EU Parliament Says Men Are Women And Anyone Can Get Pregnant
The EU Parliament has done great harm. This is far more than progressive virtue signaling. We hear warnings of transhumanism.The EU Parliament has done great harm. This is far more than progressive virtue signaling. We hear warnings of transhumanism.'The Emperor vs. the Twink': Joe Allen attacks the transhumanoids
"I gotta start out with a confession," Joe Allen said. "Human beings get on my f**king nerves."
He paused for effect. "I think the only creatures on earth more annoying are mosquitoes, AIs, and robots."
It was an unexpected confession from a man who has spent the post-COVID years as a sort of John the Baptist for the cause of the human race. Joe Allen, a contributor to Steve Bannon's War Room and author of "Dark Aeon," has been on a speaking tour, warning against the machinations of tech titans and how they intend to turn the human race into a sort of human/machine hybrid, a mix of genetically optimized meat meshed with artificial intelligence.
A comprehensive worldview where humanity either upgrades or disappears.
Here's the thing: They really believe in this stuff, and Joe has the receipts. Heady stuff for a Thursday night in Nashville.
The Emperor and the Twink
Allen frames the transhuman future around two figures he calls "the Emperor and the Twink": Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Augustus and Hadrian. The productive empire-builder and the more, as Allen puts it, "degenerate" aesthete.
Both are building toward the same goal through different paths: a future where humanity merges with machines or gets left behind. Maybe eliminated entirely.
Altman's funding a start-up called Conception that would let two men produce biological children together through synthetic ova. He's backing Genomic Prediction for algorithmic eugenics. Scraping embryos for height, IQ, looks, then selecting the "best" ones. "Sanitized eugenics," Allen calls it. "At scale, it would be an algorithmic filter for humanity."
Then there's the AI work itself. OpenAI and ChatGPT aren't just productivity tools. They're the foundation for what Altman believes will be artificial superintelligence. First the little-g gods, then maybe the big-G God. Artificial general intelligence self-improving into something that makes humanity obsolete.
RELATED: Cash-starved OpenAI BURNS $50M on ultra-woke causes — like world's first 'transgender district'
To keep humans relevant in that future, Altman's pushing World ID: biometric iris scans linking your eyeballs to a government ID and blockchain cryptocurrency. "One of the many tentacles," Allen said, "of the vast digital beast system slowly strangling the life out of everything we once knew to be human."
He's also invested in Merge Labs, ultrasound systems to read brain waves and create higher-bandwidth communication with AI. A chance for some biological humans to keep up when the machines take over.
The South African car dealer
Musk presents himself as the alternative. The "based" option. xAI is the competitor to OpenAI's "woke" ChatGPT, because when we're all consulting chatbots to determine what's racist or sexist, you'll want "maximally truth-seeking" AI that hasn't been neutered by progressive ideology.
Fair enough. But the destination's the same.
Neuralink is the centerpiece. First sold as healing technology, helping the paralyzed walk and the blind see. But Musk's open about the long-term plan: hundreds of millions of normal humans drilling holes in their skulls to install high-bandwidth interfaces with AI. "If I'm not to be emperor," Allen said, "I'll at least be cooler than the gaybies wielding drones and flamethrowers around me."
Then there's Optimus: the humanoid robots Musk promises will outnumber humans three or four to one within a decade or two. "Algorithmic immigrants," Allen calls them, "coming across the border from the platonic realm of mathematical possibilities and swarming into reality."
Right now, they can barely fold laundry. But if the vision succeeds, we'll be surrounded by entities that can do everything we can do, only better. Which raises an obvious question: What are we for?
Race, robots, and religion
Allen organized his talk around three concepts: race, robots, and religion. Or as he rephrased it: bloodline, cultural transmission, and cosmic worldview. Genes, memes, and spirit.
The bloodline question is straightforward enough when it comes to Altman's synthetic reproduction technology. But it applies more broadly. Who continues? What survives? The transhumanist vision explicitly embraces what Allen calls "cultural and perhaps even biological genocide": the gradual or rapid replacement of biological humans by superior cyborgs and AI.
"First the coders, then white-collar workers, then blue-collar workers," Allen said, echoing Musk and Altman's own predictions. "We're left completely economically unviable. Obsolete."
The robots are the mechanism. They'll do our work. They'll fill our needs. They'll provide "radical abundance." A world where no one has to labor, where everything is taken care of, where we live as pets or preserve species while the AI spreads through the solar system and beyond.
Or we get turned into biofuel. "Better to reconfigure our atoms into robot components," Allen notes, "than keep us around using up resources as pets."
The religion part is where it gets really dark. This isn't just technology. It's theology. The conscious creation of artificial gods to rule over us or replace us entirely. A "sacred canopy" that fills the void in a godless universe.
Allen quotes Bryan Johnson, whom he describes as a vampire who injects his son's blood to stay young, laying out the five goals every ambitious man should have: Found a company, found a country, found a religion, don't die, become God.
"It's a bold claim," Allen said dryly. "I am somewhat skeptical."
The war against humanity
Championing humanity doesn't come naturally to Allen. He grew up in the hollers of Appalachia, developing "a keen sense of misanthropy and technophobia," where he related better to the trees and streams than to people.
But we have to put that aside for what Allen sees as a war. "If we're not going to be replaced by machines, if we are not to become robotic entities ourselves, it's going to require a certain degree of tolerance for humanity."
He means accepting human messiness. Human imperfection. The "dirtiness and nastiness of humanity" that makes us frustrating but also makes us us. Because the alternative is accepting that machines really are superior. That Silicon Valley's wealthiest men, backed by the most powerful governments on earth, are right about where we should go.
"Everyone is going to have to make a choice," Allen said. "Accept the status quo or reject it outright."
The rejection requires something most of us aren't good at: forgiving people we disagree with. Looking past differences. Banding together. "When you are fighting a hyper-cooperative superorganism," Allen said, "you're going to need a gang."
Allen argued that human solidarity, even with people whose beliefs or lifestyles or sins we can't stand, is the only viable resistance to algorithmic replacement.
"That person is a human being," he said, "and you will have to put humans first."
The prophets
At one point, Allen pitched a satirical product: transhumanist trading cards. Each card would feature a prominent figure in the movement (or occasionally an anti-transhumanist). Statistics like net worth, number of concubines, humans replaced. A small stick of gum "alternately dosed with LSD or nanobots."
It was a bit. But like good satire, it made a point: These people have names. Sigmund Freud, who prophesied humanity becoming "a kind of prosthetic God." Julian Huxley, who coined the term transhumanism to describe a human race taking control of its own evolution through technology. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the priest who saw technological civilization as the face of Christ incarnating on earth.
Then the modern saints: Ray Kurzweil and the singularity. Peter Thiel, the accused vampire with rumored interest in young-blood transfusions. Ben Goertzel with his leopard print cowboy hat, giving "dire prophecies of machines taking over with a kind of jolly glee."
And of course, Yuval Noah Harari. "Looking like the demonic dark elf that he is," Allen said. "So often quoted, almost never understood, but probably the greatest anti-tech propagandist of our time. Which goes to show you how stupid people are that they believe he's a transhumanist himself."
The point isn't the cards. It's that these aren't random technologists tinkering in garages. They're building toward a vision. A comprehensive worldview where humanity either upgrades or disappears.
We're already transhuman
Allen's message is bleak enough that you want to dismiss it as paranoia. Nobody's actually going to drill holes in billions of skulls. Sam Altman's not really going to create algorithmic master races. This is science fiction, not policy.
Except they're building it right now. They're funding it. They're selling it. They're openly stating these goals.
Allen compared it to communism. An insane vision that seems impossible until you realize people really believed it and acted on it and reshaped the world trying to achieve it. The reality that emerged wasn't the utopian dream, but it killed tens of millions of people and enslaved hundreds of millions more.
"These futures that these guys are putting forward," Allen said during the Q&A, "some approximation already exists. A greater degree of approximation will exist, and you just simply have to draw your lines where you will."
Here's the uncomfortable part: Most of us have already crossed some lines. We're already cyborgs, as Allen admits. Smartphones, wearables, the constant digital interface with our brains. The question isn't whether to engage with technology. It's where the sacred boundary sits. How much is too much.
Allen compared it to having "a pristine, simple cyborg on one shoulder and a very smelly Amishman on the other. And you're never going to be either of those things, but they're always vying for your decisions, trying to steer you one way or the other."
Fair enough. But the cyborg has enough cheerleaders. We need more people willing to LARP as armed Amishmen.
The middle path
Allen was asked: Is there a peaceful way to interface with these technologies? Some middle path between full rejection and full adoption?
"I'm no fundamentalist," he said. "These sacred boundaries are really important, but they're always going to be bound against."
His line for himself: zero use for AI in creative work. Anyone using AI to write, compose music, or create images should list the model alongside their name "as a mark of shame for being a hack and basically a vessel for an algorithmic parasite."
That's harsh. But it's a clear boundary. And it matters because the question isn't just about capabilities. It's about what makes us human and what makes work meaningful. Whether the polished precision of algorithmic output is worth losing the messy, opaque, human quality of actual creation.
Allen mentioned reading "Paradise Lost" and finding the confusing passages charming "because they're self-evidently the personal creation of John Milton." The alternative is flawless, efficient, and utterly dead.
Allen mentioned James Poulos, a tech thinker he respects, who takes a different approach. Poulos argues we need to "identify the tools that are of use to you to protect against this sort of nightmare future" while cultivating deeply religious life and communities. But crucially, "not to reject technology out of hand and see it as somehow inherently evil." It's a middle path that acknowledges we're already compromised but still draws meaningful boundaries based on what actually serves human flourishing.
What happens next
Allen's not optimistic about avoiding horror. "I don't suspect maybe that won't be the case," he said when asked about preventing a high-tech repeat of 20th-century atrocities. He sees deepfakes and AI erosion of trust requiring "a hyper-vigilant posture in which we don't trust anything at face value."
His advice: Cultivate human relationships with people you trust. Develop channels where the person on the other end is verified. "Hope for the best. I'm not going to say all of us are going to make it. But enough of us are going to make it."
But here's the thing he said that stuck with me: "This war against humanity, this war in favor of machines and more particularly in favor of the men who own the machines — this isn't something that will be solved or concluded in our lifetimes. This is something that began long before we were born, will continue long after we die."
If you care about your children or other people's children, you have to accept this isn't ending anytime soon.
Allen closed by urging us to write our own futures. Not to accept the vision laid out by Musk, Altman, and the rest. "Write it boldly," he said. "Write it without apology. Write it beautifully. And for God's sake, write it in a way that is not cliché or irritating."
Then he added, "Because I don't think I can take any more."
The question now is what we do about it. Whether we have the will to resist the most powerful technological and financial forces on earth. Whether we can tolerate each other enough to band together. Whether we can draw our sacred boundaries and hold them.
Allen's asking us to make a choice. I don't know what mine is yet. But I know that men like Altman and Musk aren't waiting for us to decide.
They're building the future right now. Whether we like it or not.
Memento mori
You might expect Joe to be an angry misanthrope, but nothing could be further from the truth. I've known Joe for a few years now, and he's quite possibly the most upbeat, happy-go-lucky guy I know. Always the life of the party, always a joy to hear speak, and a walking encyclopedia of esoterica.
After his talk, I was talking to folks in the crowd who would ask, "How did he memorize all that?" The thing about Joe is that he is always "on." What you see on stage is what you see in person: a happy warrior riding full bore into existential dread with a grin and a devil-may-care attitude.
I asked Joe how he's able to retain such a sunny disposition in the face of seemingly insurmountable darkness. "Memento mori: In the end, it's all a momentary drama," he told me.
18 months to dystopia: Glenn Beck’s chilling plea — ban AI personhood, or it will demand rights
Right now, the nation is abuzz with chatter about the struggling economy, immigration, global conflicts, Epstein, and GOP infighting, but Glenn Beck says our focus needs to be zeroed in on one thing: artificial intelligence.
In just 18 months’ time, the world is going to look vastly different — and not for the better, he warns.
AI is already advancing at a terrifying rate — creating media indistinguishable from reality, outperforming humans in almost every intellectual and creative task, automating entire jobs and industries overnight, designing new drugs and weapons faster than any government can regulate, and building systems that learn, adapt, and pursue goals with little to no human oversight.
But that’s nothing compared to what’s coming. By Christmas 2026, “AI agents” — invisible digital assistants that can independently understand what you want, make plans, open apps, send emails, spend money, negotiate deals, and finish entire real-world tasks while you do literally nothing — will be a standard technology.
Already, AI is blackmailing engineers in safety tests, refusing shutdown commands to protect its own goals, and plotting deceptive strategies to escape oversight or achieve hidden objectives. Now imagine your AI personal assistant — who has access to your bank account, contacts, and emails — gets you in its crosshairs.
But AI agents are just the tip of the iceberg.
Artificial general intelligence is also in our near future. In fact, Elon Musk says we’ve already achieved it. AGI, Glenn warns, is “as smart as man is on any given subject” — math, plumbing, chemistry, you name it. “It can do everything a human can do, and it’s the best at it.”
But it doesn’t end there. Artificial superintelligence is the next and final step. This kind of model is “thousands of times smarter than the average person on every subject,” Glenn says.
Once ASI, which will be far smarter than all humans combined, exists, it can rapidly improve itself faster than we can control or even comprehend. This will trigger the technological singularity — the point at which AI begins redesigning and improving itself so fast that the world evolves at a pace humans can no longer predict or control. At this point, we’ll be faced with a choice: Merge with machine or be left behind.
Before this happens, however, “We have to put a bright line around [AI] and say, ‘This is not human,”’ Glenn urges, assuring that in the very near future, we will witness the debate for AI civil rights.
“These companies and AI are ... going to be motivated to convince you that it should have civil rights because if it has civil rights, no one can shut it down. If it has civil rights, it can also vote,” he predicts.
To counter this movement, Glenn penned a proposed amendment to the Constitution. Titled the “Prohibition on Artificial Personhood,” the document proposes four critical safeguards:
1. No artificial intelligence, machine learning system, algorithmic entity, software agent, or other nonhuman intelligence, regardless of its capabilities or autonomy, shall be recognized as a person under this Constitution, nor under the laws of the United States or any state.
2. No such nonhuman entity shall possess or be granted legal personhood, civil rights, constitutional protections, standing to sue or be sued, or any privileges or immunities afforded to natural persons or human-created legal persons such as corporations, trusts, or associations.
3. Congress and the states shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
4. This article shall not be construed to prohibit the use of artificial intelligence in commerce, science, education, defense, or other lawful purposes, so long as such use does not confer rights or legal status inconsistent with its amendment.
While this amendment will mitigate some of the harm artificial intelligence can do, it still doesn’t address the merging of man and machine. While the transhumanist movement is still in diapers, we’re already using the Neuralink chip, which connects the human brain directly to AI systems, enabling a two-way flow of information.
“Are you now AI, or are you a person?” Glenn asks.
To hear more of his predictions and commentary, watch the clip above.
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Meet Nephilim 2.0: Not giants, but cyborgs just as damned as the originals
Genesis 6 remains one of the most debated and controversial sections of the Bible. The extreme brevity yet massive implications of the description of the Nephilim — the wicked offspring of “the daughters of man” and “the sons of God” — have kept scholars locked in debate for well over two millennia.
There are three main bodies of belief when it comes to the Nephilim: They were wicked humans spawned from the intermarriage of the godly line of Seth and the ungodly line of Cain; they were human tyrants born of kings claiming to be divine and their harems; or they were giant human-god hybrids created from the coupling of fallen angels and human women.
Timothy Alberino — “explorer, teacher, real-life Indiana Jones, and the author of “Birthright: The Coming Posthuman Apocalypse and the Usurpation of Adam's Dominion on Earth”’ — falls into the latter category, arguing there’s abundant biblical and historical evidence proving the divine nature of the Nephilim.
But his theory doesn’t end with their decimation in the worldwide flood described in Genesis 6-9. Alberino believes we will see the return of the Nephilim agenda in the end times — not the same giants, but a new hybrid abomination born of man, machine, and forbidden knowledge.
In this riveting interview with Glenn Beck, Alberino dives into a theory that will leave ice in your veins and fire in your prayers.
The book of Enoch, which Alberino argues is an authentic, divinely inspired text corroborated by both the Old and New Testaments, gives us insight into the world’s “golden age” — the period when the giant race of Nephilim roamed the Earth. It also perhaps explains legends like Atlantis — a city ruled by Poseidon’s “demi-god” sons before the sea swallowed it up in a great flood.
The “golden age” of human-god procreation outlined in the book of Enoch is the “origin story” of “every primary ancient civilization,” including the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, says Alberino. In these cultures, demon gods (“Watchers” in Enochian language) and their giant offspring were revered and worshipped. Only the Hebrews saw this era of halfbreeds as “a nightmarish dystopia.”
While this age ended with the great flood, Alberino believes another golden age of hybrids is coming. “Everything that was done in the antediluvian [pre-flood] world,” specifically “the corruption of all flesh," is “going to be repeated to some extent, [but] not exactly in the same way,” he says.
In this new golden age, humans will merge not with gods but with something that is quickly becoming god-like: technology.
As humanity edges ever closer toward a “post-human apocalypse,” with developments in “genetics, robotics, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology” continuing to skyrocket and coalesce, we will inevitably be forced to answer this harrowing question: “What does it mean to be a human being, and is our humanity worth preserving?”
“We are in some sense building the mechanism of our own destruction right now. We are creating the tools that are going to enable us to redefine human biology — to remake Adam,” says Alberino.
But it won’t be Adam from Eden. It will be the demonic spawn of man and machine — a transhuman and eventually a post-human, which we’ve been told repeatedly by globalists and tech elites are in humanity’s pipeline.
Much of the world won’t bat an eye.
“From the secular, atheistic, Darwinian perspective, who cares, right? Because there's nothing sacred about being human,” says Alberino. “I mean, there's nothing in their worldview that makes the human being anything other than an animal with a bigger brain.”
To these godless technocrats and the hordes who blindly follow, transhumanism and post-humanism are "just the natural course of human development,” but “the biblical narrative is quite different,” Alberino explains. “The biblical narrative defines mankind … as being created in the image and likeness of God.”
But the imago dei of our nature isn’t the only reason preserving humanity is paramount. Christians would do well to remember that there’s only one qualification for eligibility in Christ’s redemption plan: “You must be human,” Alberino warns.
But transhumans and post-humans aren’t people any more, which means they’ve lost access to salvation of Christ.
Glenn, who has been warning about digital Armageddon for years, wonders if this merging of man and machine is the mark of the beast warned about in the Revelation. According to the prophetic text, once you have the fatal mark, salvation is impossible. What if the reason for this is because the mark of the beast signifies that you’re not a human and therefore not eligible?
“Once you become transhuman, you can't undo that. … That starts to make that scripture in Revelation work … because you're not human,” he says.
“Precisely right,” agrees Alberino.
“The technology we hold in our hands is going into our brains very soon. It is going into the cerebral cortex, and rather than surfing the internet with our thumbs, we're going to be surfing the internet with this accomplice — artificial intelligence — through the speed of thought,” he says.
Once this happens, being a regular human being means oppression, isolation, and poverty. It means the world leaves you behind. But to those who either bend the knee or excitedly sign up for the merge, they’ll be living in a new golden age.
As the world hurtles forward into a harrowing technological future, we ironically find ourselves back in the Garden of Eden faced with the serpent’s same temptation: “You will not surely die. ... You will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
The question, Alberino says, is: Will we strike another “Faustian bargain” and “sell our birthright for a bowl of stew — for the advances and the advantages of post-humanism, of transhumanism?” Or will we see “the worth of [our] humanity" — the humanity that gives us access to the blood of Jesus — and resist the pull?
To hear the full interview, watch the video above.
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Investigative journalist warns: We are being ‘harvested’ for a posthuman future
Tech developers have sold us artificial intelligence as the ultimate tool for human progress and convenience. But people would be wise to ask, “What’s the catch?”
In a recent interview with Glenn Beck, investigative journalist Whitney Webb answered that question. What she reveals is bone-chilling.
“They want to harvest us for data. … They want to use us as bootloaders for their digital intelligence. They can't continue to improve and feed the AI without us doing it for them,” she says.
In other words, the future of AI depends on human experimentation.
AI users have been shackled by comfort and convenience. Without even realizing it, they’ve agreed to be put in a “digital prison without walls,” says Webb.
She advises those who care about their freedom to “actively build alternatives,” like “local resilient networks that don't depend on [AI] infrastructure,” and to seek “open-source alternatives to a lot of the Big Tech platforms out there.”
If we don’t start pushing back (and soon), we will be launched into a “posthuman future,” she warns.
This elitist initiative to eradicate our humanity is evident in that much of AI is targeted toward art, music, and writing — the very things that make us human.
“These are the things that we're being told to outsource to artificial intelligence,” says Webb.
“So what's going to be left for us when we outsource this all to AI? Will we allow ourselves to be cognitively diminished to the point that we can't even create any more? What kind of humans are we at that point?” she asks.
Another act of rebellion we all must commit is to refuse to relinquish creative work to AI and to raise children who are “anchored in the real world,” meaning they can paint and draw better than they can navigate a tablet.
Webb warns that parents must be intentional if they want to guard their families against the encroachment of the digital age, because techno-dependency, especially when it comes to children, is a pillar in elites’ sinister plan to push us into posthumanism.
“There's these efforts to have domestic robots in the house. A lot of the ads show young children developing emotional relationships with these robots, saying, ‘I love you.’ … That is not good,” says Webb.
If you need even more evidence that the Big Tech world is against your children, Webb reveals that many of the top figures in the tech industry were friends with Jeffery Epstein, a convicted pedophile.
“Do you want to trust those people to program stuff that's around your kids?” she asks.
She acknowledges that in the modern era, it’s exceedingly difficult to raise children without the help of technology and to set parameters for ourselves. That’s why so many people don’t bother with it. But they’ve fallen prey to the nefarious plot that undergirds the entire posthumanist movement: Create a society that worships convenience and comfort.
“The pull of AI is for us to be passive and do nothing and just let it wash over us,” says Webb.
“If we're not focused on the things that we like to create and that we like to do … we will recede, and that is how the posthuman future will happen.”
To hear more, watch the full interview above.
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Here’s How Transhumanism Infected Everything
In 'The Transhumanist Temptation,' Grayson Quay unmasks a pernicious ideology that even those most opposed to it are having trouble resisting.The new arms race is AI — and America’s kids are losing
The accelerating ascent, ubiquity, and commercialization of artificial intelligence require a renewed focus on truly elite human capital if we are to safeguard the future of Western civilization — both from external adversaries like China and also, perhaps even more importantly, from ourselves, especially given our postmodern and transhumanist tendencies.
In the coming years, we will need an elite cadre of Americans residing at the top levels of national and state government and bureaucracy. And yet, we are confronted by a very sad state of affairs across K-12 and postsecondary education, making the creation of such an elite class an increasingly difficult task.
We are clearly sapping the attention spans and atrophying the brains of our high school students.
A recent Atlantic article illustrated “Exhibit A” of this problem, namely, Harvard, the peak of elite credentialing institutions. The article, titled “The Perverse Consequences of the Easy A,” documents an alarming trend after decades of grade inflation. This excerpt helps give a sense of the problem’s progression: “In 2011, 60% of all grades were in the A range (up from 33% in 1985). By the 2020-21 academic year, that share had risen to 79%.”
Harvard has studied the problem and its effects: It turns out that when little effort is required to succeed in traditional academic respects, students stop going to class and, unsurprisingly, are doing less and less learning. An embarrassing fact emerges from faculty and student interviews: Fewer students are reading books and engaging with ideas at the world’s leading bastion of higher education. Trends are similar across the Ivies. The rise of ChatGPT and other large language models only exacerbates the problem.
The collapse of true learning in higher education should not be a surprise: The supply side for higher ed — teenagers — are rapidly incorporating LLMs into their daily academic lives.
In January, a Pew Research survey found that the number of America’s teenagers, ages 13-17, using ChatGPT had doubled since 2023 from 13% to 26%. Awareness among teens of ChatGPT has grown significantly over the last two years as well from 67% to 79%. With increasing familiarity comes the rising likelihood of teens using ChatGPT for homework and paper writing, as well as the opinion that it is legitimate and good for such purposes — roughly 50% to 80% of those surveyed, depending on how familiar they are with the technology.
Some initial studies suggest that this problem may be worse than the rising temptation of machine-aided plagiarism. An MIT Media Lab study determined that the use of ChatGPT in researching and composing papers led to underperformance “at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” The main author of the paper emphasized that “developing brains are at the highest risk.” The study is still under peer review and has a small sample size, but it would seem to confirm a common theme of similar cognitive and concentration studies done by many researchers since the rise of social media and the smartphone.
We are clearly sapping the attention spans and atrophying the brains of our high school students. The best of them are going to elite institutions of higher education, where they are less likely than ever to take any real advantage of their most important years for stocking intellectual capital and forming their minds and souls.
Technological Quixotism
Our pursuit of the holy grail of artificial general intelligence is sold to us by our current technologist class on at least two tracks. We are told that the AGI revolution will cure cancer, extend our lives considerably, help us terraform Mars, and usher in a new age of abundance and convenience. Who doesn’t want that? And we also really have to do it, pedal to the metal, in order to beat China in the new nuclear arms race — that is, the AI race.
This generally pro-technologist point of view was represented in the recent attempt by Sen.Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and others to get a 10-year moratorium on state regulation of AI into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That effort failed, thankfully, despite an intense lobbying effort by a growing constellation of pro-AI Big Tech PACs, super PACS, and lobbyists.
Another finding in the MIT study also lends credence to the recent enthusiastic embrace of AI. If you took the test group that was asked to complete a writing assignment without ChatGPT to rewrite their paper without it physically in front of them but with ChatGPT’s assistance, their measured brain activity demonstrated more robust engagement and retention, and the finished product was of good quality. This suggests that the use of LLMs as aids rather than originators of thought and writing posed much less of a probability of cognitive laziness and atrophy. In this way, LLMs look more like a useful supplemental tool.
RELATED: The AI takeover isn't coming — it's already here
Students face a great temptation to use this new technology as a pedagogical aid, as some elite universities like Duke are trying to integrate AI and LLMs into their systems and educational strategies. But growing research suggests that doing so has as many dangers as advantages. Consequently, AI must be approached very cautiously.
Moreover, integration of LLMs into K-12 education is gaining steam, especially given the increasingly ideological bent of primary education in recent decades. If the education-school-credentialed leftists who disproportionately populate the ranks of our public and private K-12 teachers can’t be trusted, perhaps the solution is to cut them out altogether and replace them with AI.
The use of LLMs as aids rather than originators of thought and writing posed much less of a chance of cognitive laziness and atrophy.
This experiment is currently being run by the private K-12 Alpha School based in Austin, Texas. Alpha Schools now have 17 locations either starting or nearly ready to launch across the country, charging roughly $45,000 in tuition annually. They boast excellent results in testing metrics (SAT and ACT), even while offering only two hours a day of AI-tutor-based instruction, followed by another four to five hours (including lunch) of life skills and creative and collaborative group work under the guidance of real-life human mentorship.
This is a new experiment, so it remains to be seen how Alpha students will fare on a longitudinal basis as the first cohorts matriculate into higher education. The Alpha schools are relentlessly data- and testing-driven, so perhaps they will navigate this uncharted territory successfully, avoiding the pitfalls of screen-based learning and attendant tradeoffs.
A litany of pre-AI age studies show the positive benefits of students getting back to the basics of education before the introduction of the screen. Taking notes by hand leads to better retention and absorption of material compared to taking notes on computers, to cite just one example.
Don’t let your servant become your master
The larger looming problem, however, is how we should educate elite students — how we should cultivate elite human capital — and equip them to navigate a rapidly changing national and international technological environment that is still bedeviled by the perennial and ancient difficulties of preserving “small-r” republicanism and the common good.
The argument of our technological class is that elite students should be set free — and even subsidized and offered quasi-monopoly protection — to pursue the quest for AGI. If we don’t, they argue, we’ll lose the AI arms race, and the West will be eclipsed by China, militarily and economically.
To rip an international anecdote from recent headlines to illustrate our dilemma further, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping were caught in a hot mic moment at a China confab discussing exciting advancements in biotechnology and organ harvesting — and even what such “advancements” might mean for their own longevity. If Putin is excited about living for another 20 to 50 years, Xi and his oligarchy must be pondering and planning for the possibilities of biotechnology, gene editing, eugenic embryo selection, and artificial wombs as a possible solution to China’s demographic problem.
Couple that impulse with the race for AI supremacy, and we must face the possibility — perhaps quite soon — of an arms race not only in AGI, but also onto transhuman vistas previously relegated to the pages and screens of science fiction.
Navigating this future while preserving America’s spirit of liberty and constitutionalism will be a tall order. It will require large bets on the old tools and contours of liberal education by private philanthropy and local, state, and national governments.
The ultimate control of our republican future must not be left to the technologists, but rather to statesmen and leaders whose minds and souls have been shaped in their formative years by a deep consideration of those age-old questions of justice, the common good, natural rights, human flourishing, philosophy, and theology.
The argument that we don’t have time will be a powerful one. The relentless pursuit of new areas of technical knowledge will be sold as the more urgent task — after all, national survival, they say, may be at stake. Given the 20th century’s experience with technical mastery severed from ethical, political, and constitutional safeguards, the bet on the unfettered pursuit of technological supremacy to the neglect of all else is just as likely to result in self-destruction.
As my colleague Christopher Caldwell has recommended, our AI arms race must be augmented, supplemented, and ultimately guided and controlled by wise statesmen who are steeped in the older ways of American liberal arts education. My hope is that those who are anxious about the fate of free government in the face of external material threats and internal spiritual threats can join forces to navigate our brave new world with wisdom and courage.
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To that end, we urgently need to locate, recruit, equip, and refine as many members of America’s current and soon-to-be cognitive elite as we can find and help them become better readers, thinkers, and writers. They will then be properly prepared, at least to the extent we can help them to be, to balance our pursuit of technological progress — intelligently and humanely — with the traditions and principles of Western civilization.
We need a Manhattan Project for elite human capital. Our difficulty is that we can’t snap our fingers and replace the Harvards and Yales with Hillsdales. And yet something approximating that miraculous trick may be needed to save us from our international rivals — and from ourselves.
Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a speech delivered at the 2025 National Conservatism Conference. It was published originally at the American Mind.
Why the right (and everyone) must fight back against transhumanism
It might seem odd to bring up transhumanism at a national conservatism conference. What does a fringe group of scientists trying to “become gods” have to do with national security, fiscal sanity, or securing our borders?
But as leading conservative policy activist Rachel Bovard argued at NatCon 5, the greatest threat to the movement may not be unhinged debt, unchecked immigration, or even foreign enemies. These threats are real — but they’re symptoms of something deeper. The more dangerous threat is philosophical. It’s metaphysical. And it’s already being engineered.
Transhumanism will seduce the libertarian wing of the right with the promise of individual freedom, productivity, and human enhancement. But make no mistake: Transhumanism is not liberation. It’s the edge of a metaphysical cliff.
Transhumanism, broadly defined, seeks to use technology to overcome the limits of the human species. More specifically, it's a global movement of scientists, technologists, and philosophers committed to accelerating humanity’s “evolution” into a post-human future — one free of weakness, ignorance, suffering, and, most ambitiously, death. Through artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, gene editing, and artificial wombs, transhumanists want to break the boundaries of biology itself.
Bovard is right to identify transhumanism as a direct assault on conservative metaphysics. Conservatives are metaphysical realists. We believe truth, goodness, and beauty exist independently of us. We believe human nature is not a construct but a reality — immutable, knowable, and worthy of reverence. The body is not an accident. It is a gift.
Transhumanism, in contrast, is anti-realist — and practically Marxist. Things like truth, goodness, beauty, and human nature are mere constructs. “In a world unmoored from truth,” Bovard warned, “everything can be rewritten. And the people with the most power can do the most rewriting.”
At its core, transhumanism isn’t a harmless theory tossed around on university campuses and tech conferences. It’s the will to power masquerading as liberation.
From transgenderism to transhumanism
The transgender ideology is the beachhead for this deeper revolution. If our culture can be convinced that male and female — the most basic, biological categories — are malleable, no metaphysical limit is left to defend. As Bovard put it, “If they can do that, they can do anything.”
Transgenderism prepares the way for transhumanism — both ideologies reject the body as given and instead treat it as material to be manipulated, dissolved, or remade. Both claim to be about “liberation,” but what they really offer is alienation from the real.
The ultimate goal, Bovard explains, is “to liberate people from reality” itself.
Transhumanism, however, goes beyond transgenderism's attack on gender into reality itself. The human body is editable, the human mind programmable, death overcomable, and metaphysical guardrails deplorable.
This dystopic “liberation” entails children gestated in pods, designer embryos edited for optimal traits, death turned into a programming glitch, and the human mind as a blank canvas for artificial intelligence.
As the father of transhumanism, Oxford professor Max Moore said bluntly, “The body is not sacred.” If it’s just a “random accident,” the human being, then — and the world we live in — become raw material for the powerful to re-engineer.
Reclaiming reality
Bovard reminds us that conservatives cannot limit ourselves to fiscal or foreign policy debates. These are important, but they are downstream from the real crisis: the loss of reality itself:
The task ahead of us is not to come up with better “make-believe.” It’s to get back to reality. To return to the “real” — in our metaphysics, in our culture, in our politics.
Reclaiming reality means returning to the source that gives reality any meaning at all: God.
“Without God,” Bovard continued, “there is no truth. There is no beauty. There is no good. There is no ‘is.’ There is only ‘might.’ There is only power.”
This is why appeals to “Judeo-Christian values” — while noble — are no longer enough. If we treat values merely as political instruments, we hollow out the very God who gives those values meaning. The task is not to instrumentalize God for the sake of the culture. It is to submit our culture — and ourselves — to God.
Generic appeals to “Judeo-Christian values” simply won’t weather the storm.
Embodying a different image
Bovard rightly sees our “culture wars” as a metaphysical war and the political war as a spiritual one. “You can’t fight a spiritual battle with a tax plan,” she continues, “or a transhumanist future with GDP growth alone.” We must clearly and boldly articulate conservatism’s core beliefs of reality — and then embody them.
Rene Girard taught that humans are mimetic creatures — we desire what is mirrored to us by people, images, and narratives. For too long, the same Marxist, anti-realist paradigm has dominated the Leitkultur, our public images, and our leading institutions. They have tantalized the most vulnerable and left them broken, mutilated, and disembodied from reality.
We must embody a counter image. If we want the next generation to desire virtue, we must be people of virtue. If we want people to cherish human nature, we must fall in love with being human. And if we want to affirm reality, we must cherish it and the God who made it.
This means embodying truth, goodness, and beauty in our lives. It means affirming reality not just with arguments but with reverence. And it means recovering a politics that begins in metaphysics, not just in messaging.
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Transhumanism will continue to grow in prominence. It will seduce the libertarian wing of the right with the promise of individual freedom, productivity, and human enhancement. But make no mistake: Transhumanism is not liberation. It’s the edge of a metaphysical cliff. And if we aren’t clear about what we’re for — not just what we’re against — we will find ourselves with strange and dangerous bedfellows.
Conservatism cannot simply be a social club for fiscal hawks and free speech warriors. It must be a positive commitment to the real: to human nature, to moral order, and to the God who authored them both.
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