Bottom Line Up Front: In a recent interview on the Joe Rogan podcast, billionaire entrepreneur Palmer Luckey expressed his astonishment with China’s culture and how it differs from America, saying they’re much more open to censorship. Luckey says that, despite their advanced weapons capabilities, he believes China’s strongest weapon is their ability to control the populace with propaganda and get people to buy into causes that might be completely false. 

The Details: In a conversation on The Joe Rogan Experience, Luckey offered a sweeping assessment of China’s control over political memory and public discourse, arguing that social norms and state systems reinforce one another. He described how many Chinese citizens dismiss Western concerns about historical atrocities such as Tiananmen Square as irrelevant, portraying those who raise the topic as disruptive. Luckey then expanded the point beyond a single issue and toward the strategic significance of narrative control, stating: “I’ve come to the conclusion that their most powerful weapon is not any bomb or missile or drone, it’s their ability to control people’s minds through the media, through propaganda, through state pressure.”

Palmer Luckey is best known for building technologies that push the boundary between science fiction and practical reality. As the founder of Oculus VR, he helped spark the modern consumer virtual reality boom, culminating in Meta’s (META) acquisition of the company in 2014. In the years since, Luckey has become a prominent figure in defense technology as the founder of Anduril Industries, which develops artificial intelligence (AI)-driven autonomous systems and advanced military hardware. That dual background in consumer-facing immersive technology and national security-focused robotics shapes how Luckey views the competition between global powers: not only in missiles and drones, but also in information systems, persuasion, and the management of public attention.

Discussion of censorship in China frequently focuses on what the state restricts (such as references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown), but it’s also important to emphasize how thoroughly the topic can be erased from public view through education policy, media controls, and increasingly sophisticated digital filtering. 

The Trump administration has described winning the ongoing AI race as a national security interest because these tools can be weaponized for propaganda and information control. Recent reports suggest that China is already using AI to “turbocharge” its information control systems, which will likely only exacerbate these issues. 

AI-enabled tools and humans can work together to identify references to flagged or undesirable content and remove them more quickly than before, contributing to a quieter, less visible form of information control. This is central to Luckey’s argument: the strategic value lies not just in restricting speech, but in engineering a public environment in which restricted topics feel socially unnecessary to discuss.

Luckey drew parallels to the ongoing war in Ukraine. Russia and its proponents convinced soldiers that the ongoing multi-year war would only be a 5-day operation and that the Ukrainian people wanted to be freed. They assured soldiers that Ukrainian citizens were waiting for them to show up and liberate them, effectively convincing them they’re on the right side of history.

Luckey went on to say that this same approach has actually created a culture in China where most citizens are supportive of the government and its policy of suppressing people who speak out or bring up incidents like Tiananmen Square. Specifically, Luckey said, “If you talk to most Chinese people and you say, 'What do you think about the fact that they're censoring all this discussion?', they say, 'That's an irrelevant issue from 30 or 40 years ago. It doesn't matter. Anyone who's trying to make every discussion about Tiananmen Square is just a troublemaker, and I don't care if they're shut down. I'm glad that they're not clogging the comments. And I'm glad those people are being pushed out of the conversation.' That's actually a pretty normal opinion.” 

With the ongoing mass adoption of AI, it’s likely this trend will continue. The internet allows for mass distribution of content, and now AI allows for the mass production of content – including content that could look completely real, even if it’s fake. 

Luckey’s perspective carries weight partly because of the world he operates in. Anduril is a major defense-tech company focused on autonomous systems, AI-enabled sensing, and command-and-control platforms, built around the idea that modern conflicts will be shaped by the speed of decision-making and the integration of information. The company’s positioning reflects a broader defense-industry shift toward autonomy, intelligence fusion, and human-supervised AI systems. These are tools designed to compress the time between detecting a threat and responding to it. In this context, Luckey’s emphasis on “control… through the media, through propaganda, through state pressure” fits within a wider strategic understanding: influence operations and information dominance can shape outcomes long before weapons are deployed.

This framing also connects to market dynamics more broadly. Investors and policymakers increasingly treat AI not only as a productivity tool but as a strategic technology tied to national competitiveness. The same machine learning capabilities that power recommendation systems, content moderation, and social platforms can also be used to amplify narratives, suppress dissent, and personalize persuasion at scale. As a result, industries spanning defense, social media, semiconductors, cybersecurity, and cloud infrastructure all intersect with the underlying theme in Luckey’s quote: information systems are not neutral; they are instruments that can shape perception and behavior.

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