To say we live in weird times is an understatement. And as amazing as the technology is, the world of artificial intelligence is making life in a weird world all the more so. In the past month, the song at the top of Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart was not written and sung by a down-on-his-luck guitar player with boots and a cowboy hat. It wasn’t even sung by a pop star as a crossover hit, as has recently been the trend. The No. 1 song, “Walk My Walk,” by the artist Breaking Rust, was 100% generated by AI. It’s a catchy tune, with pop-like beats and a depth of lyric that rivals most chart-topping country songs—which is to say not that deep. The chorus is defiant: “You can kick rocks if you don’t like how I talk, I’m gonna keep on talking and walk my walk.” I’m not sure if telling someone to “kick rocks” is a real insult in certain regions, or just an AI hallucination, but it gets the point across that the singer is going to go his (its?) own way. If I had to be honest, it’s not all that bad, compared with the balance of popular songs on the market. It so perfectly hits the spot of the music market that I suspect the AI prompt that started it was something like, “Write me a catchy country song that mimics the style of chart toppers over the past two years.” Real Music on Ice? It’s not just country music that’s getting the AI love. A group called Fake Music Lab (at least it’s honest!) made a video called “Reimagining ‘Ice Ice Baby’ as a soul song,” taking the ’90s hit rap song by Vanilla Ice and using AI to generate what Ice himself might call a pretty dope melody. In fact, in a twist, Vanilla Ice apparently thought the AI version of his song was so VIP that he reposted it on his own YouTube channel. I guess anything less than the best is not a felony after all. If ’90s rap is not immune, then other genres are certainly fair game. Fake Music Lab also has a bluegrass version of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” and an outfit called ReGrooved has a “dark country” version of Phil Collins’ “In The Air Tonight.” For these AI cover songs, the flattery of imitation (and paid royalties on the songs) may outweigh any copyright or brand-dilution concerns the artist might have. Given that they’re all robotic voices, no singers were harmed in the production of these songs—except the ones who didn’t get the job. In Praise of Robots When it comes to praising the Lord through music, Asaph the psalmist said it best: So we will not be silent before You. Morning and evening, Your praise will dwell on our lips. Our children will learn the refrain of Your faithfulness, and their children after them will proclaim it anew. For great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; His steadfast love is the song that upholds the world. Except Asaph never said that. ChatGPT said it when I asked it to write me a psalm in the style of Asaph that talks about singing praises. It turns out AI is well-versed enough in the Scriptures to write a pretty decent psalm.  And it’s not just chatbots writing verse on demand. Just like in country and pop music, AI is generating lyrics, music, and vocals for Christian songs. For example, a YouTube channel called Bible Folk has released in recent months a spate of long videos that contain dozens of songs based on books of the Bible. One video, titled “If the Apostle Paul sang Romans in Folk, it would sound like this …” tackles themes from the book of Romans. With folk backing tracks and a country-like voice, the “album” features songs with lyrics like: I am not ashamed of the gospel call It is the path that saves us all To everyone who will believe the gift of God we freely receive. Like Breaking Rust’s “Walk My Walk,” the music is not awful, especially when compared with its contemporary Christian music competition. Though the Bible Folk lyrics are generally pretty simple, they are at times more theologically robust than some CCM songs. The lyric above is, after all, a paraphrase of Romans 1:16—and if we apply poetic license broadly, a real person writing such songs might be applauded. But a real person is not writing, and a real person is not singing, and any applause would fall on deaf ears—if there were any performers’ ears to hear. These AI songs are at best arrangements of material that living musicians have explored and written in the past century or so of recorded music. All in good fun, there’s nothing inherently wrong with using a computer to make ordered sounds. The Wisdom of Ick But there’s something about AI music—especially of the Christian sort—that doesn’t sit well. And it’s hard to say what that wrong feeling is. A certain “ick factor” presents itself when you find out that it’s a machine writing the song, writing and playing the beat, and packaging it all together. The late ethicist Leon Kass, when describing a similar feeling people get when thinking about human cloning, called this the wisdom of repugnance: Revulsion is not an argument; and some of yesterday’s repugnances are today calmly accepted— though, one must add, not always for the better. In crucial cases, however, repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it. That wisdom is an echo of what David the (real) psalmist sang about in Psalm 8:4-6: What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet Machines may be shiny and new, but they are not crowned by God with glory and honor. And last I checked, machines are still included in the “all things” under the feet of mankind. When those things get turned upside down, the world feels a bit more icky. I could be wrong, but I suspect that the lasting difference between AI music and music made by human beings will be that AI music will not be lasting. The classic AI tracks of yesteryear will fade into obscurity within months, to be remembered only by future AIs who train themselves on available music.  Only real music will persist, and anything less than the best is a felony. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. Originally published by The Washington Stand The post Artificial Music for Artificial Ears: AI Rocks the Jukebox appeared first on The Daily Signal.

On this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler examine how the Left put forth the “waxen effigy” of former President Joe Biden, then used the autopen to enact its radical policies. Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of 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: Well, Victor, since we’re talking about fake things, let’s talk about the autopen, which was used by Joe Biden in thousands of ways to free people, criminals, hardcore criminals, murderers, dirt bags, etc. We’ve heard a lot about this for the last year, and [President] Donald Trump put out a statement the other day and I’d like to get your comments on it. Here’s what he wrote on Truth Social: Any document signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the auto pen, which was approximately 92% of them is hereby terminated and no further force or effect. The autopen is not allowed to be used if approval is not specifically given by the president of the United States. The radical left lunatics, circling Biden around the beautiful Resolute Desk in the Oval Office took the presidency away from him. I’m hereby canceling all executive orders and anything else that was not directly signed by Crooked Joe Biden because the people who operated the autopen did so illegally. Joe Biden was not involved in the autopen process, and if he says he was, he will be brought up on charges of perjury. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Victor Davis Hanson: That raises a lot of issues. No. 1, I don’t know how you post facto, go back and undo things that he did. I mean, I don’t know why he pardoned Hunter Biden, [former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, I think [Dr. Anthony] Fauci. Are all of those invalid, and if so, who adjudicates that? What if they say, “No, he’s pardon me”? So, they’re all going to have to go through the courts. When Trump says things like “Sleepy Joe Biden” and all of this, people, they kind of roll their eyes and [think], “There goes Trump.” But actually, he’s responding to something that is quite egregious. We’ve never had it in American history. We came close with Woodrow Wilson and Edith Wilson covering up his stroke for over a year. But we never really had a president that at some point, I think, in the campaign of 2020, there were two decisions made. One, that the Democratic Party was going to lose, according to the polls, if they nominated an Elizabeth Warren, a Cory Booker, a Bernie Sanders, a Pete Buttigieg, etc. And two, given that Joe Biden was the only viable candidate, they were going to use him as a moderate veneer and sell him to the American people as a return to normalcy. That is, we would start remembering what Joe Biden said in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Remember when he talked about a jungle and crime, and his poor mother was endangered, and he was against illegal immigration. So, they passed that nonexistent Joe Biden as a waxen effigy. Then they used him, and they perpetrated the most radical agenda, I think more radical than the New Deal. They destroyed the border. They destroyed jurisprudence as we know it. They weaponized all the [Justice Department], the FBI, the CIA. They destroyed deterrence abroad. They sort of begged Iran to get back in the Iran deal. The Kabul pullout was the worst military disaster in the last 50 years. It empowered [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to go into [Ukraine]. I could go on. So, Trump has a point, and the question is, they knew he was incompetent, non compos mentis. He was not in control of his faculties. And then they had another agenda and that was to get particular green, DEI, ESG, radical initiatives into the Cabinet and the institutions that had no public support. And they put them on the desk, and they used the autopen and to the degree Joe Biden knew about it, and I don’t think he even did. There’s no way that he can ever under oath identify any of those things in detail. Just no way it’s going to happen. So, then the question is, are they going to call in the people who did it and what will they say? “Well, I talked to Biden.” Well, do you have documents? “No.” And then people will say “To what degree does Trump”—as do all presidents—“use the autopen?” And he’ll have to explain that he has done it on his direction, or he has an executive order, or he has a written chief of staff order, or somebody is in the room with him. I don’t know. But he’s got a good point is what I’m trying to say. And it sounds crazy, but what was really crazy is what they did. This was the biggest sham perpetrated on the American people in my lifetime. It makes Watergate look like a joke. They had somebody who completely was a zombie and didn’t know where he was or what he was saying, and they used him as a prop to initiate and advance a radical agenda that had it been explicit and open, and people knew what they were going to do about the border or crime or critical race, critical legal theory, or DEI, they would’ve never voted for it. They knew that and that’s why they kicked out all the other nominees. Like dominoes, they quit the primary of 2020. He hadn’t won Nevada, he hadn’t won New Hampshire, he hadn’t won Iowa. And Jim Clyburn and everybody said, “I will deliver the black vote in South Carolina. And we will win, and then we will get them all out. We’ll promise them various things. We’ll promise Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders a socialist agenda. We will promise Pete Buttigieg a cabinet post, etc.” And that’s where we are. And Trump, he’s got a right to be furious, and that he doesn’t speak about it in sober and judicious tones, a lot of people resent that. But compared to what actually happened, his description—as uncouth and crude as it can be—is absolutely spot on. 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 Autopen and the ‘Waxen Effigy’ President appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Left is attacking pregnancy centers again. Today the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case of First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Platkin. First Choice is a network of pregnancy resource centers (PRCs) serving vulnerable pregnant women in New Jersey. Matthew Platkin is New Jersey’s attorney general, and he is trying to make life hell for PRCs in his state. How? By launching a series of politically targeted lawsuits with the goal of donor doxing and death by paperwork.  Platkin has targeted First Choice on the basis of its religious and pro-life views by issuing the organization a burdensome subpoena seeking confidential donor and client information. It’s good old-fashioned lawfare. I say the Left is attacking PRCs again, but it’s never really stopped. The last time PRCs had their day at the Supreme Court it was because Democrats, led by then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris, tried to force the pro-life centers to advertise and refer for abortion, a violation of their free speech and, in many cases, religious beliefs. Thankfully, the Supreme Court agreed with the PRCs. Since then, the Left has only turned up the pressure on PRCs through rhetorical attacks, legal harassment, and outright vandalism and violence. Why? Because pregnancy resource centers are unquestionably an increasingly important—and arguably essential—part of a post-Dobbs world that shifted the legal landscape around abortion. Yet the stubborn realities of crisis pregnancy have not. Pregnancy resource centers exist not only to meet the immediate needs of those women, but also to help those who want to be moms thrive in that role. This perpetually vexes the Left’s pro-choice idealogues. What Pregnancy Resource Centers Do Pregnancy resource centers first stabilize an almost always unstable situation. They meet the immediate health and material needs of pregnant moms in crisis. For some, that means baby supplies (diapers and formula). In just one year, PRCs nationwide served an estimated 1.85 million people, providing 2 million baby outfits, 1.3 million packages of diapers, 19,000 strollers, and more than 30,000 car seats. In New Jersey, where Platkin is on the hunt, PRCs served more than 23,000 men, women, and children with 8,713 pregnancy tests, 6,872 ultrasounds performed by licensed medical professionals, 9025 packs of diapers, 75,472 baby outfits, and 1,658 cans of formula. For others, that help takes the form of housing. A woman named Monica found such help when fleeing domestic violence and homelessness while pregnant. Aid for Women pregnancy center’s maternity home, Heather’s House, took her in immediately and stayed with her for the course of her pregnancy and after she had a baby boy. The center’s staff even babysat while Monica took ESL classes. “I can’t even begin to express how much Aid for Women has impacted my life. I was able to work on establishing a life for me and my son,” she said in an interview. “Everything in my life has been touched by Aid for Women and their support of me, not just having a place to live, but real support of me as a woman and as a person, has changed the direction both of our lives could have gone.” Helping mothers establish a life is what PRCs specialize in. An estimated 1 in 4 women report their abortion as “unwanted or coerced,” 60% of post-abortive women say they would have preferred to have their baby if they had more emotional or financial support. One study found that 61% of women reported “high levels of pressure” to have abortions. PRCs provide women the support they need to not only make a true choice, but also to thrive as mothers. Many offer career counseling, life coaching and parenting classes. One PRC so empowered Claire Anctil-Cathey that the former client went on to establish one herself. She said her pregnancy was like “being in total darkness” until she sought help at a PRC. It was like “being led into the light by people who just stepped in and cared for me and provided me the support that I needed one step at a time to get to a place where I was on my feet.” “No one’s ever looked at them and said, ‘Well, you can do this, and we can help you,’” Claire says of her center’s clients. “Our main goal is to provide these women with the same sort of support that they would have from a loving, healthy family.” This is what New Jersey’s attorney general and the Left want to shut down. So far, it isn’t working. The number of PRCs increased by 35% over a decade, and they now outnumber abortion clinics by a 3-to-1 ratio. Small wonder that 70% of those polled said PRCs should receive public funding. They have become an essential part of a new, genuinely pro-mother era. The Supreme Court should shield them from ideological attacks aimed at shuttering them.   We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post The Supreme Court Can End New Jersey’s War on Pregnancy Resource Centers appeared first on The Daily Signal.

With time winding down before the House breaks for Christmas, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is hitting Republicans’ pressure points. On Monday, Jeffries announced he is introducing a discharge petition—a way to circumvent Republican leadership—in a bid to extend COVID-19-era enhanced health care premium tax credits before they expire.  Jeffries appears to be trying to hit Republicans where it hurts, fomenting dissent in their caucus and gaining political momentum off of the health care issue. Discharge Mayhem Discharge petitions, which require 218 members to sign on in order to force consideration of a bill, have become increasingly common in this Congress. The petitions are a thorn in the side of leadership, granting Democrats power in the minority. The mechanism allows a member to force a vote on legislation that leadership is not putting on the floor once the petition collects 218 signatures. The petition then sets off a timer of seven legislative days for the petition to “ripen,” at which point the speaker is given two legislative days to schedule a vote. Recently, a discharge petition brought forward by Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Ro Khanna, D-Calif., forced consideration of a bill to compel the release of information on the now-deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine, has also successfully gathered the 218 signatures necessary to force consideration of a bill to protect federal employees’ union rights. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., has also submitted a discharge petition to force a vote on his bill to sanction Russia, and the backers of a bipartisan bill to ban stock trading among members have discussed a discharge petition to force it on to the floor, as well. Jeffries Not Interested in Negotiating Jeffries is demanding a three-year, clean extension of the Obamacare premium tax credits—an idea most Republicans have rejected.  “We only need a handful of Republicans to join us in order to save the healthcare of tens of millions of Americans,” Jeffries writes in his letter announcing the initiative. “It’s time for the do-nothing Republican Congress to proceed with urgency.” This demand for a clean extension—despite Republicans criticisms of the credits as market-distorting, prone to fraud, and permissive of abortion—is in contrast with the openness some Democrats previously expressed to negotiate and reform the credits with Republicans. “We have to write a version that is good for our values that helps people, but also is designed to get some Republican votes,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said shortly before the shutdown ended.  Kaine ultimately voted to end the shutdown after receiving Republican guarantees of a vote on whether or not to extend the credits. “Time has run out on Republican inaction,” Jeffries told The Daily Signal when asked why he would propose a clean extension. The credits, which were boosted to higher levels and granted to higher earners under President Joe Biden, were set to expire at the end of 2025 by Democrats. “We have a discharge petition that if it received an up or down vote in the House of Representatives, we are confident will pass,” Jeffries told The Daily Signal. “But obviously, [Speaker of the House] Mike Johnson [R-La.] has zero interest in protecting the health care of the American people. Instead, these extremists are gutting the health care of the people that they represent, including in the state of Louisiana.” In response to Jeffries’ statement, a spokeswoman for Johnson told The Daily Signal, “Democrats are once again fabricating a narrative and misrepresenting the speaker’s position. The speaker welcomes President Trump’s efforts to lower health care costs, and any White House input is a meaningful contribution to the thoughtful, deliberative conversations taking place in Congress.” The White House, although it has not released any final proposal of how to resolve the subsidy expiration issue, has reportedly flirted with the idea of a two-year extension of the credits, involving reforms such as ending zero-premium credits. She added, “After 43 days of the Democrat Shutdown—during which they demanded bipartisan talks and direct White House engagement—Democrats now attacked the mere possibility of President Trump’s involvement. If Democrats truly want to address health care affordability, why would they reject a plan they haven’t even seen? Democrats clearly prefer a partisan fight over working towards a bipartisan solution.” The Path Forward Jeffries’ discharge petition might be more of a messaging ploy than an actual attempt at passing legislation, as Democrats have consistently messaged on purported Republican attacks on health care and entitlement programs. In the Senate, Republicans are still discussing proposals for replacing the COVID-19-era credits, such as Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy’s proposed flexible savings accounts, which, if enacted, would allow consumers more flexibility in shopping for health care coverage and eliminate direct subsidies to insurance companies. Jeffries suggests that, with total Democrat unanimity in the House, picking up the five necessary Republican defectors is a possibility. “I guess we can always hope that there are a handful of Republicans who will actually do what they said that they would do once their shutdown ended, which is to work with Democrats to find a path forward,” he told reporters Monday. Democrats’ success in this attempt would have to involve an extraordinary revolt against Republican leadership, going against the long-established position that the credits need reform if they are to be extended at all. The post Jeffries Tries to Sidestep Republican Leadership on Health Care appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Fraudsters in the Somali community of Minnesota stole billions of dollars from American taxpayers over a period of years, and the state government did nothing to stop it. That outrageous scandal has finally become part of a “national conversation” after City Journal published a stunning article written by Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe titled “The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer” in November. Al-Shabaab is a Somalia-based Islamist terror organization. “Minnesota is drowning in fraud. Billions in taxpayer dollars have been stolen during the administration of Governor Tim Walz alone,” Rufo and Thorpe wrote. “Democratic state officials, overseeing one of the most generous welfare regimes in the country, are asleep at the switch. And the media, duty-bound by progressive pieties, refuse to connect the dots.” The piece highlighted truly titanic fraud schemes involving various state welfare programs, including “Feeding Our Future,” a program that received hundreds of millions of dollars annually and was ultimately “being used to fund lavish lifestyles, purchase luxury vehicles, and buy real estate in the United States, Turkey, and Kenya.” The report set off a firestorm. Rufo was accused of being anti-immigrant and racist. Many on social media accused him of exaggerating the problem. But then The New York Times published a follow-up basically confirming that Minnesota’s social services were essentially eviscerated by Somali fraudsters under Walz’s watch. There was a very important line in this piece provided by Ahmed Samatar, a professor at Macalester College. Samatar said, according to the Times, that “Somali refugees who came to the United States after their country’s civil war were raised in a culture in which stealing from the country’s dysfunctional and corrupt government was widespread.” This sort of gets to the heart of why immigration policies have been so out of whack and destructive in Western countries for a generation, producing the current justified backlash. It should be no surprise that in concentrated Somali communities, like the ones that exist in Minnesota, similar scams have taken place. One doesn’t need to be wholly against immigration to understand that. After all, Thomas Jefferson warned in his famed “Notes on the State of Virginia” about taking in too many people from “absolute monarchies” who will bring with them “the principles of the governments they leave imbibed in their early youth.” “These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children,” Jefferson wrote. “In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us in legislation. Our laws and institutions must therefore be guarded with jealous attention; and in order to preserve them, we must incorporate our immigrants into the body of our people.” He recommended essentially slowing our roll bringing in people from such places. That’s prudence, not nativism. What we’ve seen under President Joe Biden and Democrat governors like Walz, is the furthest thing from prudence. Instead, our country has been subjected to a reckless, cynical vote grab combined with the toxic empathy of modern leftism. President Donald Trump said on Sunday that the U.S. needs to stop taking people in from countries like Somalia where they have “virtually no government” and “then they come into our country and tell us how to run our country.” .@POTUS: "Countries like Somalia, that have virtually no government, no military — all they do is go around killing each other, then they come into our country and tell us how to run our country. WE DON'T WANT THEM." pic.twitter.com/x8oVgKAXR4— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) November 30, 2025 The president is on to something here when talking about the Somalia issue. The war-torn nation typically ranks as one of the most corrupt on Earth. Theft of public money is commonplace. In 2022 it was discovered that two-thirds of the five thousand civil servants in Somalia didn’t report to work and in many cases were likely “ghost employees” according to the Horn Observer. Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud groused about this issue. “There are more than 5,000 civil servants registered in our biometric system, but only 1,500 of them report to work every day,” he said, according to the Horn Observer. “Where are the rest? They do not exist or they do not live in the country. However, they are still paid. They are thieves and their superiors who accepted this scheme are also thieves. They are simply stealing public money.” Hassan may be right, but it seems he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. He’s been accused of corruption related to public land sales. There has been, no surprise, widespread problems with theft of international aid in Somalia too. The European Union had to temporarily suspend Somalia’s World Food Programme in 2023 because of widespread theft. Reuters reported how the program was supposed to send $130 a month to displaced persons in a refugee camp, but they would frequently only receive $65 after it was handled by the camp manager. In 2024 the Minnesota Informer published an interesting piece about the corruption clearly taking place among Somalis in Minnesota. It was written by Kayseh Magan, a man with a Somali background who had worked as a fraud investigator in the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office. Magan explained that widespread fraud was common in the Somali community. He said that this crime problem is the classic case of when “desire meets opportunity.” Magan wrote that “Minnesota’s public programs don’t adequately guard against organized fraud.” Part of the issue: The fraudsters have exploited “the burgeoning political power of the Somali community, and the feckless fear that establishment politicians and state agencies show when confronted with charges of racism or Islamophobia.” It’s here we see the crisis facing many Western governments playing out in the most extreme way in Minnesota. They’ve combined a generous welfare state with the near religious belief in mass immigration from developing, “third world” countries as Trump called them. To even question that system is to be ostracized as part of the wholly unacceptable “far right.” The result in Europe, after years of evidence that the system isn’t working, is that governments literally silence people who disagree with unlimited immigration. The U.K. is conducting this Orwellian experiment in tyranny as I write this. What we are seeing in the United States is hopefully an immigration reset of sorts. More Americans now question the value that unlimited, unchecked migration from dysfunctional countries brings to ours. What is happening in Minnesota needs to stop. The country can’t afford it. The post Thomas Jefferson Could Have Predicted Massive Somali Minnesota Fraud Schemes appeared first on The Daily Signal.