Dear Weekend Jolter,
AI development appears to have reached the phase where the industry’s Oppenheimers must contemplate the chain reaction their creation could set off that brings about humanity’s end.
But, on the bright side: It might not happen.
Little wonder that years of muttered warnings about AI’s potential have left voters unsettled. Those worries were given voice at the highest levels the past two weeks, as pronouncements from Anthropic World commanded the attention of everyone from its competitors to the president.
First, an Anthropic researcher resigned, dramatically announcing on X that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.” He added, “No other human activity poses this level of danger.”
Then came slightly more subdued warnings, from the AI titans themselves. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged AI development to slow down, calling for “third-party evaluators,” industry-set standards and “sensible” regulation, and global agreements. Competitors Sam Altman (OpenAI) and Elon Musk (SpaceXAI) agreed. President Trump responded by doubling down on AI development, mocking Amodei, and warning that the “SICK conspiracy” against AI and data centers only helps China.
This is a lot to sort through. NR’s editorial does so, and pushes back on the pushback:
It is, of course, entirely possible that researchers at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Grok are aware of troubling developments to which we are not privy. But we remain suspicious of early movers who call for government regulation. . . . The current leaders in the AI realm are in a highly advantageous position and would stand to improve that position were the government to entrench them as virtual utilities.
Further, our editorial argues that erring on the side of caution in the AI race means ensuring the U.S. stays in the lead: “Given the enthusiasm with which China rips off American intellectual property, there is no reason for anyone to believe that its leadership would respect an international slowdown pact or that it would hesitate to press its advantage once obtained.”
The most extreme doomer prophecies deserve extreme scrutiny. Rich Lowry notes the crucial factor that if AI “lacks physical agency,” it “could presumably be unplugged or contained.” Recall the end of The Mitchells vs. the Machines in which (spoilers ahead) the malevolent phone overlord is dispatched by a glass of water. Michael Brendan Dougherty is likewise skeptical of doomerism. Andrew Stuttaford cautions against “pacing” and/or “global governance”; Daniel Castro, against a Euro-style regulatory regime, or worse.
Outside of data centers’ water usage, however, there are many legitimate questions about how AI’s future helps or harms humanity. Joshua S. Treviño, in a thoughtful essay, explores the underlying concern that it “will only accelerate the diminishment of our way of life.” The risks of AI’s potential — whether “acting” on its own or directed by the hands of an adversary — are myriad. Jim Geraghty writes about the risk that AI could support the development of biological weapons. Autonomous operation of weapons could be catastrophic, Andy McCarthy explains. And the impact on education must be seriously considered. As Rich recently noted, teenage test scores are declining around the world, at a time of broad access to smartphones, social media, and AI. These can be educational tools, but they can also be a grave distraction from the learning process and present, in the case of AI, a false substitute for knowledge.
The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle reasonably writes that humans should address AI concerns by retaining control of the physical world, and limiting “AI access to any means of causing mass death: nuclear command and control, materials and equipment needed to make biological or chemical weapons, and critical water and power infrastructure.” That means cooling it on the robots, by the way.
In this frontier, issues of regulation and ethics and national security and human flourishing and even theology must be thought through carefully, and it would be optimal if someone with the capacity to lead that debate were president of the nation pioneering the tech. As an exercise, Jim imagines what a normal president would say, to help assure the nation and work through these existential questions. It might go something like this:
In recent days, several leaders in the industry have discussed a tentative agreement to slow down the pace of research into advanced artificial intelligence. In his essay, Amodei proposed third-party evaluators watching over companies’ cutting-edge AI research, to verify adherence to safety practices and commitments, and report incidents. He also urged the creation of national and international standards for safety. . . .
I understand how chilling it is to hear extremely wealthy guys out in Silicon Valley talk about their company’s products leading to the end of the world. But we have faced great threats before and great technological changes — the splitting of the atom, the widespread adoption of computers at work and in the home, the rise of the internet. We will face these challenges, and emerge stronger than before, once again.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Bo French proves that on social media, some people will defend anything: The Repulsive Online Attack on Indian Americans
A disastrous policy, back from the dead: Republicans Should Run Against Medicare for All
Just to reiterate, “this is no way to run a country”: Trump’s Reckless $5,000 ‘Dividend’
ARTICLES
John Yoo: The Case for Containment
David R. Osborne: Government Unions Are Making a Comeback — and Taxpayers Will Pay the Price
Marc Sarnoff: College Freshmen: If You Care About Justice, Beware the ‘Free Palestine’ Movement
Mark Schneider: Why Is New York Covering Up Test Scores?
John Gustavsson: The State Department Plan to Fund Europe’s Right Is a Mistake
Jim Geraghty: One Way or Another, Change Is Coming to Cuba
Eva Terry: AOC’s ‘Modern-Day Lynching’ Claim Is Built on Sand
Brittany Bernstein: Judge Refers Soros-Backed Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner to Justice Department
Dan McLaughlin: Heritage Americanism Is Massively Overrated and Counterproductive
Dan McLaughlin: The Senate Races Are Breaking Bad Already
Jeffrey Blehar: A Scorned Trump Gathers Bulldozers for the Kennedy Center
Ryan Ellis: The Memory Chip Crisis Washington Can’t Ignore
Will Swaim: Gavin Newsom Walks the AI Tightrope
Noah Rothman: Don Jr. Will Regret It
Jacob Eisler: What Our Society Would Lose If Lindsay Clancy Is Exonerated
CAPITAL MATTERS
John R. Puri reports from the Fed: At Last, the Fed Begins to Do Its Job
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Even if it’s not the season, Brian Allen’s got a Purim story, thanks to a new Boston show: Queen Esther and Rembrandt Rule in a Superb Show at the Gardner
Armond White puts a hex on this strange Hollywood brew: The Trite Alchemy of Practical Magic 2
FROM THE NEW, NOVEMBER 2026 ISSUE OF NR
Charles C. W. Cooke: Your Data Center Life
Noah Rothman: The Future of Woke
Dan McLaughlin: Nixon’s Not the One
Christine Rosen: When the Political Circus Stops Being Fun
Vahaken Mouradian: A Walk Through Manhattan’s Unofficial 9/11 Memorials
Philip Klein: Why Rocky Still Packs a Punch
Jeffrey Blehar: Red Harvest
NO EXCERPTS, NO PEACE
The new issue of NR is out, and you can dive in right here. On the cover, misfortune teller Noah Rothman gazes into the future of woke:
The mood was light on the set of ABC’s This Week one Sunday in August as co-anchor Jonathan Karl bantered with his guest, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Suddenly, it seemed, the phenomenon of “wokeness” could be marveled at as little more than an imprudent episode.
“I have a local city councilman that has this saying,” said AOC with a laugh, “‘Woke 1 was crazy.’” Karl laughed, too. With that, left-of-center Americans had all the permission they needed to repudiate the mania that had once gripped them. And some did, albeit through gritted teeth. . . .
If some on the left were annoyed at AOC for the admission that woke was crazy, they were downright furious at the right for, well, noticing the left’s predicament. Progressives may be grudgingly distancing themselves from “their most excessive past stances,” The Atlantic observed, but “Republicans have no intention of letting voters forget.” As though that’s dirty pool.
Why should anyone forget the craziness we are now allowed to acknowledge? Perhaps wokeness’s diehards think the backlash against their philosophy is unfair. Maybe those on the left now denouncing wokeness are only going through the motions. Aside from a few examples, we aren’t hearing a lot of regret from the participants in that prolonged moral panic. So how can anyone call woke a thing of the past, as AOC implied? Perhaps she and her compatriots believe that true wokeness has never been tried.
If the activist class acknowledges only that their methods were flawed but insists that their motives were pure, we’re likely to see the phenomenon return in a more bitter, aggrieved, and, ultimately, vindictive form.
John Yoo makes the case for Iran containment:
The return of fighting in the Strait of Hormuz is producing calls for a renewed deal with Iran. But the last deal, the Islamabad memorandum, did not fail for want of good terms. It failed because Iran does not keep its word, a lesson that every president since Jimmy Carter has learned the hard way. The United States should begin to plan for a state of the world after the war that depends not on trusting Tehran, but on imposing conditions on it.
Reaching international agreements involves the same factors as making contracts. The parties must receive benefits from complying with the agreement that outweigh the costs, and the gains from a deal must outweigh the status quo. But of equal importance is that the parties must be able to depend on the enforcement of the agreement. If one party may receive benefits first (such as receiving a car before paying the money), it has an incentive to break the deal unless the courts and police stand by in the background to enforce it. The fundamental problem with ending the Iranian war is that international law, unlike American domestic law, has no supranational institutions capable of forcing nations to keep their promises. Great-power politics has instead required that nations threaten economic, political, or even military violence to force compliance with treaties.
This means that once Iran receives the benefits it seeks from an agreement, it will have little fear of breaking the pact. If President Trump agrees to end combat operations, lift the American embargo, and end economic sanctions, he will have few means of forcing Tehran to keep promises to respect free navigation in the Strait, to end the nuclear program, and to stop its efforts to destabilize the region. Instead of trading American concessions for Iranian promises, the United States should keep the blockade, hold Iran’s oil revenue, and release it only if the mullahs behave. That is not diplomacy; it is containment. The United States and its allies followed a similar approach against Saddam Hussein for twelve years.
Eva Terry unpacks the unsupported allegations of “lynchings” brought forward by Democratic lawmakers:
A group of Democratic lawmakers has asked Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel to re-investigate “every hanging death of a Black individual across the United States,” citing “the role of lynching in our nation’s history.”
The letter, sent last Tuesday, referenced the deaths of ten black individuals who were found hanging in public. Eight of the deaths were investigated as suicides based on autopsies and physical examinations. Six occurred since the beginning of 2026, while the other four occurred between 2024 and 2025.
None of the ten listed cases has an identified non-black killer.
The death of Tasia Fortune, one of the ten individuals referenced by the letter, is being investigated as a homicide. Her suspected killer is Jarques Ratliff, a black man who had a prior association with Fortune.
Lynching has historically been defined as the racially motivated, public killing of an individual at the hands of a mob, usually through the means of hanging.
Current public evidence does not support that characterization of any of the ten deaths listed by the letter.
However, Last Thursday, Representative Ayanna Pressley wrote in an X post, “Black folks are being found hanged in America. This is a national crisis and we CANNOT stand by while strange fruit hangs from trees across the country. We’re demanding a federal investigation NOW so we can stop modern-day lynchings.”
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded to Pressley’s post with her own, saying, “This year, there have already been 10 reported hangings of Black people in the U.S. I’m proud to have signed onto @RepPressley’s letter to address these widespread modern-day lynchings and put a stop to this racial terror.”
David R. Osborne, with the Commonwealth Foundation, has some interesting new data that indicate public-sector unions are rebounding in the wake of Janus:
Government unions looked like they were up against the ropes in 2018. Then, a landmark Supreme Court decision, Janus v. AFSCME, cut them off from a major revenue source. Janus ruled that unions could no longer force public employees to pay “fair share” fees to unions they never joined.
In the years that followed, the four largest government unions — the National Education Association (NEA), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) — lost hundreds of thousands of members. Most people assumed this decline would keep going.
But new numbers suggest otherwise. Taken together, those same four unions have added back more than 230,000 members since 2024, the Commonwealth Foundation reports. That’s a 3.5 percent jump, and it has wiped out most of what looked like a permanent decline. Two of the four unions, AFSCME and SEIU, now have more members than they did before Janus. Only one union, the NEA, is still losing members, but even that decline has slowed.
This didn’t happen by accident. Union leaders changed their strategy.
Instead of fighting to keep the fees that courts had struck down, they started pushing state lawmakers for new kinds of legislative cover. Since 2022, government unions have lobbied for a smorgasbord of new permissive laws, such as ones requiring employers to hand over workers’ private information — home addresses, phone numbers, etc. With access to such information, the unions recruited aggressively.
But these union-friendly “reforms” didn’t stop there. New laws also granted unions access to government email and payroll systems, as well as buildings and facilities, for their recruitment efforts.
CODA
Variations on a theme today. In my sometimes-arbitrary jazz purchases over the years, I’ve come across various ensembles playing a song called “Manha de Carnival.” Here’s Stan Getz. Here’s Chuck Mangione. It traces back to Brazilian composer Luiz Bonfá and was a major export of the bossa nova scene in the late ’50s. Have one more listen (the song also goes by “Black Orpheus”).
Thanks for reading. Go enjoy the weekend.