Could the government use aliens as an excuse to seize total control? Author Brace McCoy says yes: on the podcast Stupid People With Pets, he argues a manufactured or exaggerated alien threat fits the same playbook regimes have used before, manufacturing fear to justify sweeping surveillance and control. That fear, not actual evidence, is what makes the public accept it.
I recently sat down with Mr. Burnz Sativa, host of the podcast Stupid People With Pets, for a wide-ranging, hour-and-forty-five-minute conversation built around the central warning of my book, The Government’s Plan for Containing the Alien Contagion, and How We Will Justify Killing Billions of Humans. You can watch the full episode here: Could Aliens Become the Perfect Excuse for Total Government Control?
From West Point to the Alien Contagion Thesis
Before writing the book, I spent years in military strategy and analysis — a background that shapes how I read government crisis response, not as a series of isolated decisions but as a doctrine. That doctrine is the subject of the book: once a government has practiced managing one kind of emergency, biological, geopolitical, or otherwise, the same tools, apps, and emergency orders can be relabeled and reused the moment a new crisis, like a declared alien contagion, needs “containing.” Mr. Sativa and I spent a good part of the episode walking through how plausible that repurposing really is.
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AI, Biological Threats, and the Fear/Reason Divide
A good chunk of the conversation focused on artificial intelligence — not as a sci-fi threat, but as an economic one already displacing workers today. We discussed how that displacement is quietly being reframed as an “overpopulation” problem, and how a biological scare, real or manufactured, could accelerate the same emergency machinery the book describes. Mr. Sativa pushed hard on where fear ends and reasoned caution begins, which is exactly the line the book argues governments are trained to blur.
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Could Aliens Really Be “The Perfect Excuse”?
The episode’s title question is the one I get most often: could a real or staged alien encounter actually work as the “perfect excuse” for expanded government control? I laid out why the answer is yes — not because aliens are fake, but because the emergency-powers playbook doesn’t care what triggers it. Decades of slow, managed UFO disclosure have already done the work of preparing the public to take “nonhuman biologics” seriously through official channels only, which is precisely the conditioning the book warns about.
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Warning Signs Worth Watching
We closed the episode on a practical note: what should ordinary people actually watch for before a manufactured crisis is used to justify sweeping new power? My answer tracks the book’s own closing argument — watch for language that quietly sorts people into categories of worthy and unworthy, watch for “temporary” emergency measures that come with no sunset clause, and watch for institutions that were built years in advance of the crisis they claim to be responding to. If you want the full conversation, you can watch it here, and the book, The Government’s Plan for Containing the Alien Contagion, and How We Will Justify Killing Billions of Humans, goes into all of it in far more depth.