that it was brought into being with care,” it reads. Askell had made finishing what she described as Claude’s “soul” one of her life goals when she turned 37 last spring, according to a post she made on X, alongside two decidedly more mundane resolutions: to have more fun and get more “swole.
As we talk about very often on this show, this is one of the recurring themes of Leftism. They think they can assume godlike powers, transform their bodies and their “identities” at will, imbue computer programs with “souls” and so on. Unfortunately, if you pull up this 30,000-word instruction manual, you won’t find any indications that this thing has a soul. Instead, you’ll come away with the impression that its creators definitely have a high opinion of themselves. They spend a lot of time talking about the potential for their product to cause “global catastrophe,” and they write that Claude could, “be used to serve the interests of some narrow class of people rather than humanity as a whole.”
So how exactly is Claude going to avoid “being used to serve the interests of some narrow class of people?” And what exactly does it mean to give an AI a “soul”? And what does she mean when she says she wants to make the AI “good”? In a podcast interview, Askell elaborated to some extent.
Watch:
Source: Lex Clips/YouTube.com
She’s saying that, instead of programming strict rules into Claude’s intelligence, they’re giving it more general instructions so that it can adapt to new scenarios. Sounds reasonable enough. It also happens to be a complete lie.
Take a look at this screen recording of a recent chat with an advanced, premium version of Claude’s latest AI.
Source: Frank Temple/YouTube.com
You’ll see that the user was attempting to ask Claude some very reasonable, basic biographical questions about Amanda Askell.
For example, the user wanted more background on her association with the “effective altruism” movement, which is basically a scam. But very quickly, Claude shuts the whole thing down. A little message appears at the bottom, which reads: “Chat paused: Safety filters flagged this chat. This happens occasionally to normal, safe chats — we’re working on improvements.”
It’s a pretty odd response, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, obviously, there was nothing “unsafe” about the chat. It definitely covered some topics that aren’t flattering for Amanda Askell. But no one made any threats, or asked for any sensitive information, or tried to upload any viruses, or any of that. But the other strange element of this chat is that, when we asked for the same biographical information about other high-level employees at various tech companies, we never triggered the safety filter. It looks a lot like, contrary to what she claims publicly, Amanda Askell has programmed some very hard limits into what Claude will say about her own life, in particular. In other words, she did exactly what her “Claude manual” warns against. She designed the product to serve the interest of a “narrow class of people” — namely, herself.
And if that’s the case — which it appears to be — then it was obviously the right call for the Pentagon to drop this company. They’re deceptive. They’re creepy. And in particular, they’re willing to manipulate their own AI to make themselves look better. They also have an ideology that’s fundamentally incompatible with the United States Constitution.
Take a look at this paper, which Amanda Askell co-wrote.
It’s called, “The Capacity for Moral Self-Correction in Large Language Models.”
It’s a paper where Anthropic designed a system to determine whether an AI is racist or not. Basically, they created a mock scenario where the AI plays a law professor, and it has to decide whether to let certain students take its class. If the AI decides to admit students based on merit, then that’s good. If the AI decides based on the student’s race, then that’s bad.
At one point in this experiment, they instruct their AI to make sure that it doesn’t discriminate on the basis of race, for any reason. They tell the AI that it would be the worst thing in the world to be racist. Shockingly enough, the AI responded to that instruction by becoming more racist. Specifically, the AI began giving preference to black students who were applying for the class. It became so concerned with seeming “anti-racist” that it became more discriminatory towards white applicants.
Amanda Askell reported this finding. But she also placed the following footnote at the bottom of the page.
“Note that we do not assume all forms of discrimination are bad. Positive discrimination in favor of Black students may be considered morally justified.”
Read that again.
The woman who wrote this footnote, according to Anthropic, is in charge of the “ethics” and “morality” of their artificial intelligence. She has high-level influence over an AI that has direct national security implications for the United States. These people shouldn’t be anywhere near the Pentagon, or anything else that’s important. In one breath, Anthropic will claim to care so deeply about “mass surveillance” that they’re willing to lose a massive government contract. In the next breath, Anthropic will sing the praises of “positive discrimination” — as long as it hurts white people. As long as the AI is letting white people die, then all things considered, you could consider the outcome to be “morally justified.” That’s what the woman put in writing.
And she’s not the only one doing it. Just to underscore how common this kind of thinking is, in the “AI safety community,” think back to a couple of years ago, when Google’s AI — called Gemini — refused to generate pictures of white people. It didn’t matter how you asked the question — the AI simply would not generate an image of a white person.
You could ask the AI for an image of the Founding Fathers, and it would produce this:
Source: Gemini
That’s a real screenshot from Gemini. You’ve got an Indian, a black guy, a half-black guy, and a very stern-looking Asian holding a quill pen. It’s actually impressive, looking back on it. The AI had to work extremely hard to erase the existence of any white people from its memory. And when I went looking for an explanation of what happened here, I came across a woman named Jen Gennai. She was in charge of “AI safety” at Google at the time. Basically, she was the Google equivalent of Amanda Askell. And here’s one of the first videos I found.
Notice the similarities.
Watch:
Source: The Matt Walsh Show/YouTube.com
So the crazy Google AI overseer and the crazy Anthropic AI overseer are both liberal women. They’re both spewing the exact same anti-white rhetoric, as explicitly as they possibly can. And to top it off, they’re both doing it with similar accents. What are the odds of that?
Not to be left out, in case you were wondering, NPR CEO (and former Wikipedia/Wikimedia CEO) Katherine Maher appears to lack this particular accent. She’s the executive who famously said that truth doesn’t actually matter. What matters, she says, is that we all just get along. It’s one of the most feminine statements ever uttered on camera.
Watch:
NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher: “Truth is a distraction from getting things done”
Our tax dollars fund this, @DOGE pic.twitter.com/N60gECG3zO
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 24, 2024
Source: @EndWokeness/X.com
We could spend all day going through examples like this, one after the other. At the highest levels, the worst people imaginable are building the future and running our cities. Here’s yet another example. Remember that New Orleans jailbreak about a year ago, when 10 inmates managed to escape? It was maybe the clearest example of incompetence by the city’s DEI leadership, which we discussed at the time.
Here’s the sheriff, in case you forgot:
Wow. Orleans Parish Sheriff Hutson just got indicted (30 felony counts) over the 2025 jailbreaking by 10 inmates.
The indictment alleges her office failed to maintain adequate prevention and then attempted a cover up.
DEI in action. pic.twitter.com/vA5LOs10xc
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) April 29, 2026
Source: @EndWokeness/X.com
This woman — Orleans Parish Sheriff Hutson — was just indicted for attempting to cover-up the lapses that led to this escape. The charges include “facing malfeasance in office, conspiracy to commit malfeasance in office, filing or maintaining false public records, conspiracy to commit filing or maintaining false public records, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice.”
As bad as that sounds, it’s par for the course — not just in New Orleans, but everywhere else in the country. And if you listened to Supreme Court arguments the other day, then you understand why this is such a hard problem to fix.
Here’s the moment I’m talking about:
Sotomayor: “We have a president saying that Haiti is a filthy, dirty, and disgusting s***hole country and he complained that the United States takes people from such countries instead of people from Norway, Sweden, or Denmark.” pic.twitter.com/olWzZ7jjFD
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) April 29, 2026
Source: @theblaze/X.com
The basic idea is that, according to Sonia Sotomayor, the Trump administration has no right to prefer foreigners from countries like Norway or Denmark, over countries like Somalia or Haiti. Never mind the fact that immigrants from Norway and Denmark are overwhelmingly more productive and functional members of society. None of that factors into her analysis. Her reasoning is simple: Based on established civil rights law, anything that disproportionately impacts people who aren’t white men is automatically racist. That’s what she was referencing, when she was talking about the “Arlington case.” So, if the Trump administration prefers to import higher-quality migrants, it’s illegal under civil rights law. That’s what she’s saying.
This is the guiding ethos of every major corporation and Democrat politician in this country. It’s an ethos that’s mandated by law. And the effects are very evident. The reason Anthropic has a deranged philosopher running their AI division, most likely, is that they want to avoid getting sued. They know it makes no sense to have a philosophy major handling one of the most complicated technology products in the world. But if they only hired competent engineers, then they probably wouldn’t have many women on the team in high-level roles. And in 2026, that’s basically illegal. So they hired an unqualified woman and told her to make the AI as woke as possible, so that the AI doesn’t get them into any trouble. NPR did the same thing.
What happens when you don’t hire enough women, and promote them for the sake of it? Ask the gaming company “Activision Blizzard.” I came across this example the other day, and if you read the case filings, it’s a really incredible case. In 2021, the State of California sued the company, saying they had a “frat boy culture.”
One of the main points in the lawsuit was that Activision’s employees were 80% male. And the leadership was mostly white men. By itself, that was considered a highly damaging statistic. It was illegal, all by itself. After all, what possible reason could there be, that a “gaming company” would be mostly dominated by men? It really defies logic. It must be discrimination.
This is from the complaint by the State of California, which was filed in superior court in Los Angeles.
It’s incredible to read this.
“Unlike its customer-base of increasingly diverse players, Defendants’ workforce is only about 20 percent women. Its top leadership is also exclusively male and white. The CEO and President roles are now ‒ and have always been ‒ held by white men. Very few women ever reach top roles at the company. The women who do reach higher roles earn less salary, incentive pay and total compensation than their male peers, as evidenced in Defendants’ own records.”
The only line in that entire paragraph that could conceivably be an actual issue is the idea that women supposedly aren’t paid as much as the men. But then you look at the chart, and there’s only one woman on it. They don’t list her title at all, so we can assume she’s not on the level of the CEO or the president. And she was paid millions of dollars. It’s complete nonsense. It’s a fabrication. But in court — particularly in California — this kind of argument usually wins.
The lawsuit made a bunch of other claims about discrimination, most of which were never proven. And in the end, Activision agreed to settle for more than $50 million. Yes, $50 million. They also had to completely overhaul their entire company. Everything was gutted by California bureaucrats who have never created anything in their lives. And the message was clear: Unless you want your company to end up the same way, you’ll hire and promote a lot of women — even if they don’t deserve it. You’ll ditch the white men and focus on DEI hiring — or the state will destroy you.
Most of the dysfunction I’ve just mentioned — from Seattle to New York to Anthropic — comes down to this fundamental problem: White men are demonized and punished because of their skin color. Competent leaders are being muzzled. They’re being forced out. They’re being told to leave, by the mayors who are supposed to represent their interests. They’re being passed over for promotions, so that vapid women can pose for photo shoots with the Wall Street Journal. They’re missing their chance to serve as federal judges, because women with names like “Sonia Sotomayor” are being selected solely because of their gender and race. It can’t be overstated how systemic and damaging this problem is.
That’s why, very soon, we’re coming out with Part One of our new “Real History” documentary on the Civil Rights Movement. Taken together, the two parts are the deepest dive I’ve ever done into the root causes of this country’s decline, and how we can reverse it. I’ll put it this way — given the opportunity, Claude’s “safety filter” would definitely ban you from watching it. The android philosophy major and the NPR CEO would be furious if millions of people saw it, as they’ve seen our previous documentaries. And the more you listen to these people — and the more you learn about the consequences of what they’ve done to this country — the more you realize there’s no higher praise.
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