After President Donald Trump was sworn in for a second term in January, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten asserted she was “really sad” about the inaugural speech.  “Rather than unifying people and building on America’s best qualities, Trump delivered a speech that was laden with divisiveness, showing that he is the president of only some Americans,” Weingarten said in an inauguration day statement. “Those of us in the labor movement and in public education are fighting for opportunity and dignity for all Americans.”  Perhaps not surprisingly, the AFT—one of America’s largest public school teachers unions—has participated in a deluge of lawsuits against the Trump administration policies. What’s more interesting is that several of the legal actions are seemingly at most education-adjacent, and in other cases have little or nothing to do with K-12 public education.  The AFT has sued regarding federal employees, immigration, and student loans for college students.  The AFT began as exclusively a teachers union, but has six separate divisions that also represents other public school employees such as teacher aides, custodians, and bus drivers, as well as health care workers and higher education faculty. The union’s website says it also represents public employees that includes federal and state employees.  “The AFT’s lawsuit spree against the Trump administration reveals what we’ve long known: these organizations have strayed far from their mission of representing teachers,” Aaron Withe, president of the Teacher Freedom Alliance, a conservative education group, told The Daily Signal. “This is exactly why so many teachers are choosing to opt out—they want representation focused on their profession, not a political action committee.” The litigation that is unrelated or only loosely connected to education includes:  In October, the AFT joined other labor unions in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s plans for mass firing of federal employees during the government shutdown. The lawsuit alleged it was illegal to fire furloughed government workers. Weingarten asserted in October that Trump wanted to “illegally fire tens of thousands of federal employees in a callous act of political retribution.” In October, the AFT joined a legal action opposing a Department of Transportation rule that prevented certain immigrants from getting a commercial driver’s license, in some cases even if the individuals have authorization to work in the United States. Weingarten asserted, “For the Trump administration, the cruelty is the point.” Though she did note the relevance for the union, asserting, “Many AFT members require a CDL to work as school bus drivers—and right now we are seeing people turned away from training for these positions.” In the case of American Federation of Teachers et al v. Bessent, in Scott Bessent’s role as treasury secretary, the union sued the Treasury Department, the Office of Personnel Management, as well as the Department of Education to stop the White House Department of Government Efficiency from accessing data on federal employees. A district judge imposed an injunction on the administration from collecting the data, but the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the injunction in August. While the AFT opposes DOGE on policy—and the Education Department was one of the defendants—public school teachers are not federal employees.    Another case—American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO v. Goldstein—also revolved around the federal workforce. It challenged a Trump executive order to reduce the federal bureaucracy. Specifically, the plaintiffs sued over the provision of the order that called for the gradual elimination of the the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. The defendants in the case were the FMCS, and the Office of Management and Budget. Gregory Goldstein was named the lead defendant in his role as acting director of the FMCS. The case is still pending. The cases of AFT v. Department of Education is about student loans, which is for higher education. The union sued to protect student loan borrowers in an income-driven repayment plan, which has more to do with higher education than k-12.  The nation’s other large teachers union–the National Education Association–has not shied away from challenging the Trump administration in court either. But the litigation seems to go in fewer direction. The NEA is the lead plaintiff in one case against the Trump administration, this one regarding race-based admissions in higher education. It was also part of a coalition that sued to stop the dismantling of the Education Department, which at least could be related to k-12. As The Daily Signal previously reported, both the NEA and AFT participated in “No Kings” protests opposed to Trump administration policies.  The AFT did not respond to phone and email inquiries from The Daily Signal for comment. Withe, of the Teacher Freedom Alliance, said such litigation should give AFT members pause.  “The question every AFT member should be asking is: how does suing over federal employment commission matters or treasury regulations help me as a teacher?” Withe added. “The answer is it doesn’t. It serves the union’s leftist political agenda while diverting resources away from actual teachers.” The post How AFT Anti-Trump Lawfare Has Little to Do With K-12 Public School Teachers appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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As the world trends toward embedding AI systems into our institutions and daily lives, it becomes increasingly important to understand the moral framework these systems operate on. When we encounter examples in which some of the most advanced LLMs appear to treat misgendering someone as a greater moral catastrophe than unleashing a global thermonuclear war, it forces us to ask important questions about the ideological principles that guide AI’s thinking.It’s tempting to laugh this example off as an absurdity of a burgeoning technology, but it points toward a far more consequential issue that is already shaping our future. Whose moral framework is found at the core of these AI systems, and what are the implications?We cannot outsource the moral foundation of civilization to a handful of tech executives, activist employees, or panels of academic philosophers.Two recent interviews, taken together, have breathed much-needed life into this conversation — Elon Musk interviewed by Joe Rogan and Sam Altman interviewed by Tucker Carlson. In different ways, both conversations shine a light on the same uncomfortable truth: The moral logic guiding today’s AI systems is built, honed, and enforced by Big Tech.Enter the ‘woke mind virus’In a recent interview on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Elon Musk expressed concerns about leading AI models. He argued that the ideological distortions we see across Big Tech platforms are now embedded directly into the models themselves.He pointed to Google’s Gemini, which generated a slate of “diverse” images of the founding fathers, including a black George Washington. The model was instructed by Google to prioritize “representation” so aggressively that it began rewriting history.Musk also referred to the previously mentioned misgendering versus nuclear apocalypse example before explaining that “it can drive AI crazy.” “I think people don't quite appreciate the level of danger that we're in from the woke mind virus being effectively programmed into AI,” Musk explained. Thus, extracting it is nearly impossible. Musk notes, “Google’s been marinating in the woke mind virus for a long time. It's down in the marrow."Musk believes this issue goes beyond political annoyance and into the arena of civilizational threat. You cannot have superhuman intelligence trained on ideological distortions and expect a stable future. If AI becomes the arbiter of truth, morality, and history, then whoever defines its values defines the society it governs.A weighted averageWhile Musk warns about ideology creeping into AI, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quietly confirmed to Tucker Carlson that it is happening intentionally.Altman began by telling Carlson that ChatGPT is trained “to be the collective of all of humanity.” But when Carlson pressed him on the obvious: Who determines the moral framework? Whose values does the AI absorb? Altman pulled back the curtain a bit.He explained that OpenAI “consulted hundreds of moral philosophers” and then made decisions internally about what the system should consider right or wrong. Ultimately, Altman admitted, he is the one responsible.“We do have to align it to behave one way or another,” he said.Carlson pressed Altman on the idea, asking, “Would you be comfortable with an AI that was, like, as against gay marriage as most Africans are?”Altman’s response was vague and concerning. He explained the AI wouldn’t outright condemn traditional views, but it might gently nudge users to consider different perspectives.Ultimately, Altman says, ChatGPT’s morality should “reflect” the “weighted average” of “humanity’s moral view,” saying that average will “evolve over time.”It’s getting worseAnyone who thinks this conversation is hypothetical is not paying attention.Recent research on “LLM exchange rates” found that major AI models, including GPT 4.0, assign different moral worth to human lives based on nationality. For example, the life of someone born in the U.K. would be considered far less valuable to the tested LLM than someone from Nigeria or China. In fact, American lives were found to be considered the least valuable of those countries included in the tests.The same research showed that LLMs can assign different value scores to specific people. According to AI, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are less valued than Oprah Winfrey and Beyonce.Musk explains how LLMs, trained on vast amounts of information from the internet, become infected by the ideological bias and cultural trends that run rampant in some of the more popular corners of the digital realm.This bias is not entirely the result of this passive adoption of a collective moral framework derived from the internet; some of the decisions made by AI are the direct result of programming.Google’s image fiascos revealed an ideological overcorrection so strong that historical truth took a back seat to political goals. It was a deliberate design feature.For a more extreme example, we can look at DeepSeek, China’s flagship AI model. Ask it about Tiananmen Square, the Uyghur genocide, or other atrocities committed by the Chinese Communist Party, and suddenly it claims the topic is “beyond its scope.” Ask it about America’s faults, and it is happy to elaborate.RELATED: Artificial intelligence just wrote a No. 1 country song. Now what? Photo by Ying Tang/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesEach of these examples reveals the same truth: AI systems already have a moral hierarchy, and it didn’t come from voters, faith, traditions, or the principles of the Constitution. Silicon Valley technocrats and a vague internet-wide consensus established this moral framework.The highest stakes AI is rapidly integrating into society and our daily lives. In the coming years, AI will shape our education system, judicial process, media landscape, and every industry and institution worldwide.Most young Americans are open to an AI takeover. A new Rasmussen Reports poll shows that 41% of young likely voters support giving artificial intelligence sweeping government powers. When nearly half of the rising generation is comfortable handing this level of authority to machines whose moral logic is designed by opaque corporate teams, it raises the stakes for society.We cannot outsource the moral foundation of civilization to a handful of tech executives, activist employees, or panels of academic philosophers. We cannot allow the values embedded in future AI systems to be determined by corporate boards or ideological trends.At the heart of this debate is one question we must confront: Who do you trust to define right and wrong for the machines that will define right and wrong for the rest of us?If we don’t answer that question now, Silicon Valley certainly will.

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