Steve Bannon had a meltdown on his podcast when he suggested a conspiracy between Elon Musks’ brain-interface technology company Neuralink and the impending 2022 midterm election.
Bannon—the co-founder of far-right news site Breitbart News and former advisor to former President Donald Trump—talked about the controversial technology on his podcast Real America’s Voice.
He suggested there was no regulation on the brain chips Musk wants to develop and no one knows what’s going to happen.
In the video, Bannon is speaking with his guest about Elon Musk and brings up Neuralink. While Musk is known for Tesla and SpaceX, Bannon suggests the Neuralink brain chip is Musk’s most dangerous project.
This led to wild and meandering speculation.
“So you can tell what's going to happen here. Totally unregulated.”
“Nobody's asking these tough questions of exactly what's going to happen when you start putting chips not into monkeys, not into pigs, but when you start putting them into human brains. Where does that go?”
Mostly, the plan is to use the chips in the brains of tetraplegics and quadriplegics, patients the chip hopes to help with daily life.
But yelling wild conspiracy theories online has worked well for Bannon so far.
Neuralink is a company attempting to make a brain-interface technology. The chip would be implanted in people’s brains to record and stimulate brain activity.
It’s believed this would allow for more effective treatment of spinal-cord injuries and neurological disorders.
Musk recently pushed back his estimate for human testing to 2022, but said:
“Neuralink's working well in monkeys, and we're actually doing just a lot of testing and just confirming that it's very safe and reliable, and the Neuralink device can be removed safely.”
This is an ongoing promise, with Musk previously promising human testing in 2020 and then 2021.
Bannon likely has little to fear from Musk attempting to rewire people’s brains for the 2022 election, but that may not be what he’s really thinking.
Some commenters think he’s just stoking the fires of fear.
Bannon is currently facing criminal contempt charges for refusing to answer a subpoena over the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol.
Previously, he faced charges as part of a “Build the Wall” scam, but was pardoned by former President Donald Trump before he left office.
