In 1968, while teenage Red Guards beat their professors to death with clubs in Beijing courtyards, Jean-Paul Sartre sat in Paris calling Mao's Cultural Revolution a model of revolutionary democracy. The most celebrated intellectual in France looked at a country burning its own libraries and saw liberation. He sold the Maoist newspaper La Cause du Peuple on French street corners himself, holding it aloft like a sacrament. Consider what he was endorsing. Between 1966 and 1976, the Cultural Revolution killed somewhere between 500,000 and two million people. Schools shut down across the entire country. Students dragged teachers onto stages, hung placards around their necks, forced them to kneel on broken glass, then murdered them. The historian Bian Zhongyun, vice-principal of a girls' school in Beijing, died on August 5, 1966, beaten by her own students with nail-studded clubs. Sartre called this the people governing themselves. You should understand why a man this intelligent got it this wrong. Sartre believed knowledge served power, that truth was whatever the revolution required, that the individual existed to be dissolved into the collective will. So when Mao abolished the distinction between teacher and student, between expert and mob, Sartre cheered. He had spent decades arguing that bourgeois reason was a class weapon. Here was a regime taking him at his word and clubbing the reasoners to death. This is what economic illiteracy buys you. A university, a price, a contract, and a peasant's grain stockpile all carry knowledge that no central planner can seize or replicate. Mises explained the calculation problem in 1920. Hayek explained dispersed knowledge in 1945. Sartre had access to both and chose the dunce cap of the collective instead, then handed out its propaganda on the Rue de Rennes. He died in 1980, mourned by 50,000 followers, never having retracted a word about Mao. The professors of Beijing got no such funeral. They got a ditch, and a philosopher in Paris explaining that their murder was freedom.

SCOTUS argument in Little v. Hecox: Q- should Court dump case as moot because plaintiff trans athlete wants it dismissed? A - No. As I argued in our @approject brief, “The supposed mootness here amounts to little more than a change of mind” [the essence of transgenderism].

READ: Don’t fall for Bernie Sanders’s authoritarian AI power grab "In the age of populism, it’s probably quaint to ask under what constitutional authority Congress can unilaterally seize half of an entire industry." @davidharsanyi's latest: washingtonexaminer.com/in_fo…

Over 90% of AI chatbot answers about midterm elections are flawed, stunning analysis shows trib.al/idxVClN

A robot kicked a little boy in the stomach We're officially one software update away from Terminator

Monsignor Stephen Rossetti has been an archdiocesan exorcist in Washington, D.C., for nearly two decades. He was recently removed for his comments about UFOs being demons. wapo.st/4eoUG5G

Opinion: As the world enters a new era of technology, AI must be permitted to develop without premature regulation, writes Argentina's President Javier Milei ft.trib.al/JnTQ0Zv

when sam quotes the bible, you know things aren’t going well for OpenAI

Two things can simultaneously be true about this new AI security executive order: 1) This represents a reasonable governance arrangement for frontier model security and its oversight, at least when compared with the far more intrusive ideas floated earlier, like the pre-vetting of models via a formal government licensing regime (aka, “FDA for AI”). 2) This represent as significant win for the military-industrial complex and the continuing fiction of “voluntarism” surrounding its inner workings. Thanks to open-ended EOs like this, the new growing AI-industrial complex will further concentrate power around AI – in both government and industry – and lead to more avenues for public officials to exert control over not just model security, but potentially many other aspects of algorithmic development and use, including content-related matters. After all, “security” is in the eye of the beholder (and future administrations and officials).

The House just passed legislation to stop schools from hiding critical information from parents about what their kids are learning. The ACLJ is fighting to stop the sexualization & indoctrination of children in schools. Sign now: brnw.ch/21x32w4

We need to create a new humanism before the “AI successionists” win. vox.com/future-perfect/48997…

Blocking children from social media is no substitute for making platforms safe in the first place, the UN human rights office warned Friday, urging governments and tech companies to go further and faster to protect children online. news.un.org/en/story/2026/05…

As a Presbyterian, this Papal Encyclical is a reminder how subtlety different our two traditions are. This struck me reading the Pope’s interpretation of the Tower of Babel. In Reformed churches, the confusion of languages in Genesis 11 is better understood as deliberate divine act of judgment, not a natural consequence of human pride. In his commentaries on the Bible, for example, Calvin emphasized that God directly intervened and scattered people as a demonstration of his control. It “ought not to be regarded as a punishment, seeing it rather flowed from the benediction and grace of God.” In the Pope’s telling, God functions more as a witness. Importantly though, the confusion of tongues has its response in Acts 2, where people hear the Gospel in their own languages. The Pentecost shows Christ’s mastery. It is a new covenant in all senses. There’s also a deep irony with Genesis 11 that has never been lost on me. The people building the Tower wanted to make a name for themselves and we all know the story! It is constantly used as a device to understand technology.

A year ago at this time, Congress was considering a moratorium on state AI over-regulation and the Trump administration was formulating an AI action plan for America. Today, the biggest Blue state legislatures and progressive Democratic governors in California, New York, and Illinois have effectively taken over national AI policy and are dictating the terms of interstate computational commerce. This represents an astonishing policy turnaround, and one with troubling ramifications for efforts to create a coherent policy framework for a technology sector with such global strategic significance. While some large companies have apparently made their peace with this regulatory arrangement, it is mostly because they have the resources to navigate this parochial patchwork and confusing and costly compliance regime. The moat around these bigger firms will be filled with a sea of paperwork. Other players will fall by the wayside. And, needless to say, we'll be saying goodbye to open source options if this regime sticks. It's a terrible approach if one cares about AI competition, investment, and innovation going forward.