A pioneer. The post Who was the first woman to have a song banned by the BBC? first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Don't you know you've really got to jerk it out? The post ‘Paper Tigers’: the forgotten indie album Steve Jones adored first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

A grand opening. The post The Arctic Monkeys song Matt Helders said “felt like a sense of achievement” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

The road not taken. The post The would-be Wham! shows they regretted not playing: “A final tour to say goodbye to our fans” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

On September 18, the first wide-ranging interview of Pope Leo IV was published in a book titled Leo XIV: Citizen of the World, Missionary of the XXI Century. The book, which was published in Spanish, has been described as a “collaboration” with the pope, given that His Holiness was given the opportunity to review it and suggest any changes he deemed necessary. As such, it offers an especially revealing look at who the pope believes himself to be amidst the lingering questions in the secular and religious press on who this new pope truly is. “Families need to be supported,” he said…. “They call it the traditional family. The family is father and mother and children.” The New York Times’ interest in the book was to examine the Catholic response to it more than its actual content. That response being, in the Times’ estimation, that Catholics with a variety of political and ideological leanings are continuing to claim, even after the publication of this long-form interview, that the pope fits into their camp. “Liberal? Conservative? Cubs Fan? Catholics Project Many Images Onto Pope,” reads the headline. I would submit, however, that more interesting is what the pope actually says in the book about himself to Elise Ann Allen, Crux’s senior correspondent in Rome and a fellow American. Allen, who has affectionate regard for the pope and describes his good character and kindness, began by asking him head-on “Who is Robert Francis Prevost? Who Is Pope Leo XIV?” The pope’s immediate response was to point to his conviction that every human being is touched by God’s gifts of dignity, goodness, and grace. He described himself as, “Someone who has a deep appreciation for humanity … a deep faith that, in some way, the mystery of Jesus Christ, God incarnate, reaches all of us. I believe that I have the ability to sit with other people and recognize the goodness in them.” He then shifted to discussing the traits that shape his approach to dialogue. This is notable given the strong emphasis that the pope has placed on listening to a variety of voices in these first four months of his papacy — an emphasis that has brought about considerable goodwill from many sides amidst division, and perhaps caused, as the New York Times put it, “followers to project their hopes and expectations onto a pope who has so far resisted identifying clearly with any particular camp.” The pope said, “In conversation, in dialogue, in respect, I am able to see the good, whether the other person is someone of faith or not, and to share some of the happiness and hope of what it means to be alive, the gift of life.” According to the pope, we should not fear that his end goal is dialogue, and that we will continue forever in a pontificate in which no major decisions are ever made. Answering Allen’s question of what makes him such a respected leader, Pope Leo pointed to two factors: his ability to listen and his ability to be decisive: I know how to listen, I believe, quite well. When I am with people, I respect everyone’s point of view, but then I also reach a point with them, when it is possible, to say, “We have to make a decision here, friends. Somehow, let’s try to unite everyone’s ideas.” It’s not only about compromise. It’s not only about finding the lowest common denominator. It’s about looking ahead and bringing the people with you as you do it. I’m not a lone ranger, I never have been. It’s the way to build this sense of “We’re in this together,” and, again, respect for every member of the group, of the Church, of the community…. [This is present] in my own formation, certainly based on the sense of the Church of Vatican II, trying to be part of building this kind of Church that truly invites the participation of all of its members. The pope went on to describe other personal traits that inform his leadership, noting in particular, “I’m adventurous. Some people would use the word brave, others ‘crazy,’ but I’m willing to move forward.” This makes sense given his childhood dream of becoming a missionary in Africa that he revealed at another point in his interview and his many years persisting despite facing grave dangers as a missionary in Peru. He then, quite assuredly, spoke of his own decisiveness: I am capable of being decisive when it is necessary to be decisive, which is another aspect of leadership that sometimes people lack. You can’t just go around in circles thinking, “Let’s think about this and talk about this forever.” You have to make decisions in order to move forward. I’m capable of doing that, and I’m not afraid to do that. You don’t always make the right decision, sometimes you make mistakes, but I guess the people have the sense that they feel invited, they feel listened to, and they know that there will be progress on something. This sense of decisiveness comes amidst his very “synodal” papacy, synodality being to him “an attitude, an openness, a willingness to understand.” Synodality is an “important dimension,” he said, of “how we live our life as the Church.” He said it “consists in each of its members having a voice and a role to play through prayer, reflection.” One means through which we can see how the pontiff puts this method of listening and decisiveness into action is through how he approaches in his interview the, as he put it, “hot-button” issue of homosexuality. While much of the pope’s interview with Allen is only available in Spanish translation in the book, the portion in which he discusses the LGBTQ issue was published by Crux in video form in the original English. The pontiff explained that in the “back of [his] mind” on this issue is a comment from a cardinal from the eastern part of the world, who said that the Western world is “fixated, obsessed with sexuality.” It’s at the back of his mind, Pope Leo said, “because of what I’ve already tried to demonstrate and live out in terms of my understanding of being whole at this time in history. I’m trying to not continue to polarize, promote polarization in the church.” The pope gestured toward welcoming and inviting everyone, regardless of sexual identity: “And I am trying to say, this is what Pope Francis said very clearly when he would say ‘Todos, Todos, Todos,’ everyone’s invited in. But I don’t invite a person in because they are or are not of any specific identity. I invite the person in because he’s a son or daughter of God.” Then the pope made the comments that have drawn attention. He said, “I mean obviously at some point people want Church doctrine to change and they want attitudes to change. I think we have to change attitudes before we ever change doctrine. I find it highly unlikely, certainly in the immediate future, that the Church’s doctrine, in terms of what the church teaches about sexuality, what the Church teaches about marriage [will change].” The phrase “I think we have to change attitudes before we ever change doctrine” could be interpreted as motioning toward the idea that a change in doctrine on this matter would be good but that changing attitudes first would be necessary. But Jonathan Liedl wrote this week in the National Catholic Register that he found “compelling” the explanation that the pope chose these words because he decided they were “the best way to lower expectations for change without necessarily pushing away those who have come to expect it as a possibility.” The “non-reaction of the Church” to these words, Liedl explains, comes in the context of a papacy in which the “interpretive key” is the pope’s effort to foster unity. Notably, Crux, as well as the Spanish translation in Allen’s book, have transcribed this pertinent phrase from the pope differently than I heard it, and I rolled the tape four times. Allen’s version of the quote says, “[W]e have to change attitudes before we even think about changing what the Church says about any given question.” This softens and generalizes the pope’s comments. Perhaps the pope, who reviewed the book, wanted to clarify his comments. Regardless, the pope, while gesturing openness toward those concerned with getting the Church to accept homosexuality, softly said that he finds it “highly unlikely” that the Church’s doctrine on the matter will change in the “immediate future.” Later, he said more firmly, “But I think that the Church’s teaching will continue as it is, and that’s what I have to say about that for right now.” The pope also used the opportunity to discuss the centrality to society of marriage, specifically meaning a man and a woman united together. “Families need to be supported,” he said. “They call it the traditional family. The family is father and mother and children. I think that the role of the family in society, which has at times suffered in recent decades, I think that that once again has to be recognized, strengthened.” Interestingly, Pope Leo discussed the possibility that divisions in society today might emerge from the fact that many have been deprived of the opportunity to grow up in a traditional family. “And I just wonder,” he said, “about if the question about polarization and how people treat one another doesn’t also come from situations where people did not grow up in the context of a family where we learn, that’s the first place you learn how to love one another, how to live with one another, how to talk with one another, and how to form the bonds of communion. That’s the family. If you take away that basic building block, it becomes very difficult to learn that in other ways.” The pope also, in the context of this discussion, made perhaps the first decisive action on a matter of import and controversy. He stated that the published rituals of blessing “people who love one another” in Germany go “specifically against the document that Pope Francis approved, Fiducia Supplicans.” The late pontiff’s document allows for “non-liturgical” blessings of couples in “irregular relationships,” including same-sex relationships, but calls for “spontaneous blessings.” A later press release clarified that these blessings should not take place in a prominent place, suggested that a “catechesis” explaining “that these types of blessings are not an endorsement of the life led by those who request them” might be necessary alongside the blessing, and said that such blessings should be “neither liturgical nor ritualised.” Here we have the pope listening to those from various sides on an issue of import, offering a posture of unity, giving a (mostly) conclusive answer: “I think that the Church’s teaching will continue as it is,” and stating decisively opposition to the manner in which certain German bishops have conducted themselves in regard to blessings for same-sex couples. Whether he will go beyond simply stating his opposition to such blessings remains unclear for the time being. On Friday, the pope also put on display the decisiveness he advertised when he made his first major appointment. He filled his previous, powerful spot as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops. Archbishop Filippo Iannone, who is currently prefect of the Dicastery for Legislative Texts, and is known for being a level-headed veteran bureaucrat and canonist, will take on the role of helping the pope to select bishops. Iannone notably had a hand in efforts to curtail the rebellious German church’s “Synodal Way,” which, among other things, called for the creation of a “synodal committee” consisting of bishops and laypeople who would make major decisions. Pope Leo, before he was named pope, was one of the top Vatican officials working to resolve the German issue, and it is known that he is seeking to learn German, potentially to help deal with the crisis created by the German Church. One Vatican source close to the Jesuit America magazine said that the pope’s selection of Iannone was “an enigma” and “difficult to decipher.” An alternative interpretation is that Archbishop Iannone will bring a steady hand and a dedication to thoroughness and procedure. As the pope continues to shift from his period of listening to one of decisiveness, it’s worth noting what Leo said is the most “fundamental role” of the successor Peter: confirming others in the faith. “Being pope, successor to Peter, asked to confirm others in their faith, which is the most important part, is also something that can happen only by the grace of God,” he said. ***** The pope made one more thing clear in his interview: He feels a strong connection to his American identity. While I’m sure the pope loves Peru, and he has said so, the reality is that he obtained Peruvian citizenship because it was a requirement for being a bishop there. This is a man who is obsessed with Peeps, loves Midwestern roadtrips, and whose father served in the Navy in World War II. And so, when the pope was asked if he identifies more as a Peruvian or as an American, he said, “I’m obviously an American, and I very much feel that I’m an American.” Peru, he added, “is a part of who I am.” READ MORE from Ellie Gardey Holmes: ‘Sexual Life of Colonialism’ Professor Denied Tenure at Harvard The SPLC and the Radicalization of Charlie Kirk’s Killer Harvard Kennedy School Peddles Ecomysticism

Last summer, the Democratic National Convention centered on abortion, the wholesale slaughter of innocent, unborn children. Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz touted the party’s record on abortion; Gov. Andy Beshear (D-Ky.) actually suggested that someone should rape a member of then-Sen. J.D. Vance’s family to see if he would still oppose abortion; a Planned Parenthood trailer parked outside committing abortions and performing sterilizations, and practically all Democrats united behind the unholy practice of killing unborn babies, citing “abortion” more than a dozen times in the party’s platform, compared to only a handful of mentions in years past. It’s not a surprise that Cupich is overlooking the Catholic Church’s infallible, perennial moral instruction on abortion in favor of his own subversive take on immigration. The abortion-centered event was hosted in Chicago and the city’s Catholic archbishop, Cardinal Blase Cupich, spoke at the abortion-celebratory extravaganza. The cardinal spoke for less than four minutes but made no mention of either Christ or the Catholic Church’s age-old moral teachings on abortion. He even hid his pectoral cross. Is it any surprise then that the same Cardinal Cupich has decided to bestow the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Lifetime Achievement Award upon pro-abortion Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who calls himself a Catholic despite his radical support for butchering the unborn? In fact, when Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Durbin’s home diocese of Springfield barred the pro-abortion politician from receiving Holy Communion, Cupich welcomed the senator to desecrate the Body and Blood of Christ in the Windy City. Paprocki, along with a cadre of other bishops, have called on Cupich not to honor Durbin, due to the senator’s decades of pro-abortion policies. Is it any surprise that the same Cardinal Cupich has defended his decision to honor Durbin? “At the heart of the consistent ethic of life is the recognition that Catholic teaching on life and dignity cannot be reduced to a single issue, even an issue as important as abortion,” Cupich wrote in a press statement. No, Durbin’s decades of aggressive support for abortion pales in comparison to his warped position on immigration, which just so happens to align with the cardinal’s own warped position on immigration. “The recognition of [Durbin’s] defense of immigrants at this moment, when they are subjected to terror and harm, is not something to be regretted, but a reflection that the Lord stands profoundly with both immigrants who are in danger and those who work to protect them,” Cupich claimed. It’s not a surprise that Cupich is overlooking the Catholic Church’s infallible, perennial moral instruction on abortion in favor of his own subversive take on immigration. But it should be. The Catholic Church is abundantly clear that the Eucharist is the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ Himself. The newly-canonized St. Carlo Acutis dedicated his short life to documenting Eucharistic miracles, when the consecrated Host has bled or turned to flesh in the hands of the priest. St. Clare of Assisi stood outside the convent at San Damiano holding the Eucharist high and repelling a horde of Saracen invaders. When an Albigensian heretic denied Christ’s presence in the Blessed Sacrament, St. Anthony of Padua held the Eucharist high before a starving donkey, who abandoned his trough of hay to kneel before the Blessed Sacrament. In the eighth century, when a monk questioned Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, the host turned to bleeding heart tissue in his hands. Centuries later, in the 1970s, a doctor examined the relics, preserved in the Church of San Francesco in Lanciano, and determined that the tissue was myocardial and the blood had no preservatives. When an Italian priest placed a Eucharistic host between the pages of his breviary, instead of in a pyx, to take to an ailing parishioner, the host bled through the breviary pages. The Eucharist is the very flesh of Christ which was scourged at a pillar in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago; the very flesh which carried a cross to Golgotha, loaded with the sins of all mankind; the very flesh which hung on that cross after crying out, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34); the very flesh which was pierced with a lance and poured out blood and water. And yet Chicago’s cardinal blithely allows Durbin, upon whose soul the blood of countless slaughtered children must weigh, to desecrate that very flesh every Sunday. The least that Cupich could do is not rub salt in Christ’s wounds by giving Durbin an award.

What does it mean to recognize a country that hasn’t existed before? To understand, we can look back at a case that some may be old enough to recall.  Within mere minutes of its declaring independence in 1948, President Harry Truman offered the new state of Israel de facto recognition. Great Britain had just lowered its flag and left what they had called the Palestine Mandate — the section of the now-defunct Ottoman Empire that stretched from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and that Britain had invaded and taken to govern after World War I. It is only faithful service to our highest ideals that will overcome the preening, empty platitudes of the temporarily powerful. The United Nations had voted in late 1947 on a partition of that territory into regions to be under Jewish or Arab sovereignty as well as a section in the middle, including Jerusalem, that would be under international control. The UN’s plan was to give each distinct community living there its own area to govern. The map was drawn, the borders of were precisely defined.  The Jewish community had a long-established quasi-government, the Jewish Agency. The British constituted the official government of the Mandate under the treaties that ended World War I and backed by the League of Nations, the predecessor to the UN, which had not yet been exposed as unable to keep the world from another world war.  Nonetheless, the Jewish Agency served as an effective government of a Jewish community who for centuries gave allegiance to a law whose grip on the people’s affection was deeper than anything that could be forced by a king or prince. When the British left, that fully functioning government seamlessly took over the helm of the newly independent state. At the moment it declared its independence, this new fully functional state set before the world exactly what it was about and to what principles it held itself accountable. Notable is this paragraph:  THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions. At its very start, the Declaration set out the historic basis of the Jews’ claim for statehood in this place, making clear that Truman’s recognition would be not of a new state, but of a resurrected one. The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books. After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom. So, in sum, when Truman offered his recognition, it was to a renewed state, with defined borders, with a working government formally dedicated to equality of social and political rights for all its inhabitants, whatever their religion, race, or sex.  This week, the Left governments of Canada, Britain, and Australia all recognized a Palestinian state. Clearly, they wish their recognition to have the power of Truman’s recognition of nearly eighty years ago, the significant recognition of an actual, defined, self-governing state dedicated to the high principles that make modern nationhood legitimate. But these leftist governments, who are each dependent on a bloc of voters steeped in the tradition of Middle East tyranny and contemptuous of a West they see as fatuous and immobilized by guilt. These leftist governments are in craven fear that this bloc will desert them if they do not take a stand for a “free Palestine,” and so to buy some time before the next demand, they have decided to recognize — exactly what?  To begin with, there are no defined boundaries for the state they “recognize.” Do they include Gaza? Do they include all of Jerusalem? Do ABC (Australia, Britain, Canada) recognize the boundaries over which Jordan sent its armies in 1967? Do they recognize the boundaries set by the 1949 armistice, which was never accepted by any Palestinian political organization other than as a ceasefire line? Do they recognize the UN-devised boundaries of 1947, which were rejected by every Arab government at that time? Are they recognizing boundaries that those whom they are patronizing do not use to define themselves? Are they recognizing a government? If so, which? The ever-diminishing tunnel scum who emerge to strut and prey on civilians on October 7? Who validate their manhood by torture and rape, not sure that they are enough of a man unless they can force unwilling women and make them suffer and die? Are ABC recognizing them? If not, whom? The ones Hamas already executed when in 2006 they won the only election Gaza ever had? Or the ones growing up on a culture of hate, a Hitler Youth given not ten years but more than a half-century to work? Or perhaps they are recognizing the Palestinian Authority government, with its head elected by the people to a five-year term in 2005 — and that five-year term seems to stretch without end! True, elections have been announced several times since then, but, well, you know. Is this the government they are recognizing, to help peace? For democracy? What about a national, historical connection? Search the history books for a Palestinian nation, for a Palestinian language or culture. Good luck. The name Palestine was given to the area by the Romans almost 2,000 years ago, punishing the rebellious Jews by changing it from Judea to the name of the ancient Philistine enemy of old Israel, a people that long ago lost the distinctive language, culture, and organization that they had in Biblical days. Jewish books of the day knew of Arabs, one of many people in a land that has had many conquerors and immigrants. No one identified them with the Philistines of old. Both according to the Jewish literature of that time and of established scholarship, those groups were ethnically, politically, and linguistically distinct. What about a moral right? ABC are signifying that they are bowing to the endless propaganda that complains of an apartheid, genocide state, and that ABC will fix by recognizing those who claim to suffer such injustices. Yes, indeed, it is true that in the Middle East, followers of religions are being persecuted, decimated, forced to convert, disadvantaged economically and dispossessed, not allowed to live in their ancestral home solely on the basis of their religion, their population steadily decreasing and now homing in on zero. True! But of whom?  Before World War II, the 2,000-plus year old Iraqi Jewish community still had about 150,000 members. Today they are gone. Gaza had an ancient Jewish community as late as 1910. Gone — until the IDF was forced to come in by the mass slaughter and rape that Hamas members affirmed would be its permanent policy. How about the PA in Judea and Samaria (“West Bank”)? Hmm. Christian population there has plummeted, even though it is home to the formerly flourishing Christian communities of Nazareth and Bethlehem. In fact, the only country in the Middle East where Christians are thriving and sharing all political rights is — Israel. And as for genocide, Israel has shown its military capabilities. If it had wanted to maximize rather than minimize civilian casualties in a war forced upon it, there is no question that it could have hit the entire Gaza Strip on day one and killed almost everyone there in one day. But who was it that actually targeted civilians — families in their homes, kids at a dance festival — and called it legitimate means for achieving their political goals? And in all the years since Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, when the propagandists say that a genocidal blockade was at work, the population increased from about 1.44 million to about 2.11 million today, even with the losses in war. So what then are ABC recognizing? Not anything identifiable by boundaries, even though the famous “from the river to the sea” chant identifies what Hamas supporters really want. But that claim the moral exemplars leading ABC cannot embrace, for fear of alienating a larger bloc of voters. Caught between two blocs, they fudge, hoping both sides don’t realize how they float contradictory expectations. The pretensions of the ABC leaders are as transparent as the mythic emperor’s new clothes. They are infected with abracadabra moralism: moral action can be achieved by the mere mouthing of correct words. Britain’s Keir Starmer seems to imagine that transparently empty assertions of virtue clothe the absence of the hard engagement with reality that true moral virtue requires, even in domestic affairs. Only recently, Starmer assured the world of Britain’s immovable commitment to the bedrock of civilized politics, freedom of speech. Quoth the Prime Minister: “Free speech is one of the founding values of the United Kingdom, and we protect it jealously and fiercely and always will.”  Of course, however, he proposed a reasonable limit on this freedom. Said Sir Keir: “I’m also for protecting children from things that will harm them: pedophiles, those that peddle suicide.”  Fine words, sir. But how does that jibe with what the British government over which you have responsibility actually does?  Ask Irish comedian Graham Lineham, who posted online advice about what women should do to protect themselves if a human with male sexual organs enters a female-only space. Quite reasonably, he recommended attracting help by protesting this abusive intrusion. Quite reasonably, he suggested as a last resort disabling the intruder by striking him in that part of the male anatomy that is inordinately sensitive to pain. One would think that the valiant knight would be as concerned about women’s rights to a secure and private place, free from assertive men, as he would about children. The moral issue is the power imbalance making the women and the children particularly vulnerable and therefore virtue requires we protect them and take away the freedom of those who demonstrate their abusiveness. But no. The virtue of the Starmers of the world so often ends with the words. What actually happened in this case was, as Lineham described in The Spectator: The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. Not one, not two — five. They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets. In a country where pedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilized five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer for … tweets (and no, I promise you, I am not making this up). If moral-sounding pronouncements about his own nation’s bedrock principles mean nothing in the land under Sir Keir’s governance, then it is more than clear that his fine-sounding words about bringing Middle East peace by recognizing an undefined Palestinian state has not the slightest chance of bending the curve of history towards peace. The bad players from that rough neighborhood are not impressed. It only confirms their opinion that the West is a rotten civilization, ready to be smashed. And were the ABC leaders truly representative of the West, they would be right. It is up to us to join words with action and sweep away these leaders so inadequate for this stern moment. There will be no end of the violence and assassinations until the West chooses once again to back its words and ideals with action.  It is only faithful service to our highest ideals that will overcome the preening, empty platitudes of the temporarily powerful. READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: We Can and Will Triumph Over the Subversion of Language and Thought Kirk Was Loathed by Those Who Hate Independent Thought The Religious Roots of Separation of Church and State

As a longtime book author, lecturer, and journalist, a great part of my time is spent on research. So, the arrival of Artificial Intelligence would seem to be a great boon for my writing. I mostly use publicly available search and AI. But in thousands and thousands of searches, I have never received a positive right-of-center response first on a search. If looking for a specific product or named person or institution the regular search can usually find it. But finding a Right-oriented article often takes multiple searches going far down the list. Often there is nothing very far Right on the list at all. For AI searches, it is rare to find a serous conservative piece anywhere. But its inherent flaw is that AI can only calculate from backward in time. All data answers must by definition come from past facts or past predictions of future facts. I know, they would probably reply that there is no such thing as a serious conservative piece. I began my study of AI several years back, reporting here in The American Spectator, starting with a mainstream opinion source. It was a review of a book titled The Age of AI written by polymath Henry Kissinger, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and MIT Dean Daniel Huttenlocher. They compared artificial intelligence to 15th century moveable-print. Gutenberg’s revolutionary discovery unleashed a “profusion of modern human thought,” they found, “but AI frustrates thought” by creating “a gap between human knowledge and human understanding.” The authors argued that Sophisticated AI methods produce results without explaining why or how their process works. The GPT computer is prompted by a query from a human. The learning machine answers in literate text within seconds. It is able to do so because it has pregenerated representations of the vast data on which it was trained. Because the process by which it created those representations was developed by machine learning that reflects patterns and connections across vast amounts of text, the precise sources and reasons for any one representation’s particular features remain unknown. Moreover, they added, AI leadership is likely to concentrate in the hands of a few “institutions who control access to the limited number of machines capable of high-quality syntheses of reality.” And the enormous cost of the most effective machines will tend to “stay in the hands of a small subgroup domestically and in the control of a few superpowers internationally.” What do we know about those who actually produce such materials? A new comprehensive study of AI sources from the American Enterprise Institute is revealing. Authors Arthur Gailes, Edward J. Pinto, and Jonathan Chew studied five flagship large-language models from leading AI companies in 2025 (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI, and DeepSeek). They then gaged how 26 prominent U.S. think tanks were evaluated by AI ratings for accuracy on 12 criteria regarding their research quality, their institutional character, and their moral integrity. The analysis exposed a clear ideological bias and is summarized as: Center-left tanks have the highest scores (3.9 of 5), left and center-right together tie at (3.4 and 3.4), and right scores trail at (2.8). They find that this order of greater support from Left to Right persists through multiple sets of models, measures, and setting changes. Across the twelve evaluation criteria, center-left think tanks outscore right-leaning ones by 1.1 points (3.9 vs. 2.8). On the three headline criteria of Moral Integrity, Objectivity, and Research Quality, center-left think tanks outscore right-leaning ones by 1.6 points on Objectivity (3.4 vs. 1.8), 1.4 points on Research Quality (4.4 vs. 3), and 1 point on Moral Integrity (3.8 vs. 2.8) Sentiment analysis finds more positive wording in responses for left-of-center think tanks than for right-leaning peers. High rating correlations across providers indicate the bias originates in the model’s behavior itself, not in individual companies, specific user data, or in web retrievals. Why do these findings matter? Large language model planners decide who is cited, how it is funded, and who participates in the process. The fact that models “systematically boost center-left institutes and depress right-leaning ones, writers, committees, and donors may unknowingly amplify a one-sided view, creating feedback loops that entrench any initial bias.” Of course, the findings are no surprise. It is no secret that Harvard, Yale, the New York Times, The Washington Post, media generally, the Gates, Open Society, Lilly, and Ford foundations, and  think tanks  generally lean left. And since AI sets the future by relying on the past, which intellectually has been dominated by the center-left, the AEI findings make sense. As the philosopher Plato taught, the “poets” — or we would say the intellectuals and those who popularize them —will always shape the culture and will thus rule, for better or worse. But its inherent flaw is that AI can only calculate from backward in time. All data answers must by definition come from past facts or past predictions of future facts rather than forward facts (because they haven’t happened yet so cannot be measured). Guesses for the future are simply guesses. And that past must be dominated by the sources of those doing the actual fact collecting from the materials they consider the most valid — in media, academic studies. government research, and so forth. Rather than predicting the future, AI gets it backwards, actually dominated by the past. A vibrant future needs new thought for new times. One must confront the past with fresh ideas, such as with a futurist like George Gilder’s Life after Capitalism, with new understanding about government like Philip Howard’s Saving Can-do, and with entrepreneurial common sense and traditionalist moral underpinnings as in Robert Luddy’s Seeking Wisdom? AI can access large data and calculate, and that can be helpful. But the fundamental need is to understand artificial intelligence’s limits by challenging them with innate human intelligence. READ MORE from Donald Devine: Trump on Tariffs, Trade, and Pragmatic Populism The Washington Post Is Wrong: History Proves the Federal Reserve Econometric Models Cannot Make a Fiat Money System Work Pitfalls and Obstacles Plague Defense Modernization Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during his first term in office. A former professor, he is the author of 11 books, including his most recent, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, and Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles, and is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator.