In the latest episode of the No Agenda Show, titled 'Junkie Communism,' hosts Adam Curry and returning guest co-host Rob Dew (Sir Deucifer) dissect the escalating artificial intelligence panic, arguing it is a near-perfect rerun of the COVID-19 playbook. Broadcasting from the Hill Country of Texas, Curry and Dew combed through roughly 170 clips to trace how the narrative is being manufactured, pointing to a familiar structure of expert priesthood, division, government regulation, and a push toward global governance.
The episode, published September 17, 2026, covers a wide range of news items that illustrate the growing AI scare. Congresswoman Maxine Waters grilled Treasury officials on AI safety, while Senator Bernie Sanders equated AI risk with nuclear weapons. Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang appeared on CNBC claiming self-replicating bot swarms have polluted the internet, requiring 'synthetic internets' and a kill switch. President Trump proposed a $5,000 tariff dividend to every adult American citizen, with a possible stablecoin mechanism behind it. Canadian PM Mark Carney's Strasbourg speech proposed Canada become the EU's first associate member. Houthi advances near the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait and the new Mecca Accords defense pact were also discussed.
Curry's media deconstruction approach is on full display as he maps the AI hoax structure. 'The reason why I can easily explain this being a hoax, because you've got the models, the large language model, and that thing by itself... turns out wasn't very useful unless you give it access to tools... Then you have the harness. Oh, I love these terms,' Curry explains, before walking through how guardrails on ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini prove companies can throttle output at will. Dew adds context from a friend's Hegelian dialectic analysis mapping eight cultural inhale-exhale cycles from 1945 to present, from the Cold War through COVID to today's AI narrative.
The conversation ranges into the effective altruism movement (with Sam Bankman-Fried as its poster child), Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's warnings, Jensen Huang's semiconductor push, and a Purdue University report on the 157,000-worker shortfall facing US chip fabs. Dew, who once worked at Tokyo Electron America servicing Micron and other clients, pushes back on the mystique around semiconductor manufacturing. The hosts also cover Ilhan Omar's alleged marriage fraud investigation under Tom Homan, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's Kids Act targeting social media for under-13s, Canadian MAID euthanasia expansion, the Yalta European Strategy conference attended by Boris Johnson and David Petraeus, and the mysterious glitter industry centered in New Jersey.
The implications of this analysis are significant. Curry and Dew suggest that the AI doom narrative is being used to justify increased regulation, corporate control, and a shift toward global governance, much like the COVID-19 pandemic was used to expand government power. By drawing parallels between the two, they warn listeners to be skeptical of expert claims and to recognize the patterns of media manipulation. The episode serves as a call to critical thinking, urging the public to question the motives behind the AI panic and to resist the erosion of individual freedoms in the name of safety. As AI technologies continue to advance, the debate over their risks and regulation will only intensify, making the hosts' deconstruction a timely contribution to the conversation.
