The latest episode of The District Club dropped yesterday — you can watch it here. It included this on Pete Hegseth’s aims with his new Department of War agenda:
There was also extensive conversation about the week’s movements on the A.I. front, which was also a topic on my Fox weekend, where I co-hosted the Big Weekend Show on Saturday and joined Sunday Morning Futures. Thanks to everyone who tuned in!
The A.I. Golden Calf
Andrew Walker in the Daily Wire:
The form of human idolatry changes. The propensity for idolatry does not.
Whether building sky-high towers that reach God, as in the tale of Babel in Genesis 11; making golden calves in Exodus 32; or raising Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image in Daniel 3, humans tend to project God-like power onto human-made artifacts. The great theologian John Calvin likened the human heart to a “perpetual factory of idols.”
Enter the latest chapter of this deeply human tendency: AI. This is the next widget on the conveyor belt of idols. What’s fascinating is that even AI experts admit they aren’t even sure exactly how AI works. If they can’t, I can’t either. From all the available summaries I’ve read, AI works by algorithmic prediction based on the enormous quantities of data it has scraped.
Questions now abound about whether, and to what degree, AI possesses God-like attributes — such as aseity (existence), infallibility (without error), and omniscience (all-knowing) — and God-authored human capacities, such as rationality, moral responsibility, consciousness, sentience, and ensoulment.
Now that conversation is accelerating, as the New York Times reports in a stunning story about Anthropic consulting with religious leaders on the moral status and religious implications of AI agents. The story shows that the secularized tech vanguards of Silicon Valley — who largely assume a materialist account of reality — are courting and pressing religious leaders to consider the outer boundaries of their own assumptions about AI’s moral status as a conscious being. Other stories give eerie indication of where AI accelerationism is going: “If we build a superintelligence, we will first fall in love with it. Then we will worship it. Finally, we will make sacrifices to it.” Thankfully, not all of the AI champions are singing from the same technocratic hymnal. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s lead, is right to point out the errors of placing religious burdens on AI: “I am very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models, and think it is a real safety issue.” Restraint and sobriety in the face of unbounded optimism is a welcome chastening.
As of this writing, I am hard-pressed to find many — or any — serious religious leaders entertaining AI as a morally responsible person or an agent that can channel the divine. Earlier in the year, the Vatican released a sprawling encyclical insisting upon the unique status of humanity, a unique status that no man-made machine can fully replicate. Far ahead of our current craze, I was part of a group of Christian scholars and leaders who, in 2019, released a statement denying “that any part of creation, including any form of technology, should ever be used to usurp or subvert the dominion and stewardship which has been entrusted solely to humanity by God; nor should technology be assigned a level of human identity, worth, dignity, or moral agency.” What seemed like far-off speculation a mere seven years ago now seems the topic du jour.
Our argument was and remains: AI is not conscious. It lacks self-awareness or the ability to conceptualize self-transcendence. AI does not possess moral free choice, that is, the ability to deliberate and make choices all on its own. AI is not “alive” in any sense that bears resemblance to organic beings. AI is not sentient; it cannot feel. AI has neither soul nor body. It has no reflexive rationality that was not first programmed.
Disembodied, it lacks the foundational requirement of what makes us human persons and created in the divine image — the Body-Soul unity. Cognitive simulation without a human body does not constitute personhood. Biblically, human personhood is the unity of body and soul.
The fact that AI must be trained for “alignment” (industry lingo for setting proper moral parameters) means they are not innately morally responsive. Lacking moral agency — needing training to know right from wrong — highlights a salient difference between humans and machines: moral awareness is innate in humans (Rom. 2:14-15).
As philosopher Christopher Tollefsen helpfully summarizes, AI may have the properties of mind for information processing and still lack consciousness. From this, we can conclude what AI does: it mimics cognition. Simulating cognition is different from possessing cognition in itself. It has the “illusion” of consciousness, as Tollefsen states, that allows predictions to follow from inputs. That may be as much as we can say.
Apart from the powers of computation that humans give to AI when they create it, AI would never do. Because it has no property of doing apart from the humans that empower it, it has no property of ontological being, either. There are also real human costs to ascribing human-like powers to AI: We begin to assign worth based on function. Here, as the cognitively disabled, the comatose, or those with dementia are edged out for what qualifies as “humanity,” the logic of anti-humanism will cash out in ascribing human agency to machines at the cost of safeguarding our own dignity.
Latinos Could Decide The Midterms
Republicans built pieces of their 2026 strategy, including newly drawn House districts in Texas and Florida, around the assumption that Trump’s historic Latino gains would endure. A reversal is complicating that bet in key races.
Trump’s breakthrough with Latino men was among the clearest signs of a changing GOP coalition in 2024. Two years later, those gains look far less durable, though Democrats haven’t recovered all the ground they lost in the last decade.
A new NBC News/Telemundo poll found Latino voters preferred Democratic control of Congress 59%–35% — a 24-point advantage, double the margin the same poll found in 2024.
A new CBS News/YouGov poll tells the same story: Hispanic likely voters favor Democratic House candidates 60%–39%.
Latino men have undergone a particularly strong political whiplash. Hillary Clinton won Latino men by 31 points in 2016, according to the Edison National Election Pool exit poll, and Biden won them by 23 points in 2020. But in 2024, Trump won them by 10 points.
NBC now finds Latino men preferring Democratic congressional control 53%–39%.
About one in seven Latino voters who say they backed Trump in 2024 now want Democrats to take control of Congress.
A majority of Latino voters say their congressional vote will be a signal against Trump.
Cornell And The Gen Z Sexual Catastrophe
I interviewed Bethany Miller this weekend for the Daily Wire:
BM: I think this is where the conservatives may have, I guess in a blunt way, shot ourselves in the foot where we’ve given conservative women a dichotomy. You have either the girlboss or you have the trad wife. The girlboss is exactly that. Speaking for myself, I’m in my mid-20s, I’m a working woman, and I am unmarried, and I live in a metropolitan area. I’m exactly what the Left hopes for and often wins. Naturally, I am conservative. And so I am that exact demographic, but I can’t put myself in the tradwife box because I’m not married and so I’m not literally a traditional wife. But I’m not a girlboss either because I do desire those things. But I do think there are women like myself who are responding to the way the media, social media, is covering the Clancy case because women are elevated to just our emotions.
That’s all that they’ve become, which is interesting. As you said, this does set feminism back because there is no equality. All of a sudden, you are equal in every aspect until you have to have autonomy and actually have to take responsibility. And all of a sudden it’s, oh, she just struggled with her postpartum psychosis, whatever it may be, and it’s always believed the woman. So I think that the algorithm right now is trending towards more of that. It is pushing more of this toxic empathetic narrative. But at the same time, you can open TikTok today, and you will see women make videos talking about how their husbands are abusive or that marriage is the most oppressive thing you could do.
And I do think that the aesthetic of tradwife right now is not something that you see on TikTok. Instead, you see “Sex and the City”; you see the liberation of having a job and working in the office and being a character on “Suits.” It is the “I can do anything a man can do,” just like that Annie Oakley song — and I can do anything you can do better. That is the trend right now, and it is not trad wife because it doesn’t fit the aesthetic. And so like you said, motherhood is not an aesthetic thing right now on social media. And if it is, it trends more with this far-right-wing circle than with the broader American public. Social media caters more to women who are told to believe all their emotions.
And that is why we have the digital response we do to the Cornell 7 and to Lindsay Clancy right now. And now you’re seeing clips of women telling their boys, “This is how you’re supposed to treat women, and you’re never supposed to treat women the way that happened in Cornell 7.” And I just think it’s absolutely ridiculous what we’re seeing right now.
BD: You mentioned the word aesthetic. It seems to me that the aesthetic here is incredibly powerful because it’s largely an illusion. It’s one that, when it’s effective, is effective for a reason — it connects with people. But you also have this false choice where, as you said, it’s basically either you’re going to be a girlboss or you’re going to be a tradwife when the truth is that the vast majority of women in America are neither of those things in terms of the way that they live their lives and raise kids and work and all the different choices that they make. Is this a situation where the aesthetic has basically taken over and replaced the argument that basically it’s in an era when we don’t have any patience for anything beyond the short video scroll that never ends, that we don’t actually have the conversations around the choices that we make in life?
Are we instead just driven toward “You like this aesthetic, so you’re just going to get more and more and more of it until you can’t take anymore”?
BM: It is exactly that. It’s almost like we let the digital aesthetic speak for what exactly it is. We let Pinterest and TikTok and Instagram tell women what femininity is without actually being able to say what femininity is and actually have the argument of what is the difference between the two sexes? Men are providers and protectors and they are the stronger vessel. Whereas women are the weaker vessel, and women are nurturers and softer, and they provide an aspect that men do not have, and that’s why they’re meant to complement each other. But if I were to even say that publicly, that’s considered inflammatory and controversial, because that’s where our culture is primed right now. But 100%, it’s almost even trivial to say out loud, but the aesthetic is the forerunner to the argument. And all of a sudden, the further and further the aesthetic is allowed to run, the further back the argument is, and no one’s even able to tell you what femininity is.
I think that’s why you’re either a girlboss or you’re a tradwife, and there’s nothing in between. And you just cannot narrow down women and femininity, and men too, into an aesthetic like that. Motherhood is sacrifice and responsibility. It’s children and bills and sickness and forgiveness. Nothing about that is aesthetic. It never was meant to be. Same with men, and the aspect of what it means to be masculine was never meant to be that. But it’s funny, we talk so much about toxic masculinity. We never talked about toxic femininity. What we’ve only ever talked about was the aesthetic parts of it. But because we’ve not been able to define the argument of what it means to be a woman, which we can’t even answer that, funny enough, but then we can’t even answer what it means to be feminine.
All we’ve seen is the unhealthy version of it, which is what we’re seeing in the headlines. And so it doesn’t surprise me. We’ve let the aesthetic define what it means to be a woman. And then now we’ve got this outrage that we’re seeing with these women, the state of women and how they respond to headlines and how they are allowed to run with completely unrestricted emotion. And then it is all the unhealthy versions of women. And so what we’re seeing on display is that unhealthy femininity and not healthy femininity because no one has stopped and talked about what it means to be a healthy and beautiful and flourishing woman. And it’s been unfortunate to see the conservative outlook on life not be able to communicate that because now we’ve let the Left say we are the pro-women party, we are the pro-woman movement.
And now women have found a “home within the Left,” thinking that they are pro-woman, when it’s the conservative outlook on life that actually provides that flourishing, that femininity. And exactly like I said, 72% of Gen Z does want to marry. Some women are lying to themselves. They do want to marry. And if you ask them, they’ll say, “Yeah, we do want a man to pay for dinner. We do want a man to open the door.” And they’re naming all of these things that are exactly what true textbook masculinity is. So they still want to, which is why it’s kind of contradictory. But yes, 100%.
More from Jordan Schroeder in the Daily Wire: Why the ‘Cornell 7’ Story Didn’t Actually Start Inside a Frat House
✍️ Feature
🌍 Foreign
WSJ: Security Failures Mount After FlyDubai Pilot Is Killed in Israel
WSJ: Flavio Bolsonaro Surges Past Lula, Setting Up a Bitter Brazil Election Runoff
Axios: France’s Debt Crisis Sends Yields Higher and Politics Into Turmoil
The Spectator: It Will Be Hard for Sanchez to Avoid Defeat in Spain’s Election
🏛️ Domestic
New York Times: Supreme Court Could Reshape the Midterms as Trump Pushes Election Agenda
Mediaite: New Leaked Audio: Ken Paxton Privately Griping That He Doesn’t Control His Own Campaign
Politico: House Democrats Target Six Red Seats in Trump Country
Daily Wire: The Case Against Taxpayers Funding America’s Wealthiest Alumni
New York Post: White House Rips ‘Scumbag’ Ex-Special Counsel Jack Smith After He Wears ‘No Kings’ Shirt to Bruce Springsteen Show
New York Post: Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Who Later Admitted to Sexual Abuse, Dead at 84
🗳️ 2028
Washington Examiner: John Kennedy Eyes 2028 Republican Presidential Run
Fox News: Democratic Senators Dodge Backing Kamala Harris for Potential 2028 Run: ‘Very Messy’
📰 Media
💻 Tech
City Journal: Artificial Intelligence, Safety, Technology, and Innovation in Historical Perspective
Washington Examiner: Big Tech’s AI Safety Guardrails Push Protection Over Profit
🧬 Health
Washington Examiner: Russian Researcher Studied Plague, Then Died of Mysterious Illness: What to Know
🏈 Sports
🎭 Culture & Hollywood
Variety: Digger Majorly Bombs at the Box Office, Earns Verity Scores
Variety: David Ellison Unveils Skydance’s New Leadership Team
Daily Wire: Why the Outrage Over ‘Mom of the Year’ Completely Missed the Point
🪶 Quote
“When the pioneers and adventurers of our past left their homes in search of new lands, they said good-bye forever to the place of their birth and the companions of their youth. Only a lifetime ago, parents waved farewell to their emigrating children in the virtual certainty that they would never meet again. And now, within one incredible generation, all this has changed.”
— Arthur C. Clarke