In communist Romania, when the dark and bloody shadow of the Soviet Union stretched across Eastern Europe, people were afraid to speak — even whisper — bad thoughts about the government. Romanians were paranoid that Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime had bugged the entire country with listening devices and informants. This is how Ceaușescu wanted it. He used fear to keep people in line. His thugs in the Securitate bribed, threatened, and even tortured citizens into spying and snitching on their neighbors, friends, and family members. They wanted to know every single person who disapproved of the rulers. The communists jailed my father twice for failed defection attempts, which he suspects went awry because informants reported him.

Ceaușescu’s regime deployed surveillance, fear, and force as its main weapons of control, an approach that worked for more than two decades. But those weapons eventually misfired. In December 1989, a bloody revolt erupted that appeared to have caught the dictator by surprise. In less than two weeks, Romanians overthrew the regime and executed Ceaușescu, along with his wife, by firing squad. To this day, people debate what truly ignited the revolt. Given that the next Romanian president was a member of Ceaușescu’s communist regime, and that state actors regularly infiltrated crowds, many don’t believe it was an organic rebellion that erupted because one fed-up citizen spontaneously heckled the dictator during what turned out to be his last public speech. Regardless of what happened, it’s possible that if Ceaușescu had the surveillance capabilities of, say, modern-day communist China, he might have gotten wind of the impending uprising, arrested the organizers, and ruled over Romanians to a ripe old age from his golden palace.

As for my father, he eventually succeeded in liberating his family. Less than a year before Ceaușescu’s fall, the Romanian government reluctantly released our family of six, this author included, thanks to pressure from relatives in the United States with support from federal legislators. We settled in Atlanta, Georgia, where we immediately began enjoying the fruits of freedom, as well as actual fruit.

Years later, I would grow up to learn about the international totalitarian threat, similar to what we experienced in Romania, but global in scope and far more sophisticated in its control methods. My awakening was triggered in large part by this magazine and its parent organization, The John Birch Society (JBS).

The origins of The New American go back to the 1950s, when an American businessman named Robert Welch launched a magazine to give Americans an independent, pro-American perspective on domestic and international news. Welch was passionately dedicated to alerting his fellow citizens that a group of “sophisticated criminals” was conspiring to destroy the United States from within and create a one-world, Soviet-style government. He used American Opinion (initially named One Man’s Opinion) to broadcast that message.

A few years after Welch launched his magazine, he created the JBS, an organ­ization of civically engaged Americans. The JBS’s main tactic would be education. “Education is our total strategy, and truth is our only weapon,” Welch liked to say. He believed that if people knew what the internationalist elites were doing, they would organize against them. American Opinion served as an affiliate magazine of the JBS until 1985, when it and another JBS publication, The Review of the News, were combined into one magazine, The New American.

When JBS members and allies began telling fellow Americans that shadowy figures were working to destroy the United States and submerge it under a communist-style world government, most Americans scoffed. Despite history being replete with examples of those who attempted world domination — the Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, etc. — those who believed it was happening in their day, especially in the Land of the Free, were painted as nutty “conspiracy theorists,” paranoid kooks, and wackos who were expressing their disillusionment with American culture in delusional ways. A major reason for that was because the public had been programmed to think that way. Globalists had established nearly total control over the “news” media and most other mainstream publishing institutions. The controllers had sophisticated methods of propaganda. It is an established fact that experts whose specialty was fabricating public sentiment, such as Edward Bernays, partnered with the government on propaganda campaigns designed to persuade anti-war Americans into becoming pro-war Americans. Also, by the mid-20th century, hundreds of intelligence agents and assets were on the payrolls of mainstream news outlets. They brainwashed the American people, who were historically noninterventionists, into embracing interventionist policies, necessary for laying the foundation of world government. They were also instrumental in stigmatizing and discrediting those, Birchers especially, who made compelling cases that plans for global government were afoot. However, much to their chagrin, the Birchers survived numerous attempts at destruction. Mainstream media today decries the JBS as the modern-day rebels who first yelled, “The globalists are coming.”

The goal of state-controlled media was to keep the public ignorant and subdued while the globalists stacked brick after brick of their world-government apparatus. Once completed, the people would be powerless to escape it.

No Longer Fringe

In 2025, sounding the alarm of a world-government threat is no longer fringe. It may not be completely mainstream, but it is far more common than it was even a decade ago. The cat is not fully out of the bag, but his head has popped out and he’s making so much noise that no one can ignore him. Popular publications and podcasts with millions of followers regularly mention global governance as a foregone conclusion. Moreover, people from all over the world, with all sorts of political and religious views and who run the gamut of educational backgrounds, have come to terms with what has been obvious to Birchers for more than half a century. The globalists’ bold overreaching during Operation Covid-19 opened the eyes of millions around the world, as well. Due to the internet’s ability to broadcast information to every nook and cranny of the world, Covid tyranny awakened many to the malevolent nature and intentions of the people in power.

One of those individuals who believes world government is a legitimate threat is Professor John Lennox, an Irish Christian apologist from England with an extensive academic background. Lennox earned a masters in mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and doctorates in philosophy from both Cambridge and the University of Oxford, where he is a professor emeritus of mathematics. He worked as a lecturer at the Royal School at Armagh in Northern Ireland and Emmanuel College at Cambridge. Lennox also spent two years as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Germany.

When he’s not lecturing, debating with atheists, or speaking with podcasters, Lennox writes books. Most of them are about Christian topics, but he’s also taken a deep interest in artificial intelligence. Two of his most recent books combine both interests. We spoke to Lennox following the release of his latest, God, AI & the End of History: Understanding the Book of Revelation in an Age of Intelligent Machines. Before that, Lennox had re-released an updated version of his first book on AI, titled 2084, a play on George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.

2084 argues, in part, that AI has unprecedented potential to bring about world government. Lennox said during our interview, “You have the real sense that AI is giving people a new kind of power.” His knowledge of AI and familiarity with the Bible are the reasons Lennox believes in the existence of a plot for a satanic one-world government.

When it comes to AI, a lot of buzz centers around the supposed frontier of this technology, artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial super intelligence. Neither exists yet (as far as we know), but their potential attracts a lot of attention. But to focus on something that might never be created — some experts, including Lennox, are skeptical AGI is possible — and ignore the massive impact narrow AI already has on our daily lives, as well as how it could be used to bring about totalitarian world government, is a grave mistake.

Ubiquitous AI

AI is already ubiquitous. It is central to the navigation application on your smartphone. It’s the heart of your internet search engine. Your email provider uses it to detect pesky junk mail. Social-media companies depend on it to control what you see — and don’t see — in your feed. And it’s the not-so-secret ingredient to Amazon’s tailored recommendations.

In a rare example of a beneficial contribution, AI technology has proven it can analyze X-rays and MRI scans much faster, with increased foresight and greater accuracy than human doctors. Lennox mentions the following examples in 2084:

Aberdeen Royal Infirmary reports that AI is being used in adaptive radiotherapy for tumors and can reduce two weeks’ work to five minutes. The journal Neurology announced the development of an AI system that uses eye-scan data to detect markers of Parkinson’s disease seven years before symptoms appear.

AI technology has also become a central element of policing. A report from 2022 by the Center for Democracy & Technology revealed that one in six police departments were using facial-recognition technology. That number has likely increased by now.

Police departments also use AI technology to capture and process license plate numbers, fine speeders without having to stake officers behind bushes, and help with forensic investigations. And AI is the main ingredient in predictive policing. If your initial response is to recall the plot of the 2002 movie Minority Report, you aren’t far off the mark. Reuters explained predictive policing this way in a report published in March:

Predictive policing analyzes large amounts of data to help anticipate and prevent future crime. It uses statistical predictions and algorithms to identify crime hot spots and individuals who are at high risk of committing or becoming victims of crimes.

But few institutions are investing as heavily in AI as the military. Lennox notes, “The military use of AI tends to be of two kinds: electronic warfare by disruption of cyberspace and the use of physical AI-controlled weapons.” The military uses AI for surveillance, data analysis, code breaking, and other cyber operations. It also has autonomous (AI-controlled) weapons. In their defense against the Russians, Ukrainian troops deploy American-made autonomous drones. The military expenditures section of the recently enacted One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) includes billions of dollars allocated to unmanned — AI-dependent — equipment. Here are a few examples of OBBBA expenditures that revolve around AI technology:

$450 million for application of autonomy and artificial intelligence to naval shipbuilding;

$1.5 billion for expansion of small unmanned surface vessel production;

$2.1 billion for development, procurement, and integration of purpose-built medium unmanned surface vessels;

$1.3 billion for expansion of unmanned underwater vehicle production; and

$188 million for the development and testing of maritime robotic autonomous systems and enabling technologies. (You read that right: The U.S. military is building underwater robots.)

The pitch for this advanced lethal technology is that it makes the military more efficient and safer for soldiers. Lennox observes that “contemporary technology has given people a lot more powerful weapons — automatic weapons, AI-guided weapons, drones — all those kinds of things,” and that “the whole nature of warfare has changed.”

But, as with any technology, AI has its drawbacks. In this case, they might prove highly detrimental.

Surveillance Communism

2084 includes a chapter titled “Big Brother Meets Big Data.” The same technology that dials up at the touch of a button (or the prompt of a voice request) the answer to your most pressing question; the same technology that allows you to see photos of your high-school buddy’s latest trip to the beach; the program responsible for Amazon recommending that book you enjoyed so much; the GPS system that makes traveling unfamiliar roads so easy — all that information is being harvested into a profile on you and sold to private parties and government spy agencies. Lennox notes:

AI tracker programs are geared to harvesting as much self-generated data as possible about your lifestyle and habits, where you go, what you buy, people you communicate with, books you read, jobs you do, your political and social activities, your personal opinions — a list that is growing.

A January 2022 Director of National Intelligence report revealed that “U.S. intelligence agencies are buying and storing personal information on Americans with little oversight and few guidelines,” according to a summary in a June 2023 NBC News article. Those agencies include the National Security Agency, FBI, Department of Defense, Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, and Internal Revenue Service.

When data harvesting is combined with government surveillance, you have what Lennox dubs “surveillance communism and thought control.” He sees China’s abuse of AI technology as the canary in the coal mine. “China is already using AI for social control,” he writes. “The surveillance state is no longer merely a distant dystopian threat — it is a fearful and present reality.”

By 2021, China had installed 540 million CCTV cameras throughout the country, one for roughly every three citizens, according to Lennox. Other sources say China has at least 700 million CCTV cameras, all part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Skynet project (yes, the Chinese gave their surveillance project exactly the same name the writers of the Terminator films gave to the homicidal AI system in their movies). There are few public places the Chinese can go without the government watching them.

China is also a decade into the implementation of an AI-dependent social-credit score system. The program is designed to incentivize government-approved behavior while conditioning against behavior the government frowns upon. Lennox explains the original vision of the Chinese social credit system based on a report by Drew Donnelly of workforce payment platform Horizons. The idea is to create a system that enforces compliance. Writes Lennox:

To achieve this goal, each corporation and citizen is issued a standardized unique personal identity number. Each citizen is awarded a number, let’s say 300, of social credit points that can be added to by “good” (i.e., government-approved) behavior…. As your points accumulate, you are granted more and more perks — access to a wider range of jobs, and wider access to contracts, mortgage opportunities, reduced utility bills, school placements for children, goods, travel possibilities, even reduced rental costs for bicycles.

But those behaving in unapproved ways lose points. Bad behavior can include being friends with people the government designates “unsafe,” getting into trouble with the police, jaywalking, smoking in nonsmoking areas, posting “fake news” online, criticizing the government, complaining, and a slew of other things. So how does the government operate this control system? Lennox writes that “much of this control is exercised by advanced AI facial recognition techniques working on a vast database of images channeled into a central computer center from millions of CCTV cameras.”

The Chinese government hasn’t fully implemented everything mentioned here, including a national score system, but about 80 percent of the provinces, regions, and cities have already launched some version of a social-credit score system. According to the U.K. Telegraph in 2018, the Chinese government said, “The points system will improve the city’s business environment by preventing people with low ‘integrity’ from accessing the city’s public services and travel network.” The existing social credit program evaluates businesses for compliance with regulations and ethical standards, which are determined by the communist government. It also monitors individual behavior to make sure people obey laws and societal norms, also determined by the government. And the CCP has already begun punishing people who don’t behave the way they’re supposed to. According to an April 2018 Channel News Asia report, nine million people were blocked from buying flight tickets, and another three million from buying business-class train tickets, because of their low social credit score. Lennox writes that Chinese corporations, working with the government, are developing even more efficient — and terrifying — methods of surveillance. He cites reports of Chinese companies “fitting their employees with headgear that conceals technology that can read the wearers’ brainwaves and send the data to computers that, in turn, use AI to check for emotions such as depression, anxiety, or anger.”

It gets worse. The general Chinese population has — so far — been spared the most totalitarian aspects of the CCP’s control system, which have been reserved for the Uyghurs, a Muslim minority group. “The Uyghurs are now subject to the most intense surveillance that the world has ever seen to the extent that the capital city of Ürümqi has been described as a ‘digital fortress,’” Lennox points out. Every move a Uyghur makes, every conversation he has, online and offline, is recorded. The government forces Uyghurs to carry ID cards that store their DNA information, as well as their “reliability status,” the government’s way of determining if they fit into the system. Cameras dot every street and alleyway, and there are small police stations every few hundred yards. Every Uyghur’s smartphone is fitted with spyware. When he passes by a station, he hands it over to have it electronically read, and all the information is transferred to the central monitoring system, where it’s processed by AI, Lennox writes. He goes on and on, painting a picture of a real-life dystopian hellscape, a place where people can’t even go to the bathroom without being monitored, a place where forced sterilization is reality.

China is a wake-up call. One expert Lennox cites called China “a laboratory for social engineering,” one that is “being packaged for export to autocrats across the world.”

The exporting has already begun, and it isn’t limited to run-of-the-mill, easy-to-spot autocrats. Some would argue that no exporting was ever necessary, since the technology was born in the West. Nevertheless, in addition to the data harvesting already happening in the West, many public places in Europe and the United States, alleged havens of individual liberty, are starting to look like China. According to Lennox, in 2018, a Chinese company sold 1.2 million CCTV cameras to the U.K., which authorities installed in schools, hospitals, universities, councils, police departments, and government buildings. That number has increased significantly since 2018, to at least four million, according to a more recent report. France, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands have also installed millions of cameras to monitor their citizens. And in the United States, some of the largest cities have installed hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras. According to cybersecurity website Comparitech, there are about 70,000 cameras in New York City; another 60,000 watching the residents of Atlanta; 35,000 cameras hanging around in Washington, D.C.; 47,000 in Philadelphia; and tens of thousands in many other U.S. cities.

Congress has also passed laws to make sure spying isn’t hampered by legal obstacles. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) provides permission for the government to spy on Americans without a warrant (in the name of national security, of course). There have been multiple attempts to rein in this unconstitutional action, but to no avail. The intel agencies have swooped in and provided enough pressure on legislators, with plenty of fearmongering, to ensure Section 702 remains intact.

Lennox also notes a slew of pro-surveillance laws that have been implemented in Europe, including France’s International Electronic Communications law, Germany’s Communications Gathering Intelligence Act, and the U.K.’s Investigatory Powers Act, referred to by many Brits as the “Snoopers Charter.” Like Section 702 of FISA, it allows British authorities access to personal data. Moreover, intel agencies are collaborating across the Western world. The “Five Eyes” nations — the United States, the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — have an intelligence-sharing agreement.

This is not a comprehensive, or even up-to-the-minute, summary of the communist-style surveillance and manipulation infrastructure emerging worldwide. It doesn’t include suspect provisions in the European Electronic Communications Code directive, which impacts all EU member states. It also doesn’t include what is likely a long and chilling list of secretive illegal surveillance and manipulation campaigns. And we don’t have the space to dive into the behavior-modification campaigns governments worldwide, ours included, have launched. The most obvious, of course, were the overtly dishonest and damaging psyops deployed uniformly around the world during the Covid era. Since the end of that dark period, we have learned that the six-foot social-distance rule imposed on hundreds of millions of Americans was invented out of thin air. We have learned that the lab-leak “conspiracy theory” is actually the most plausible explanation for the origins of Covid-19, even though people who said this early on were censored and shamed. We have learned that the mRNA-based Covid-19 “vaccines” do not prevent infection, nor are they “safe and effective,” even though that’s exactly what the world was told. Worse, years later, studies continue bolstering the rampant suspicions that the mRNA injections have caused great harm — and death — to people worldwide. We have yet to learn the full extent of that harm and death. (See our October 2025 cover story “Covid Vaccine Carnage: The Rising Death Toll” by Veronika Kyrylenko.)

Covid hinted at how far the technocratic globalists were willing to go, and AI was pivotal to their malevolent operation. Social-media algorithms, running on AI, were changed and deployed to censor unapproved speech. And if public pressure hadn’t derailed them, the globalists would’ve deployed their contact-tracing program worldwide. Some European countries, and even some U.S. cities, had already implemented vaccine passports that rewarded those who obeyed the government and punished those who didn’t, just as in China. The obedient could attend sporting events, eat at restaurants, and work. The troublemakers, however, were put under house arrest. Some lost their jobs. All this relied on an interconnected surveillance system that had access to your medical history and geographical location.

Doorway to Global Government

Lennox tells us that he once listened to a lecture by tech tycoon Peter Thiel, the co-founder and chairman of Palantir, a tech company with ties to intelligence agencies and which the U.S. government has enlisted to build a centralized database on the American people. Lennox asked Thiel if he feared that AI will bring about, thanks to “high-powered surveillance technology,” a totalitarian government like the one being rolled out in China right now. Thiel told him, “Yes, that’s exactly where I am.” Thiel reinforced this concern in a June interview with The New York Times’ Ross Douthat. However, he said, his concern isn’t limited to the obvious possibility that powerful AI will give globalists the edge necessary to create that long-sought-after world government. Thiel worries that the fear of emerging all-powerful AI alone will be exploited in the same vein that the threat of nuclear war and climate change have been for decades. Thiel said to Douthat:

Obviously, there are certain types of risks with A.I. But I always think that if we’re going to have this frame of talking about existential risks, perhaps we should also talk about the risk of another type of a bad singularity, which I would describe as the one-world totalitarian state. Because I would say the default political solution people have for all these existential risks is one-world governance. What do you do about nuclear weapons? We have a United Nations with real teeth that controls them, and they’re controlled by an international political order. And then something like this is also: What do we do about A.I.? And we need global compute[r] governance. We need a one-world government to control all the computers, log every single keystroke, to make sure people don’t program a dangerous A.I. And I’ve been wondering whether that’s going from the frying pan into the fire.

Thiel presents a scenario that already has precedent. International bodies, including the one he mentioned, have been using amorphous threats such as supposed climate change and the possibility of nuclear war as excuses to justify “global cooperation” for decades. As AI becomes more powerful and pervasive, the United Nations will almost certainly pitch some grand plan for international control over our keyboards. And, as is always their modus operandi, they will say it’s for our own good.

One way or another, AI has great potential to bring global government across the finish line. Lennox tells us, “Globalization in terms of world government is certainly coming back on the agenda if not into the hearts and minds of some people who would like to wield that kind of power.” He elaborates in 2084:

It seems, then, that everything is in place. For the first time since Homo sapiens began to doodle on cave walls, there is an argument, an opportunity, and a means to make serious steps toward a world government.

Echoing a decades-old JBS argument, Lennox points to the European Union — a 27-nation coalition that has its own supreme court and currency, “thousands of pages of legislation,” and the ability to deploy military forces — as an example of a model that can easily “go global.”

Atheists and Superhumans

Lennox, a Christian, also believes there is a spiritual element to AI. He points out that atheists dominate the AI industry. And as developers rush to develop AGI, which includes autonomous machines that can perform multiple tasks as well as or better than humans, he believes people who seek global government will partner with AI creators to build what tyrants since the beginning of time have sought.

Also, there is a prevailing belief among the world’s elites that AI will enable humans to become “superhumans” by merging with AI. These superhuman elites would then use their powers to grow and perpetuate their control over the rest of the world.

Lennox believes AI technology explains some of the more mysterious passages in the Bible, including Revelation 13, specifically verses 15-17. These passages speak about a Beast that comes out of the Earth, who forces everyone to receive a mark that gives them permission to buy and sell. This “mark” is a pass that allows societal participation, not wholly unlike a vaccine passport. Lennox tells us this part of the Bible reminds him of a book by Max Tegmark titled Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence:

The idea of building some kind of entity that can speak and cause people who do not bear the mark of the beast to die if they do not bow is remarkably similar — in fact it’s almost the same as one of the futuristic scenarios given by a very brilliant American physicist named Max Tegmark. He has a book called Life 3.0 where he sets up about 12 future scenarios. The idea he spends the most time on is the system called Prometheus, which takes over the whole earth and forces every citizen to wear a security bracelet that relays everything about the wearer to a central government. The bracelet also has the capacity to give a lethal injection to anybody that doesn’t bow to the philosophy of the party at the time. That is almost identical to what Revelation is talking about.

World government will eventually happen, Lennox believes. He points to the prophecies in the books of Daniel, Revelation, and 2 Thessalonians as support. “[The Bible] would appear to tell us that the final form of government will be a world government of hideous strength, overtly and maximally hostile towards God,” he writes in 2084. In his book God, AI & the End of History: Understanding the Book of Revelation in an Age of Intelligent Machines, he breaks down every chapter of Revelation through the lens of AI technology. He looks at AI’s potential role in bringing about events described in the final book of the Bible.

Even though he believes world government is inevitable, Lennox doesn’t think good people should sit around and watch it become reality — not without a fight, anyway. “Bright, scientifically-minded Christians should get involved in the beneficial aspects of AI so they might have a seat at the table and insert their Christian ethics in the discussion,” he tells us. He also believes this emerging technology presents a great opportunity for faith leaders to talk about the Bible in the framework of an important issue. Of course, faith leaders have various views as to whether we are now in the “end times” and if we know when the end of the world will be. But many, regardless of their views on this, agree that we should occupy until He comes.

AI presents obvious potential for control at a level that has never existed. It could result in the enslavement of the entire world, not just China. Like Lennox, we don’t believe faith should get in the way of doing good. We should always resist evil, every step of the way.

Concerned citizens should pay close attention to AI development and how it’s deployed into the public sphere. And when appropriate, they should work to rein it in through civic engagement. The case for this is especially strong where privacy is concerned. Surveillance is, at its core, an invasion of privacy, and therefore a violation of civil liberties.

We should refuse to accept the excuse that security trumps liberty. We must insist on and fight for a better balance than we currently have. And we must do it now, while we still can.