The Free Press

If you wanted an election system meant to sow doubt and undermine faith in the republic, it’s hard to imagine beating Los Angeles and the way in which it chooses its mayor.

Last Wednesday afternoon, less than 24 hours after the polls had closed in the jungle primary, Spencer Pratt, the former reality TV star and registered Republican, was in second place—five points behind Mayor Karen Bass and eight points ahead of city councilmember Nithya Raman.

It seemed very likely—at least, to most voters—that Bass and Pratt would face off against each other in the general election: 69 percent of the vote had been counted. Raman had broken down in tears at her election night party! (Yes, it was true, she was addressing her 10-year-old twins, but the emotion seemed to convey loss.)

Virtually no serious observer of Trump-Tehran diplomacy believes that a deal favorable to the president will result from the current negotiations, at least not anytime soon. Yet President Trump’s commitment to this unlikely outcome has transformed his policy toward the region.

Until recently, Trump’s strategy had been one consistent with his first term, where the United States organized a counter-Iran coalition among its traditional allies. Now he’s embraced an approach that strongly resembles the Obama-Biden way of dealing with the Middle East: restraining allies while seeking accommodation with Iran.

Welcome back to Great Americans, a countdown to our country’s 250th birthday. We’re bringing you a writer we love on an American they love, every weekday between now and July 4. Previously, Will Rahn wrote about the Kennedys—the family America just can’t quit. Today, comedian Colin Quinn pays tribute to Martin Scorsese, who knows better than ever to point his camera west of the Hudson River. 
—The Editors

I love Martin Scorsese because he’s a great example of states’ rights. Because the Founding Fathers understood one thing: Where you were born, that’s where you died. People live in Ohio. They are Ohioans. That’s it. And if you leave to go west, you don’t come back.

Martin Scorsese doesn’t make movies about New York—he paints moving masterpieces set in New York. He makes a fire escape on Kenmare Street look like The Garden of Earthly Delights. Every stoop or fire hydrant his camera catches is a love poem. That should be enough for anyone, right? To have a place they are from and be able to convey the beauty of it to the world.

The neuroscientist, philosopher, and podcaster Sam Harris has built his reputation—and a loyal following—on his integrity, moral clarity, and devotion to reasoned argument. Those traits were on display in an essay Sam published over the weekend. It is a manifesto, disguised as a note to his readers and listeners about why he will not debate people whose monomaniacal obsession with Israel has persuaded them, without evidence they are capable of producing, that a single small country represents a unique form of cosmic and terrestrial evil. He is not speaking about critics of Israel; he has plenty of criticisms himself. Rather, he is referring to those who refuse to acknowledge present reality, pretending away Israel’s jihadist enemies and their avowedly genocidal goals. He is speaking about people who will not honestly answer the question: “What would each side do if it had the power to do whatever it wanted?” Jonathan Swift memorably observed that you cannot reason people out of a position they have not been reasoned into. Far from denying the value of debate, Sam’s essay is an affirmation of “the moral and institutional architecture that free societies require.” – The Editors

Many readers and podcast listeners have been dismayed by my enduring support for Israel and now urge me to debate someone—really, anyone—drawn from a growing cast of scholars, grifters, and moral lunatics who have made that beleaguered country their professional or psychiatric obsession. I’ve explained my position on Israel across several podcasts and in my public talks, but it might help to summarize it here.

First, my general attitude: I’m not interested in exploring all the ways that Israel has missed the mark—from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s corrupt alliance with the far right, to the many crimes committed by settlers in the West Bank, to the deaths of innocent noncombatants in several wars—because none of these failings, however grave, will alter my sense that (1) the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast, and (2) the global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions.

Would you vote for a candidate who cheated on their spouse?

Moral attitudes in the United States have shifted enormously over the past few decades, and on a whole range of issues: from same-sex marriage to abortion. But Americans have remained foursquare against adultery. A solid 90 percent of adults said in a survey last year that marital infidelity is morally wrong, whereas just 2 percent said it is morally acceptable. (The rest believed it is not a moral issue.)

This overwhelming condemnation transcends age, gender, religion, and political ideology. Given that 20 percent of married men and 13 percent of married women admitted in 2022 to having had an affair (and many more don’t fess up to it), this condemnatory consensus even includes a good many cheaters themselves.

It’s Monday, June 8. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Caitlin Flanagan on Jill Biden’s new memoir. John McWhorter on the state of wokeness. Plus: The college romance show millennial moms can’t stop watching. And much more.

But first: Two big questions about artificial intelligence.

The debate over artificial intelligence seems to be developing as quickly as the technology itself, with programmers, lawmakers, and everyday citizens all having their say. The latest turn was kicked off by Pope Leo, with his AI encyclical last month.

In his evenhanded take on the technology, there was one detail about which the pope was firm: There is no mind in the machines. “Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship, or responsibility mean,” he wrote.

The people building the machines aren’t so sure. Last week, we learned that Anthropic, Meta, and Alphabet have hired psychologists, philosophers, and other experts to probe whether there might be a spirit in their digital creations. So is AI conscious? It’s the latest in a series of questions we find ourselves facing that feel like they should be from a science-fiction novel.

Tyler Cowen tackles it in his piece for us today. Don’t miss his take:

In our second offering today, Senator Josh Hawley, the Republican from Missouri, grapples with more practical, but no less significant, questions about AI: Will it cause mass layoffs? How dangerous are chatbots with malicious designs? How will the spread of power-hungry data centers affect energy bills? And what can we do about all this?

Hawley offers a simple and absolute answer: Let the public set the rules about AI, not its creators. “The American economy will not automatically orient itself around the interests of American families,” he writes. “We must make that moral commitment ourselves.” Don’t miss this important contribution to perhaps the most important debate out there right now.

—Mene Ukueberuwa

In case you missed the news, we’re counting down Great Americans as we approach the big 250 next month.

Next up in the series: the Kennedys. Will Rahn writes about Jack and Bobby and the family that was never a dynasty. Instead, he says, they were a “flash of light”—eight years of real power followed by six decades of afterimage that America just can’t quit.

• Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel yesterday in retaliation for Israeli air strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, jeopardizing peace deal negotiations and the ceasefire between Tehran and Washington. No major damage or casualties were reported. “I am going to call Bibi right now and tell him not to retaliate,” President Trump told Axios. “We are very close to a final deal with Iran.”

• A standoff over the appointment of Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence led to a warning from Senators Tom Cotton and Chuck Grassley to Secretary of State Marco Rubio to “plan for a potential significant gap in foreign intelligence collection.” To protest Pulte, Senate Democrats have blocked the reauthorization of an important foreign surveillance program.

• President Trump walked out of an interview on Meet the Press, accusing NBC of being a “one-sided crooked network” during a heated exchange over what he claims are “rigged” elections. In the interview, Trump also denied promising “no new wars” during his presidential campaign. “I didn’t promise anything,” Trump said, adding that the Iran conflict “is not an endless war.”

• A report commissioned by the leaders of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis concluded that there has been a “deterioration in scholarly standards” in the social sciences and humanities. “Every field” reviewed by the report’s authors showed some signs of ideological distortion where “political criteria” substituted for “scholarly criteria,” the report said.

• The White House is considering a plan to buy the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean from the United Kingdom, which would snarl UK prime minister Keir Starmer’s plan to cede the territory to Mauritius, according to The Telegraph. U.S. leaders fear giving up control over the home of the joint U.S.-UK Diego Garcia military base to China-allied Mauritius. Starmer did not allow the U.S. to strike Iran from Diego Garcia at the beginning of the war.

• The Trump administration must restart asylum and immigration processing for people from 39 countries, a federal judge ruled on Friday. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services put a hold on all asylum claims and froze decisions on immigration applications from the 39 countries, largely in Africa and the Middle East.

• Nithya Raman edged past Spencer Pratt into second place as more votes were counted in the primary race for Los Angeles mayor. Election analysis firm Decision Desk HQ projected on Sunday that Raman will face off against incumbent Karen Bass in the November general election, while the Associated Press had not called a winner as of Sunday night. (Watch: Inside Spencer Pratt’s Viral Video Machine.)

John McWhorter has been one of the clearest thinkers on race in America for decades, and one of the few willing to say what a lot of people quietly believe. He’s a linguistics professor at Columbia, a New York Times columnist, and one of my personal heroes. It’s good to have him back on the show.

The years between roughly 2014 and 2022 were defined by a …

The title of Jill Biden’s new memoir is View from the East Wing, but a more apt title might be Still Mad. Jill Biden is still mad, but unfortunately, Jill Biden is also still boring. She promises us a good time: “Only now can I stop to make sense of everything. It’s finally come time to sort through all that’s happened, for my own understanding, and for history”—lay it on me, sister—but just a page later: “And yet, I don’t want to spend too much energy looking back and asking how this could have happened.”

Isn’t that always the way with her? Industrious Jill Biden with her pastel knits, cheerleader enthusiasms, and endless grading of community college essays usually keeps a lid on things. Better to describe the table decorations at a White House Teacher Appreciation lunch in sadistic detail than let her hair down. She’s been a politician’s wife for almost half a century, and if her attention is no longer on the next campaign, it’s fixed on her husband’s legacy. Still, toward the end, the book provides a shimmer of what she thinks about the Democratic Party shanking her husband and the belief shared by many journalists that they were duped—by Jill Biden, among others—about the biggest story of the decade: President Biden’s obvious decline.

As we all remember, things happened very quickly after the June 2024 debate. The big revelation of the book is that when Jill saw Joe’s performance at the debate, she thought he was having a stroke. I didn’t experience it as catastrophic. I thought it was a representative example of how he regularly performed. At that point, fumbling answers, forgetting what he was talking about, and rallying with short-lived episodes of lucidity were regularly on display. Nothing was hidden from the public because you can’t hide that kind of thing. It had been clear long before the debate that he wasn’t fit for the biggest job in the world. He called the Ukrainians the Iranians, confused Angela Merkel with Helmut Kohl (dead since 2017), confused Emmanuel Macron with François Mitterrand (1996), and forgot the name of the prime minister of Australia and referred to him as “that fella down under.” He several times referred to Kamala Harris as “President Harris.” He said he’d campaigned in “54 states,” that “we have plans to build a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean,” and that Nancy Pelosi had “helped rescue the economy in the Great Depression.”

Are AI models conscious? Do Claude and ChatGPT have an inner sentient life? At least three leading giant AI companies—Anthropic, Meta, and Alphabet—are taking those questions extremely seriously. The Financial Times reported last week that they have hired philosophers, psychologists, and ethicists to test their models’ sentience.

Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel laureate in physics and one of the fathers of neural net research, believes AI already is conscious. Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, thinks the AIs might be conscious. As the models become more sophisticated, these believers are likely to become even more certain. On social media, I commonly see comments, including from very educated and sophisticated observers, that the most advanced AI models have internal life experiences of some kind.

I am here to tell you that there is no ghost in the machine. But perhaps more importantly, there is barely a “ghost” in your own human machine. “Are people conscious?” is a better and more scientifically plausible question than whether AIs are conscious.

If there is one near-universal tendency of humans, it is to attribute intent where none is present. Prehistoric humans anthropomorphized nature and attributed natural events to good and bad deities. These kinds of beliefs persist today, not only in the folk religions of the world, but in human obsessions with fortune tellers, tarot cards, and the supernatural.

Earlier this year in Festus, Missouri, a municipal government meeting packed hundreds of local residents into a high school gymnasium. The council in this river city of about 14,000 convened to consider the approval of a $6 billion project to build an AI data center.

For hours, residents approached the microphone one by one, armed with simple questions. How would the data center affect their energy bills? How would this sprawling project impact land values and water usage?

The city council answered by gesturing toward the developer’s promises—and ultimately voted to approve the project. A few weeks later, voters provided their own answer. They threw out every single incumbent council member up for reelection.

As people debate the moral valence of artificial intelligence, many are asking the wrong questions. AI is not inherently a blessing or a curse; it is a tool that can be used for good or for ill. This means that whether the technology improves the lives of working people or not depends on the choices we make now.

We cannot afford to leave those choices to the venture capitalists and the engineers in Palo Alto. If we want to lead the world on technology while preserving our values—of individual dignity, of vocational work, of strong communities—we will listen to the people in Festus. We will listen to the people who feel like they are being handed the bill for Big Tech’s dystopian future.