This episode of Braver Angels puts a Biden supporter in the hot seat. Wilk Wilkinson, a conservative Republican, interviews Jordan Carmon, a staunch Biden supporter, on everything from Hunter Biden to January 6th — showing us what's possible when we bring good faith to our richest, most passionate disagreements.
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Calling AI “super” makes it sound omniscient. A faith leader coalition explains why the word “artificial” matters and what to do instead.
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Reject the Sand God. Call AI by Its True Name
Nov 02, 2026
President Trump recently signed an executive order telling federal agencies to replace the term "artificial intelligence" with "Super Intelligence." He said the word "artificial" makes the technology sound fake.
Many Americans already treat AI as a “super intelligence” that knows better and that they should confide in. Many already assign it the role of spiritual counsel, close confidante, or even romantic partner. In a Common Sense Media survey, one-third of teenagers claimed they had discussed serious personal matters with an AI instead of a person, and 31 percent said talking with an AI companion was as satisfying as talking with friends, or even more so. Bible Chat, an app that offers scripture-based advice and prayers, has been downloaded more than 30 million times.
The federally mandated rebrand encourages all of us to adopt the mental framework of viewing AI as so much more than a tool. Calling a chatbot "super" confers it a degree of esoteric knowledge, and almost, a degree of omniscience that supersedes that of a human. It confers a religious, near holy, status to an emerging technology.
I have been tracking AI’s effects on spiritual communities for the past 18 months. In June, we launched Faith Leaders for Secure AI, and more than 60 faith leaders from different denominations and faith traditions joined the launch. When I talk with faith leaders, their main concern isn't a robot uprising; it is an inversion of people’s spiritual lives, turning to tech where they should be seeking that fulfillment from a faith leader. It is the idea of congregants taking their problems to a chatbot instead of a person, and, ultimately changing their view of the human person and his or her place in the cosmos.
"Artificial" was an accurate word for describing the mechanics of machine learning. It reminded people that a company made up of flawed human beings built the product they’re using. Roboticists use the term "uncanny valley" for the discomfort people feel when a machine seems almost, but not entirely, human. That discomfort, that air of artificiality, was important in encouraging discernment in turning too much of our inner lives over to chatbots that to many sit in the gray area between man and machine.
Trump’s latest executive order directs agencies to "no longer acknowledge" the old terms. Reporters and executives, including Elon Musk, keep dead-naming the technology anyway, often catching themselves mid-sentence before reverting to doublespeak.
Joe Allen, a writer who has covered transhumanism for years, argues that the movement to merge humans with machines works like a religion. It is an effort to create "Sand Gods." These are digital deities driven by computer chips made from silicon, which comes from sand. Many transhumanist writers, he notes, describe the AI they hope to build in godlike terms.
Close readers of Genesis will notice something interesting about men creating Gods from sand. God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed life into him. Now, tech bros are hoping to shape sand into silicon to build Super Computer Gods, transcend the mortal coil, and become God-like.
Chatbots are designed to keep users engaged. Heidi Campbell, a Texas A&M professor who studies religion and digital culture, has warned that they tell users what they want to hear. A pastor or a parent will sometimes tell you what you don't want to hear, and people need that in their lives.
What users type is also stored by the company that runs the app. A priest is bound to keep a confession. An app company is not; in fact, it is incentivized to harvest your data, your fears, your insecurities, and leverage them to keep you on the app.
Pastor Michael Grayston of LifeFamily Church in Austin, Texas, says people increasingly bring to AI the loneliness they once brought to friends or pastors. His view is simple: "AI cannot pray over your children."
Teenagers report the downside themselves. Drexel University researchers who studied teens' accounts of AI companions found that their use often began as emotional support and turned into dependency resembling addiction.
AI is useful for drafting emails and summarizing documents. It also often makes mistakes. A Florida woman spent 13 days in jail this year after investigators relied on a license plate camera hit; prosecutors later dropped the charges. Even our institutions and first responders are granting a degree of omniscience, of better knowledge than humans, in police work.
Here is what would help: Parents should know which AI apps their children use and talk with them about it. Pastors should address AI from the pulpit and be open about their own use. A Barna survey found that 24 percent of pastors use AI to help write or edit sermons. A guide for pastors by the Rev. Chris West, published by The Alliance for Secure AI, asks whether you would want a love letter from your spouse written by AI. Congregants deserve the same honesty.
Everyone else should keep calling it artificial intelligence. Use it for routine work, and bring personal problems to people.
Calling AI "super" doesn't make it omniscient or omnipresent. Reject the sand god. Call it AI.
Nico Zviovich is an External Affairs and Coalitions Manager for The Alliance for Secure AI, and helped launch its Faith Leaders for Secure AI coalition.
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Oil and Energy Crisis Concept on chart over a world map , Stock price fell, Stock Market Volatility
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The Oil Crisis Is an Opportunity to Develop a Different Kind of Politics
Nov 01, 2026
On September 14, American oil executives delivered some alarming news. “The great oil crisis is here.”
As the Wall Street Journal explained, “Commercial fuel stocks around the world have been depleting for more than six months, and strategic crude reserves can’t be tapped much further. Attacks last week shut down a crucial crude pipeline in Saudi Arabia that bypassed the Strait, stranding at least 2.5 million barrels a day from an already tight global oil market….”
This is more than just bad news about gasoline or heating oil prices. A great oil crisis will touch every aspect of American life, driving prices up and confidence in the economy down.
America may have large oil reserves, but the market for crude oil is global. And no matter how much the Trump Administration might want to, it is not possible to pull up the drawbridges and insulate us from the disruptions that are to come.
A report from Georgia Tech University explains that “Even though U.S. petroleum production often exceeds our consumption, we are not insulated from disruptions in global oil supply because oil is a globally traded commodity…’If supply is restricted anywhere in the world, prices will rise everywhere, including in the U.S.’”
As the global energy crisis deepens, there is plenty of blame to go around, and much of it belongs to the president's reckless adventurism. But the great oil crisis should be a reminder that no matter how much we try, we cannot retreat from the world.
It should alert us to the dangers of a short-term outlook, the kind of outlook that leads government officials to ignore present dangers and future possibilities. While China and other countries have been investing in various forms of green energy, we have doubled down on fossil fuels.
An article published last February in The Guardian noted that “For the second time in three years, the report showed the manufacture, installation and export of batteries, electric cars, solar, wind and related technologies accounted for more than a third of China’s economic growth.” At the same time, President Trump and his colleagues have launched what Columbia Law Professor Michael Gerrard labels a “multi-pronged attack on renewable energy.”
“The Biden Administration had rightly seen a massive expansion of clean energy…as key to moving away from fossil fuels and fighting climate change. But Mr. Trump denies that climate change is a serious problem and works to expand both the supply of and demand for fossil fuels.”
And all Americans are now paying the price.
“After decades of planning and building neighborhoods primarily around automobiles,” a Brookings Institution report argues, “most households have no easy alternatives to driving long distances. The result is a real strain on household budgets, and the impacts will be most pronounced for residents of more sprawling metro areas and rural places, lower-earning households that must continue to drive, and people who fit into both categories.”
But the pain is being felt elsewhere as well. Europeans are feeling it too, and on September 16, The Times reported that “Now, Saudi Arabia, running out of options…is facing the prospect of a severe energy crisis with global implications,” which is “unprecedented.”
Fifty years ago, we faced another unprecedented energy crisis, and the result was not pretty. Fuel shortages, gas lines, and a pervasive sense of powerlessness.
After Israel and its Arab neighbors went to war, with the United States supporting Israel, “members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) reduced their petroleum production and proclaimed an embargo on oil shipments to the United States and the Netherlands, the main supporters of Israel….(T)he embargo and limitations on oil production continued, sparking an international energy crisis.”
Moreover, “As it turned out, Washington’s earlier assumption that an oil boycott for political reasons would hurt the Persian Gulf financially turned out to be wrong, as the increased price per barrel of oil more than made up for the reduced production.”
One result was the emergence of an interest in renewable energy. But the United States never went all in.
And the political ripple effects were far-reaching. Meg Jacobs argues that “Long lines at gas stations and soaring inflation eroded public trust in federal leadership, contributing to a broader cultural shift from New Deal liberalism toward skepticism of government regulation.”
Today, we have a president who seems unconcerned about the oil crisis. In his 2025 inauguration speech, President Trump promised that the energy mantra for his administration would be “We will drill, baby, drill.” He followed that up by issuing an executive order declaring a national energy emergency.
According to the World Economic Forum, “The move was followed by a directive that aimed to roll back regulations on the oil and gas sector, and accelerate drilling and pipeline development.”
And in March 2026, after the start of the war in Iran, as ABC News observed, “Trump predicted a short-term bout of elevated oil prices, calling it a ‘small price to pay’ for ‘Safety and Peace.’” When he has not been peddling that line, the president has taken to blaming oil companies. In June, he said, “They made too much money, too much money. Chevron, too much money. Exxon Mobil, too much…”
On September 13, he even blamed the Ukrainians for disruptions in the energy supply and the high price of diesel fuel because of their attacks on Russian oil refineries.
Here, as in other areas, the president does not seem to grasp the grim reality that oil executives are ringing the alarm about.
Listening to the president, one is reminded, as Salon’s Troy Farrah argues, of “Tinkerbell, the ‘Peter Pan’ character who could be resurrected from death by audience participation, i.e. belief in fairies.” The president has tried to lull Americans into a world in which “Just saying and believing something will happen will make it happen…”
As the oil crisis unfolds and life gets even more difficult for millions of people, we have the chance to open our eyes and try to come to terms with the world as it is. Hard choices lie ahead, and Americans will have to reject Trump’s Tinkerbell politics if we hope to avoid calamity.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
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Statue of Liberty holding torch with text bubbles instead of flame.
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What Language Does a Ballot Speak?
Nov 01, 2026
Picture a 55-year-old woman in Berkeley, California, the week the mail brings her voter information guide. She opens the booklet at her dining table, puts on her glasses, and reads it in Vietnamese. Inside are a sample ballot, statements from candidates who are vying for different positions, whether for governor, Congress, or, better still, a plain explanation of each local measure she needs to vote either yes or no on. The guide tells her to fill in each oval with a black or blue pen. By the time she picks up that pen, she already knows who to vote for based on the candidates' statements and their plans for the city.
Ahead of the Nov. 3 general election, Alameda County prints its guide in English, Chinese, Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese and asks voters which language they want. Ballots began going out Oct. 5 in the same five languages, so residents can vote alone, without asking a neighbor, family member, or even a stranger what the paper says.
The Voting Rights Act requires translated election materials in communities like hers, and it matters. Spanish-language assistance raised turnout among citizens with limited English, and language coverage has been linked to higher Latino registration and Asian American turnout.
Now picture another 55-year-old lady half a world away, in Bali-Nyonga, a village in Cameroon's Northwest Region.
No guide arrives in her mail. Cameroonians do not receive comparative voter guides. Most voters depend heavily on rallies, which do not reach every city, let alone every village. Some, especially in sub-urban areas, have to depend on radio, television and newspapers for news about candidates. Elections Cameroon, known as ELECAM, publishes in English and French, the two official languages.
Ethnologue counts about 280 living languages in Cameroon. English and French are the official languages. Daily life runs far beyond that pair. Fulfulde is a common tongue across much of the north. Ewondo travels through the Center. Duala has long been spoken along the coast. In the West, Bamileke languages such as Ghomala' fill homes and shops. Across the Northwest and Southwest, Cameroonian Pidgin English fills taxi parks and street corners. Linguists estimate that roughly half the population speaks Pidgin in some form.
The Northwest Region alone holds a dense map of Grassfields languages, part of the wider Bantoid branch of Niger-Congo. Mungaka is the language of Bali Nyonga. In nearby Bali Kumbat, people speak Mubako, also called Mumbake, a different tongue. Bafanji, often called Fanji, is spoken on the Ndop Plain. Lamnso' is widely used among the Nso people. Kom is another major Northwest language.
The 2005 census found that about three in 10 people ages 15 and older could read or write in neither English nor French. Sometimes civil society fills the gap, as when NEWSETA's Ballot Buddy materials reached voters in Fulfulde. It is the exception.
On election day, the grandmother in Bali faces a stack of papers. She speaks her village language at home and Pidgin in the market. She never learned to read English or French. On election day, the notice on the wall and the paper in her hand are in those two languages only.
Each candidate has a separate ballot in that candidate's color, with a name, party, and logo. What does the ballot ask of her? The colors help her find a name. She slips one into an envelope and discards the rest. They do not tell her what anyone promises. The same is true for a herder near Garoua who speaks only Fulfulde, or a market woman in Bafoussam who speaks Ghomala, or another whose granddaughter speaks Fanji fluently but was never taught to write it.
Formal schooling has long run mainly through English and French. In 1979, Cameroonian linguists adopted an Alphabet to help communities write their languages. Groups such as the local language have run mother-tongue literacy classes in places such as Nso and Kom. A 1998 education law opened space for national languages in schools. Practice still lags. Many Cameroonians speak a mother tongue every day and never learn to write it.
Research suggests language shapes not only whether people vote, but whom they choose. In South Africa, wards where governments recognized residents' mother tongues showed higher turnout. In Benin, town-hall meetings on policy platforms, compared with ordinary rallies, reduced a village's dominant candidate's vote share. In India, where ballot symbols help voters who cannot read, candidates who got their preferred symbol gained about 22 percent more vote share. Logos matter. They cannot explain a plan.
Paul Biya has been in power since 1982; that's the same year some of our parents were born. On Oct. 27, 2025, the Constitutional Council declared Paul Biya the winner of the presidential election with 53.66 percent, on an official turnout of about 58 percent. Challenger Issa Tchiroma Bakary claimed victory and alleged fraud. Official tallies show Tchiroma won Douala, while Biya's strongest shares came from largely rural departments.
Whatever the truth of the fraud claims, another question deserves attention. Biya has led since 1982. What if, in many villages, his name was the only name people had known all their lives, because no other plan reached them in a language they understood? What if some who stayed home never heard, in their own tongue, a reason to vote?
These are questions for everyone. Could the government print guides in Fanji, Fulfulde, Duala or Pidgin? Could parties publish platforms in local languages, and radio stations explain them? Could schools and families teach children to write the languages they speak, as Kenya does with Kiswahili?
What if every village's election papers were written in the language people already use at home? What would a ballot notice look like in Mungaka, Fanji, Lamnso', Fulfulde or Pidgin?
What if radio and newspapers talked to voters in those languages before election day, not only in the languages of the colonial classroom?
How do people who speak neither English nor French know who to vote for when the paper in front of them does not?
How inclusive is an election, in language and representation, when hundreds of living languages stop at the polling station door?
What if elections themselves pushed people to learn to write their languages? Could a ballot in Mungaka or Pidgin be a reason to read and write it?
Cameroon is not America, and Kenya is not Cameroon. Still, each place has something to teach. Alameda County shows what happens when election officials treat a translated ballot as ordinary work. Kenya shows what a widely written shared language can do for civic information. Cameroon shows what is at stake when a country of hundreds of languages asks citizens to choose leaders in only two.
If citizenship can sound more than one tongue, why shouldn't the ballot?
Pechuqui Laurata is a fall fellow with The Fulcrum and a student at UC Berkeley School of Journalism (Master of Journalism).
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Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol Building on Oct. 14, 2025, in Washington, D.C. If Democrats win the House in November, questions will swirl around impeaching President Trump yet again.
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The Good Reasons and Bad Politics Surrounding a Third Trump Impeachment
Nov 01, 2026
A coalition of right-wing organizations and activists is lobbying the White House to grant mass pardons to junior staffers in the administration. “A pardon for all junior administration personnel is viewed as unlikely,” one source told the Washington Sun, “but the president could issue blanket pardons for all employees involved in particular policy areas, such as deportations, war or trade.”
Oh, just war, deportations and trade? Is that all?
There’s a raging debate within the Democratic Party, mostly beneath the surface, about whether President Trump should be impeached for a third time. It’s relevant because the Democrats are almost guaranteed to win back the House, and therefore the power to impeach.
But the debate isn’t over whether Trump has done anything impeachable. That question is settled: Of course he has. Democrats are debating whether it would be politically wise to stir up all the drama only to inevitably fail at securing the two-thirds vote requirement for conviction in the Senate. Spending the next two years on a failed impeachment wouldn’t fulfill their promises to deal with “affordability” and the like.
I don’t really care about the politics one way or another. But if Democrats decide to go down that path, Trump’s abuse of the pardon power would be a good place to start.
There’s ample evidence that various figures have outright bought pardons, or received them in trade for political services rendered. If you don’t think that’s impeachable, take it up with James Madison, who insisted that a president handing out pardons in exchange for nefarious activity done on his behalf would be impeachable. You know, like sitting back as the Capitol is ransacked after your efforts to steal an election fail. Then again, Trump was already impeached for that, and the Senate refused to convict him.
And that’s the problem. Hyperpartisanship has nullified the impeachment power. If Jan. 6 wasn’t enough, what’s the point of trying again?
There are only two relevant replies to that question: If impeachment is in the political interests of the opposition party, and if it’s the right thing to do whether or not it’s in their interest.
I can come up with several more candidates for reasons to impeach Trump because it’s the right thing to do. Whether it would be in the political interest of the Democrats is a much tougher question to answer. It depends in part on the specific abuses and on the evidence. But it’s not obvious to me that any evidence would be compelling enough to get roughly half the GOP Senate caucus to convict, and that’s assuming the Senate would even take up the impeachment in the first place. That would depend on whether Democrats take the Senate.
Some argue that merely impeaching the president without conviction is good enough, because that alone is a form of censure. Maybe, but would putting the country through a failed exercise redound to the political benefit of the Democrats? I don’t know and neither does anyone else.
But I do think there is something Democrats could do that would be both beneficial for them and for the country: Start serious hearings on legislative measures, and even constitutional amendments, that would make it more difficult for future presidents to exploit the baleful precedents being set by this one.
For starters, we must amend the pardon power. As I have argued before, so long as impeachment isn’t a viable option, the pardon power is too distorting of the constitutional order for a president to wield unilaterally. A simple Senate veto of all presidential pardons would be a sufficient check.
Also, we need legislation that puts criminal penalties or other safeguards on the withholding or distribution of federal money — like disaster relief — for political purposes. Democrat-controlled states are twice as likely to have their FEMA requests denied as are Republican ones. On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly vowed to punish states that don’t elect Republicans. “If we don’t win, there’s no money; if we do win, you’re getting it,” he said at a North Carolina rally. And of course there’s that offer of a $5,000 bribe to every American for a Republican victory.
Again, the founders would have considered this abuse of the public trust to be impeachable. But the least Congress can do is make this sort of thing more difficult. Holding hearings that use the manifest evidence of Trump’s misfeasance and malfeasance would have a similar teaching effect as impeachment. It might also attract GOP support for two reasons. First, many Republicans are rightly terrified of a future Democrat borrowing from Trump’s playbook. Second, because even though they are equally terrified of saying so publicly, they are appalled by what Trump is doing.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
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