The British socialist newspaper The Guardian is upset that CBS News might become less radical, publishing an article provocatively titled “‘Blood in the water’: Bari Weiss‘ chaotic first three months in charge of CBS News.” This spin announces an agenda: Weiss must be stopped! The Left cannot stand any outlet on their side moving two degrees toward the center. Any tiptoe to the middle is “anti-journalism.” Any hint at an opposing conservative view is a slippery slope to “misinformation.” Guardian “media and power reporter” Jeremy Barr quoted a pile of anonymous CBS staffers in service to his anti-Weiss agenda. He referred in this story to a previously unreported Nov. 6 “blow-up among staffers about language choices when writing about transgender individuals.” A “prominent correspondent”—which Semafor reporter Maxwell Tani claimed was legal correspondent Jan Crawford—sent an email that said CBS “should refrain from adopting terminology advocated by the movement,” referring to guidance from the Trans Journalists Association’s stylebook. A producer responded angrily to the email, writing: “It’s a TJA style ‘guide’ – that’s what I’m trying to do. Guide us to better coverage.” They define “better” as “accepted by our ideological allies.” Now this is where the rubber meets the road. Wokeness dominates the elitist media. “Style books” are surrender manuals to ideological manipulation of terminology. Facts are shredded in favor of feelings. So, you get Orwellian terms like “gender-affirming care” to describe trying to erase your actual gender. This is why Barr and Co. hated new CBS anchor Tony Dokoupil’s proclamation that “we’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.” Transgender ideology is a perfect example. They believe advocates and elites should tell the undereducated “average American” what to think and how to talk. The Trans Journalism Association demands that “better” coverage means you avoid any reference to actual biological facts in deference to the transgender imagination. Reality is whatever they decide it is, it’s “gender-expansive.” So you get instructions like these: “Avoid references to being born female or born a girl, etc.” That’s too factual. When it comes to removing breasts or penises, “Terms like ‘mutilation,’ ‘sterilization,’ and ‘social contagion’ invoke common misinformation and disinformation.” This is because they are the spreaders of the “social contagion” but hate the description. They hate the term “culture war” because they aim to win it without a real battle. Don’t mention biology. “Noun phrases like biological men, biological males, biological women, or biological females are often used by anti-trans groups to invoke a person’s assigned sex at birth as their ‘real’ gender, in contrast to their gender identity.” You have to love “real” in quotes. Don’t say the ideologues are ideological. The term “gender ideology” is described as “a charged term commonly deployed by anti-trans commentators and activists that implies trans people, merely by being trans, are participating in a political activity or have a political agenda.” They are. That’s obvious. That’s why they are intimidating the media into a political lingo. Then they double down: “There is no such thing as transgenderism any more than there is a ‘gay agenda’; the -ism as used in transgenderism implies that a trans person’s gender is a political philosophy, not a demographic characteristic.” But it is obviously a philosophy, which seeks to dominate by insisting it’s not. Their own messaging on Instagram boasts of “shaping journalism into the industry we deserve” and “transforming the journalism industry” and urging people to “Support the Movement.” But don’t call it ideological! COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Will CBS News Go ‘Unwoke’ on ‘Gender-Expansive’ Lingo? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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In this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler continue their Sour 16 competition with growing irreligiosity squaring off against artificial intelligence. Which does Hanson feel is more worrisome?  This content was recorded prior to Hanson’s major surgery on Dec. 30.  Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a segment from today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to VDH’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.  JACK FOWLER: Victor, we’re going to talk one more dust-off here before we take a break and that would be the worrisome competition between rampant, growing, irreligiosity versus artificial intelligence.   Are you worried about either one of these or which one worries you more? And I just heard you talk about your religiosity on a piece of wood in Libya. But go ahead, Victor.   VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: You mean the decline of religiosity.   FOWLER: Yes, the decline of religiosity.  HANSON: I’m more worried about it. In “The End of Everything,” I looked at a popular account, as I said, of an AI simulation the Pentagon ran where they programmed self-survival into an intercontinental ballistic missile and put it on a computer simulation.  And it was headed toward our enemy, and then they pushed the kill button, and on its own the thing circled back and was going to hit the Pentagon, and they couldn’t stop it.   In other words, in that process of giving self-preservation prompts, electronic prompts to this AI, it went on beyond that and said anybody who tries to blow me up, I’m going to go back and get. So they cancelled that.  So, I am worried about that. But I’ll give you another example. I got a pathology report. I couldn’t understand anything. Anything. It was the TBGA 168, my gene is heterogeneous for this particular adenoma, all this stuff.   I just typed “Grok,” and I cut and pasted it. You know what I mean? And I could not believe it. This has scanned 421 scientific articles. Two minutes later, it gave me the most clear, succinct explanation of exactly what percentage this is, what would happen here.   I had never used it really before. But I’ve been using it the last month. It’s amazing.   The only thing I’m worried about is … Stupid Victor is so stupid. He doesn’t even know what’s going on. I’ve been teaching at a certain place, and I had noticed that some students were writing beautiful stuff.  So just as an example I thought, “Well, I’d like to write a book about Epaminondas the Great,” and I just said, “Could you please write an essay on what were the chief achievements of Epaminondas?”   And it started coming out. And I remember it had the style and prose and syntax of some of the people that I had in class. And my wife taught class, she’s a PhD at a community college, and she is far more schooled than I am. And she said, “Well, Victor, you know, there are programs that can spot that.”   So that is a danger. But I think, all in all, AI will be valuable if carefully controlled. Not regulated to the point of death but monitored.  But I am very worried about secularism, atheism. If you don’t believe in any transcendence then it affects your … humanism that says that you’re only here and now, there’s no mystery anymore. I mean, you don’t know why you’re here.  And the neoplatonism of the early church. When the words of Jesus Christ were recorded both orally and later in the ensuing century by the four gospels, they needed an architecture for a church. They were very learned people for the next 400 years, Jerome, Augustine, et cetera. So, they did look at neoplatonism.   And you know, in Plato, it’s very clear that your soul is immortal and your body is not, and the metaphors that Socrates uses are the lyre, what we would call the harp.  Say you’re playing “Old Lang Syne” on the harp, and then you destroy the harp, does the song disappear? No. It only becomes reified when it has a body, an instrument. And in their way, theirs is not a Christian, but it’s a transmigration of soul.  So, you die, and then your soul was either dented or ruined by your appetites, and you’re given a reincarnated body until you get it right.   Finally, you don’t have to go through this process of memory, losing memory, who you were, new identity.   But the point I’m making is even the pagans believed that there had to be some transcendence. It’s imprinted on our brain. And for people to say there’s not, it’s just a nihilistic creed in my view.   And yeah. It’s very valuable. I don’t want to get into what particular creed you are. I’m just saying that the Judeo-Christian tradition …  And by the way, Jack, you pointed out that we’re very confused in America why we have suddenly substituted the Judeo part, the Old Testament. I was listening to Steve.  FOWLER: We talked about that on a recent podcast. Yes, go ahead.  HANSON: I knew Steve Bannon. I like Steve Bannon. But he was giving a talk. And he just said, we’re going to Christianize the country. And I thought, you mean you’re going to re-emphasize the Judeo-Christian creed. And he didn’t say Judeo-Christian tradition, which would include the Old Testament and the contributions of Jewish culture to Christianity, or the fact that Jesus was Jewish himself.  I think it’s very important that you have a Judeo-Christian dominant tradition with exceptions that you are tolerant of Buddhists and Muslims and other people without diluting the main tradition that affected the Founders. It’s essential.  FOWLER: Right. To act like the Founders were blasé, not ignorant, but uncaring about the Old Testament and Moses and the gang is just a lie.  HANSON: My grandmother was a devout Methodist and took me to church. My parents were not devout. They were Christians. They had grown up in kind of a very rigid religious environment, so they kind of rebelled, I think. But they made it clear they believed in Christianity to me, and they felt that. But my grandmother would take me, and she would give me 20 cents for each poem I [recited]:  “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray my Lord the soul to keep me. If I should die before I wake, I pray my Lord the soul to keep If I should live for other ways, I pray the Lord to guide my ways.”  25 cents, 1959.  FOWLER: That’s a lot of money!  HANSON: So, I remembered them all. Yeah. I think Christianity’s done a wonderful thing. The country will not survive without it.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Victor Davis Hanson: The Decline of Religiosity is More Worrisome Than the Rise of Artificial Intelligence  appeared first on The Daily Signal.