Welcome, America, to the Thunderdome of AI oversight.

President Trump has dropped his executive order, putting the onus on the federal government’s most secretive agencies to determine whether the products of private corporations are safe for public consumption. The National Security Agency is at the heart of the plan, with the intelligence community setting classified benchmarks, vetting, and gatekeeping new AI models within a 30-day window. Private-sector institutions and stakeholders, including AI companies themselves, must sit and wait, blind, for decisions to be handed down.

It can’t be said that this decision is strongly supported by conservatives, the “based community,” or even MAGA people more narrowly. The personal, private bid by former White House AI and crypto chief David Sacks to stop the Trump train on AI resulted only in a delay and a narrowing of the oversight window. On X, Sacks had to resort to emphasizing the things the order doesn’t do that he and the accelerationist wing of the right oppose.

Is there anything we can tell these machines to do that doesn’t tend to demote us as human beings?

That means even Trump’s inner circle will keep on duking it out among themselves.

Congress is wrestling with OpenAI’s approach, which relies on (deep breath) the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation. In short, the idea is that oversight and testing should be carried out under the aegis of established and respected bodies that bridge government and industry through public-private partnerships. This approach allows AI companies themselves, plus other stakeholders and experts outside the intelligence community, to have a participatory role in testing and oversight of new models.

Yet Congress is sharply divided, and the upcoming midterm elections could alter the balance of power. Competing bills are already in the mix on Capitol Hill, with the leading piece of draft legislation, the bipartisan American Leadership in AI Act, hinging on outcomes in the rat’s nest of congressional politics — ranging from Louisiana Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson’s unwillingness to reauthorize the House AI Task Force to rank-and-file Democrats’ unfavorable disposition toward the draft bill.

Can both houses of Congress come to an agreement on AI model development as well as testing? One that Trump won’t veto? Probably not, but with anti-AI sentiment running hotter and hotter across the populist (and opportunist) wings of both parties, principled members and ambitious members alike are all but guaranteed to shoot their shot before November.

That means Americans won’t be looking to their elected representatives for clarity on AI.

The doomer delusion ArtMarie via iStock/Getty Images

And Pope Leo XIV, of course, has his landmark encyclical out there, insisting — along with many other Christians — that no law or regulation or basket of rules is enough to enable anyone, even the United States government, to get the kind of grip on AI that will ensure our sacred human being is no worse for wear.

But there’s no indication that America’s Christians, much less the world’s, are poised to throw down their doctrinal and ecclesiological differences and line up shoulder to shoulder with the pope’s presentation of things — or with the pope as a singular planetary spiritual authority on all matters AI and tech.

That means neither our leading political power players nor our leading spiritual authority figures will give Americans the kind of overall guidance they increasingly seem to crave.

Perhaps, however, we should all recognize that’s actually for the best, because the essence of the problem concerning AI is its risk, not of wiping out the human race, but of emptying the human race of all power and authority except for a tiny cyborg elite, one hell-bent on remaking all God’s creation, every single one of us included, in their monomaniacal image.

Paradoxically, responding to this risk by maximizing tech hate and consolidating all tech hatred into as tiny and powerful an elite as possible dramatically increases the risk of both wiping out the human race and deepening the would-be cyborg elite’s conviction that if they don’t achieve a radical and irreversible break with all to ever come before them, then they’ll meet a fate worse than death.

Back on our feet and back in charge

Given the dangers of over-centralized AI oversight on one hand and a regulatory war of all against all on the other, now is a good time to ask whether Bitcoin can offer ordinary people a more balanced, distributed, and practical path forward.

For all the noise and blather in the fractured crypto world, the case for Bitcoin in the AI age is simple: If we are not going to dismantle these machines — and if people will keep building more powerful ones — can we direct them toward anything that preserves rather than diminishes our human dignity?

The answer is obviously yes, but the combination of massive fear over techno-dystopia and massive resistance to “organized religion” leads many to paint themselves into a paralyzing psychological corner where no answer seems plausible or effective.

That’s a shame. Bitcoin is sitting right there, an advanced, mature technology that allows people with a minimum of new information or expertise to start creating and growing markets and institutions that benefit and protect themselves and their friends, families, and parishes, without having to rely on superintelligent machines or government financial systems.

Given that superintelligent machines and government financial systems have a clear logical and practical tendency to converge, becoming one system very well suited to enforcing a single, uniform, and servile existence worldwide, it would seem fairly urgent for people to consider the benefits of taking a few steps outside their zone of comfort or self-disempowerment and start to use Bitcoin at least a little with those they care about most.

That’s why I continue to offer my book on our tech reckoning, "Human Forever," only in Bitcoin. Piling up the digital currency and waiting for Nirvana just isn’t going to cut it, whether we face a societal collapse scenario, an age of mandatory pleasure and plenty, or a mutant future that somehow combines both into one waking phantasmagoria. Using Bitcoin needs to happen well beyond the realm of books, obviously. But being a writer, well — I’m putting my money where my mouth is.

Is it enough to solve all our problems, with our machines and with one another? Obviously, again, no. But it just might fix our attention on how we can preserve human ways of life that open the way not just to solutions, but to salvation.

After fierce debate, Trump opts for federal controls in AI development

AI companies have largely developed their chatbots with very little government regulation, all in an effort to beat China to artificial general intelligence. However, as these services exploit users’ mental health, enable new devastating cybersecurity threats, and arm the U.S. military with advanced capabilities, the Trump administration recently proposed federal regulation to keep the bots in check. Now, President Donald Trump wants to take government oversight a step further by invoking the power to review AI models before they’re released to the public through an executive order that was signed this week.

President Trump has mostly maintained a hands-off approach to AI regulation, bucking attempts at state-level bills to curb development in favor of a centralized federal mandate. There are clear pros and cons to Trump’s National AI Legislative Framework, but it provides a starting point for standardizing an industry where Trump has dragged his feet.

This is why the latest reports of added AI oversight, directly from the U.S. government, come as a surprise, given Trump’s previous stance. If signed, the executive order would mark a sea change within the Trump administration, signaling that AI needs direct government intervention to protect the public from potentially dangerous models.

The question is, why?

This move raises the question: How much AI regulation is too much regulation?

Trump’s decision came after Anthropic — the same company that landed on the military’s supply chain risk list — unveiled a new AI model that was purportedly too dangerous to release to the public. Labeled as Mythos under Project Glasswing, the new model excels at leveraging computer hacking and cybersecurity exploits. In other words, it’s really good at breaking the security measures of critical digital products and services, including operating systems and internet browsers.

If left in the wrong hands, Mythos could pose a huge risk to anything and everything connected to the internet — personal devices, school computers, government systems, banking platforms, and even critical infrastructure like power grids, traffic systems, and more.

Instead of allowing the public to access Mythos outright, Anthropic opted to provide the model strictly to Big Tech companies to help them find security holes in their products before a competing AI platform on the same level as Mythos reaches public status. The goal is to patch these bugs before they are exploitable by hackers using other AI platforms. So far, Mythos has poked holes in Apple’s highly secure MacOS platform and Mozilla’s privacy-focused Firefox browser. Unfortunately, while Mythos is good at finding problems, it’s bad at patching them, with recent reports noting that Mythos can further break software, even when trying to fix it.

Not to be outdone, OpenAI also claims to have a model — GPT-Rosalind — that’s too powerful for public release, this time in the sector of life sciences and molecular biology. Instead of launching Rosalind broadly, the company is offering it to researchers and scientists only.

So far, Anthropic and OpenAI have been socially responsible with their models by self-limiting access, but there’s no mandate to enforce these restrictions. President Trump’s executive order aims to eliminate any leeway and prevent truly dangerous AI models from leaking into the mainstream.

BasSlabbers/Getty Images

This move raises the question: How much AI regulation is too much regulation, and what are the ramifications of government overreach on access to the most advanced technology known to mankind? Some view these bills and mandates as a danger to free speech. Others see it as a government power grab meant to control device, internet, and AI access. I’m somewhere in the middle — the government should prevent AI companies from outright harming the people while also keeping the people’s rights and freedoms intact.

Unfortunately, even if the Trump administration has the best intentions with its AI executive order, who’s to say that the next administration will be so benevolent? Direct government intervention over AI models gives the left the precedent they need to overtly regulate and even manipulate AI the next time they take power. Imagine a future where the left blocks AI models on the grounds of “misinformation” and “disinformation” for sharing facts that don’t align with their political views. It’s not like they didn’t try to wipe dissent from the internet before, and if given the chance, they’ll do it again.

Luckily, the left might not get that opportunity. President Trump’s AI executive order was put on hold the day it was meant to be signed, though the unsigned version was leaked online for your viewing pleasure. Still, even with the order paused at the eleventh hour, its albatross looms as a possibility for future AI regulation that could either save the people from certain chatbot destruction or steal away our rights to access “unapproved” versions of these models that don’t comply with the party in power.

It’s past time for the government to rein in AI

Recently, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett revealed that the White House is contemplating issuing an executive order that would regulate and evaluate AI models similar to how the Food and Drug Administration evaluates new food and drugs.

This is a good idea that deserves serious consideration. Here is why.

Frontier models are automating complex, multistep cyberattacks at ‘machine speed.’

There are several major concerns with AI cybersecurity that haven’t been fully addressed.

There is the use of AI to attack a cyber asset (adversarial), and there are attacks on AI tools like chatbots and voicebots that AI can accomplish with amazing speed and cleverness (AI security).

There is the use of AI in phishing attacks, and there are deepfakes. All of these pose grave threats to American businesses and the federal government, with the potential to affect financial information, privacy, personal data, trade secrets, and national security.

The CEO of CrowdStrike recently sounded the alarm on this issue.

We’re seeing an explosion of new threat actors that may not have all the superior skills to figure this out, but they can use generative AI to advance their attacks very quickly and to make them scalable. There’s going to be a greater proliferation of adversaries than we’ve ever seen. And that is just going to grow, probably exponentially.

A recent report by the National Counterintelligence and Security Center highlighted findings from the AI Security Institute showing that frontier models are automating complex, multistep cyberattacks at “machine speed.”

With some models already matching the pace of human experts at a fraction of the cost, and other models and systems completely outpacing humans, the threat is accelerating due to both the expanding expertise of humans and the expanding capabilities of the AI models, as recently announced by Anthropic about its latest models’ ability to find vulnerabilities in “well-tested” systems.

Another report by ReliaQuest described how a new malware strain called “DeepLoad” can use AI-enabled obfuscation to bypass traditional static defenses in enterprise environments.

These kinds of reports are useful, but it is difficult for us mere humans to keep up with the new daily threats. We need a machine-readable database, much like the computer virus databases that have existed for decades.

The great variety of threats that are invented on a daily basis is extremely concerning. While the Open Worldwide Application Security Project AI Top 10 list is a useful start, it is far from what today’s systems need to address emerging threats.

Our federal government must prioritize a framework solution immediately.

The technology industry has databases of cyber threats, but we also need to share information on how to mitigate them. This can be deeply technical and require specialized knowledge, not just of large language models but of other complicated technologies like audio signal processing.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a non-regulatory federal agency within the Department of Commerce, has been a leader in providing recommendations for responsible AI; however, it needs greater enforcement authority.

Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Governments are usually slow to update anything, as they should be. Legislative branches are even slower. Congress should not be writing detailed technical metrics and methodologies for cybersecurity.

A solution is that Congress should empower a regulatory agency to monitor and enforce AI safety standards. A somewhat similar example is the FDA, which protects public health by ensuring the safety and security of food, drugs, biological products, and medical devices. It regulates products by reviewing research and conducting inspections.

What Congress should do is address the need for an AI cybersecurity framework by statutorily tasking NIST with creating and managing a centralized AI cybersecurity threat database to which all software vendors can (and should) submit new threats.

While NIST would be a great place to centralize communications of the resources, it is the private sector that will provide most of the intelligence around what the threats are and how to mitigate them.

After all, NIST is already mandated to provide similar resources as part of the Secure Software Development Framework under federal cybersecurity policy and Executive Order 14028, and through the National Vulnerability Database.

We need a framework that not only keeps up with attacks, but is ahead of the antagonists in the AI war, no matter who they are or what their intentions may be. A NIST-led national framework would ensure that Americans, businesses, and the federal government can be protected from the lightning-fast, ever-advancing cybersecurity threats.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

Trump Goes All In On Regime Change In Cuba

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DEI went into hiding — but remains as dangerous as ever

Between January 2023 and May 2025, Fortune 100 companies reduced their use of the term "DEI" by 98%, according to an analysis by Gravity Research.

Within weeks of President Trump's executive order targeting federal DEI initiatives, major corporations including McDonald's, Walmart, and Target announced they were ending DEI programs.

Conservatives celebrated as one company after another backed away from the acronym that had dominated (and in many cases terrified) corporate America for years.

That celebration was premature.

The goal is no longer to showcase diversity initiatives. The goal is to make those initiatives invisible and permanent.

DEI is far from dead. According to “inclusion consultant” Lily Zheng, its disguise is now called FAIR: Fairness, Access, Inclusion, and Representation. "It's not just a communications rebrand," Zheng recently told Time magazine. "It's not just that we're avoiding the letters DEI and trying to replace it with FAIR. It's that the work itself is evolving."

What Zheng calls "legacy DEI" focused on visible programs like heritage months, diversity training sessions, and demographic targets. These programs were public-facing, easy to identify, and therefore vulnerable to political pressure. The new approach abandons surface visibility in favor of work to change what Zheng calls "systems."

Instead of counting the number of women or people of color in leadership positions, FAIR focuses on changing institutional systems. Instead of heritage celebrations, FAIR embeds what it calls "inclusion" into hiring algorithms, promotion processes, and organizational structures.

The goal is no longer to showcase diversity initiatives. The goal is to make those initiatives invisible and permanent.

Progressives adapted after losing Virginia elections in 2021. Teachers' unions suffered a historic defeat. Rather than retreat, Data for Progress and similar groups spent millions analyzing voter habits and anxieties, then redesigned their campaign around different messaging. By 2023, Democrats won nearly every close Virginia race.

Progressives don't abandon goals when challenged. They simply adapt their methods. Similarly, when conservatives successfully challenged outrageously unconstitutional explicit DEI programs, the machinery wasn't dismantled. It burrowed deeper into institutional foundations, where it became harder to identify and harder to remove.

J. David Ake/Getty Images

Companies dropped "DEI" and adopted phrases like "universal fairness," "algorithmic bias mitigation," and "inclusion by design." The framing shifted from blatant identity-based preferences to much more subtle process-based interventions.

In my book, "The Political Vise," I describe group identity politics as organizing around grievance rather than achievement. This fact explains why DEI programs can never declare victory and dissolve. If equity were achieved, the machinery would become unnecessary. The system requires permanent grievance to justify permanent intervention.

Legacy DEI focused on representation metrics that could theoretically be satisfied. FAIR abandons those metrics in favor of systemic analysis that can never be completed.

There are always more systems to audit, more processes to redesign, more barriers to identify, and more marginalized people to uplift. A company can cancel a heritage month event, but it cannot skip the algorithmic audit hardwired into its hiring platform.

President Trump's executive order triggered the strategic retreat. The grievance lobby, however, wasn’t giving up without a fight. Its members demanded that companies and public institutions find other ways to keep DEI alive. By January 2026, when Zheng described the FAIR framework to Time magazine, the evolution was complete.

Trump’s March 2026 executive order requiring federal contractors to certify that they do not engage in discriminatory activities based on race or ethnicity suggests the Trump administration recognizes the evasion.

The order notes that "some entities continue to engage in DEI activities and often attempt to conceal their efforts." But just prohibiting "disparate treatment based on race or ethnicity" can't root out systems-based approaches that claim to focus on universal fairness while pursuing the same demographic outcomes through different methods.

Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

DEI under any name serves the larger goal of institutionalizing learned helplessness. It teaches that your struggles result from discriminatory systems rather than personal choices, that flourishing depends more on institutional intervention than individual effort. Worst of all, it teaches dependence. And a lot of progressives are deeply invested in maintaining that dependence.

Eliminating DEI departments and scrubbing corporate websites of diversity language are satisfying, but not final a victory, not when the actual work of grievance culture continues under different names.

With the grievance machinery adopting ever more subtle disguises, the fight to defend merit requires more shrewdness and patience than ever before. We must ask direct questions.

When companies rebrand DEI programs as "universal fairness" initiatives, we must demand to see the metrics. When they tout "algorithmic bias audits," ask what disparities trigger intervention — and what outcomes those interventions produce.

The left hid the machinery underground because the surface became too costly to defend. It is critically important to drag DEI back into the light and destroy it once and for all.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolicy and made available via RealClearWire.

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House Republicans, Weaponization Victims Make The Case For Repealing The FACE Act

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Jon Stewart to Trump: 'You did a good thing' on veteran PTSD treatments

Jon Stewart routinely derides President Donald Trump on his Comedy Central infotainment show. This week, however, the cynical liberal found himself reluctantly celebrating the president over a new mental health initiative that could greatly impact afflicted veterans.

Trump signed an executive order on Saturday aimed at accelerating research and removing barriers to psychedelic drugs — including hallucinogenic ibogaine compounds, psilocybin, and LSD — as potential treatments for serious mental illnesses, including PTSD and depression.

'Credit where credit is due.'

In addition to tasking Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary with reducing product application review times for psychedelic drugs that have received breakthrough therapy designations for treating mental illnesses, Trump ordered the FDA and Drug Enforcement Agency to create a pathway for eligible patients to access investigational psychedelic drugs.

Per the order, the Department of Health and Human Services and the FDA must also work with the Department of Veterans Affairs and the private sector "to increase clinical trial participation, data sharing, and real-world evidence generation regarding psychedelic drugs, and shall prioritize drugs that have received a Breakthrough Therapy designation." Fifty million dollars will also be provided for state-level research into ibogaine.

The White House noted in a fact sheet that over 14 million American adults suffer from a serious mental illness; suicide rates remain alarmingly high; and the suicide rate among veterans is more than double that of the nonveteran adult population.

Jim WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

Afforded an opportunity to speak at the signing ceremony on Saturday, podcaster Joe Rogan revealed that the ball got rolling on the executive order after he "sent President Donald Trump some information" about ibogaine.

Trump confirmed the genesis of the initiative, noting that Rogan "wrote me a little note about this, and I had it checked out. I didn't just do it. ... I went to [HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] and [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz] and went to some of the people that work for you, real pros, and everybody came back with the same answer."

"Everybody thought it was incredible, and I told Bobby, I said, 'Bobby, let's just do it, and get Oz involved," added Trump.

The president noted at the EO signing that "these experimental treatments have shown life-changing potential for those suffering from severe mental illness and depression, including our cherished veterans."

On the April 20 episode of his show, Jon Stewart alerted his liberal audience that he wanted to "give credit where credit is due. We don't, obviously, often do this."

"The president did a solid over the weekend," said Stewart. "President Trump signed an executive order in front of his fraternity brothers fast-tracking the FDA process for novel psychedelic drug treatments for veterans suffering from all forms of PTSD and other psychiatric conditions, including addiction."

After playing tape from the EO signing and reflexively attacking the president over his unscripted remarks, Stewart stopped himself and said, "I'm sorry. I'm falling into old habits. It's good. You did a good thing. I'm nitpicking. I apologize."

Stewart noted further, "A lot of the people are going to get the help they need."

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Ain’t no scam: Bitcoin fixes the looming AI oversight fiasco

Back on our feet and back in charge

After fierce debate, Trump opts for federal controls in AI development

It’s past time for the government to rein in AI

Trump Goes All In On Regime Change In Cuba

Here’s How Trump Should Let Middle-Class Americans In On The Private Equity Bonanza

House Republicans, Weaponization Victims Make The Case For Repealing The FACE Act

Jon Stewart to Trump: 'You did a good thing' on veteran PTSD treatments

Blaze News investigates: Why are Islamists targeting Catholic priests?

Democrats Will Gladly Trash The Economy To Put A DEI Hire On The Federal Reserve Board

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Back on our feet and back in charge

We’ll keep you informed with top stories for conservatives who want to become informed decision makers.