Category: Conservative Review
A payout scheme for senators deepens the gap between DC and the rest of us
During the final hours of the shutdown fight earlier this month, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) slipped a toxic provision into the continuing resolution that reopened the government. The clause created a special pathway for select senators to sue the federal government, bypass its usual legal defenses, and claim large payouts if their records were subpoenaed during the Arctic Frost investigation.
The result? About eight senators could demand $500,000 for every “instance” of seized data. Those instances could stack, pushing potential payouts into the tens of millions of taxpayer dollars. That is not an exaggeration. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has all but celebrated the prospect.
Graham said he wanted ‘tens of millions of dollars’ for seized records while victims of weaponization still face shattered lives.
No one else would qualify for compensation. Only senators. Anyone who spent years helping victims of political weaponization — often pro bono, while prestige law firms chased billable hours — can see the corruption in plain view. The message this provision sends on the central Trump-era promise of accountability could not be weaker: screw the people, pay the pols.
The surveillance of senators was wrong. It should never have happened. But senators did not face what ordinary Americans endured. Senators maintain large campaign accounts to hire top lawyers. They operate out of official offices, armed with constitutional protections such as the Speech and Debate Clause. They do not lose their homes, jobs, savings, or businesses. Thousands of Americans did. Many still face legal bills, ruined livelihoods, and ongoing cases. They deserve restitution — not the politicians who failed them.
Graham helped push this provision forward. As public criticism grew, he defended it. On Sean Hannity’s show the other day, he said: “My phone records were seized. I’m not going to put up with this crap. I’m going to sue.” Hannity asked how much. Graham replied: “Tens of millions of dollars.”
Democrats will replay that clip across every battleground in the country going into an uphill midterm battle in 2026.
Graham embodies the worst messenger for this fight. He helped fuel weaponization long before he claimed victimhood. He urged the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to pass the Steele dossier to the FBI. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he did nothing to slow the Justice Department and FBI as they pursued political targets. He even supported many of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees who later embraced aggressive lawfare tactics. If anyone owed restitution to victims, Graham sits high on the list.
RELATED: Trump’s pardons expose the left’s vast lawfare machine
Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
Fortunately, enough Republicans recognize the political and moral disaster of funneling taxpayer funds to senators while real victims remain abandoned. The House advanced a measure today to repeal the provision. Led by Reps. Austin Scott (R-Ga.) and Chip Roy (R-Texas), the House forced the Senate to address in public what it attempted to smuggle through in private.
Thune defended the measure in comments to Axios. He argued that only senators suffered statutory violations and said the provision was crafted to avoid covering House members. He did not explain why any House member who was illegally surveilled should receive no remedy.
The Senate leader also claimed the financial penalty would deter a future Justice Department from targeting lawmakers, citing the actions of special counsel Jack Smith. His emphasis on “future” misconduct glossed over a critical fact: The provision is retroactive and would cover past abuses.
That defense cannot survive daylight. Repeal requires 60 Senate votes, and not a single Democrat will fight to preserve a payout for Graham. Republicans should not try either. Efforts to strike the measure need to begin immediately. Senators — especially Thune — should commit to an up-or-down vote. If they want to send tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds to Graham, they should do it in public, with the country watching.
Washington already reeks of grift and self-dealing this year. If senators protect this provision, that smell will spread nationwide.
![COMER BRINGS RECEIPTS: Oversight Chair Punches Back After Jeffries Calls Him ‘Stone-Cold Liar’ [WATCH]](https://hannity.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/GettyImages-2234508403-300x200.jpg "House GOP Leadership Speaks After Weekly Conference Meeting")
Burisma, Meet Your Brother Binance
WASHINGTON — I’ll admit it: I’ve held President Donald Trump to a different standard than former President Joe Biden when…
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‘climate alarmists and activist bureaucrats’
Vance Urges Republicans To ‘Have Our Debates’ But ‘Focus on the Enemy’
Vice President J.D. Vance addressed the ongoing fights within the Republican Party in an interview on Thursday, giving his lengthiest answer to date on the debates raging on the right about whether to welcome racists and anti-Semites traditionally marginalized by the GOP into the coalition. While Vance encouraged debate, he also urged the GOP to focus on unity against opponents on the left.
The post Vance Urges Republicans To ‘Have Our Debates’ But ‘Focus on the Enemy’ appeared first on .
‘A House of Dynamite’: Netflix turns nuclear war into an HR meeting
Netflix’s thriller “A House of Dynamite” very much wants to teach us something about the folly of waging war with civilization-ending weapons. The lesson it ends up imparting, however, has more to do with the state of contemporary storytelling.
The film revolves around a high-stakes crisis: an unexpected nuclear missile launched from an unspecified enemy and aimed directly at Big City USA. We get to see America’s defense apparatus deal with impending apocalypse in real time.
It seems the best Ms. Bigelow, Mr. Oppenheim, and the team at Netflix can offer up is a lukewarm ‘nukes are bad, mmkay?’
Triple threat
“Revolves” is the operative word here. The movie tells the same story three times from three different vantage points — each in its own 40-minute segment. From first detection to the final seconds before detonation, we watch a bevy of government elites on one interminable red-alert FaceTime, working out how to respond to the strike.
This is the aptly named screenwriter Noah Oppenheim’s second disaster outing for the streamer; he recently co-created miniseries “Zero Day,” which features Robert De Niro investigating a nationwide cyberattack.
That series unspooled a complicated and convoluted conspiracy in the vein of “24.” “A House of Dynamite” clearly aims for something more grounded, which would seem to make accomplished Kathryn Bigelow perfect for the job.
And for the film’s first half-hour she delivers, embedding the viewer with the military officers, government officials, and regular working stiffs for whom being the last line of America’s defense is just another day at the office … until suddenly it isn’t. The dawning horror of their situation is as gripping as anything in “The Hurt Locker” or “Zero Dark Thirty.”
Then it happens two more times.
On repeat
In Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” Duke Orsino laments a repetitive song growing stale: “Naught enters there of what validity and pitch soe’er, but falls into abatement and low price.”
Or put another way, the tune, not realizing its simple beauty, sings itself straight into worthlessness.
And somehow, this manages to be only part of what makes “A House of Dynamite” so unappealing. Our main characters — including head of the White House Situation Room (Rebecca Ferguson), general in charge of the United States Northern Command (Tracy Letts), and the secretary of defense (Jared Harris) — offer no semblance of perspicacity, stopping frequently to take others’ feelings into account before making decisions, all while an ICBM races toward Chicago. From liftoff to impact in 16 minutes or less, or your order free.
Missile defensive
So thorough is this picture of incompetence that the Pentagon felt compelled to issue an internal memo preparing Missile Defense Agency staff to “address false assumptions” about defense capability.
One can hardly blame officials when, in the twilight of the film, we’re shown yet another big-screen Obama facsimile (played by British actor Idris Elba) putting his cadre of sweating advisers on hold to ring Michelle, looking for advice on whether his course of action should be to nuke the whole planet or do nothing. The connection drops — she is in Africa, after all, and her safari-chic philanthropy outfit doesn’t make the satellite signal any stronger. He puts the phone down and continues to look over his black book of options ranging “from rare to well done,” as his nuclear briefcase handler puts it.
And then the movie ends. The repetitive storylines have no resolution, and their participants face no consequences. The single ground missile the U.S. arsenal managed to muster up — between montages of sergeants falling to their knees at the thought of having to do their job — has missed its target.
Designated survivors — with the exception of one high-ranking official who finds suicide preferable — rush to their bunkers. The screen fades to black, over a melancholy overture. Is it any wonder that audiences felt cheated? After sitting through nearly two hours of dithering bureaucrats wasting time, their own time had been wasted by a director who clearly thinks endings are passé.
No ending for you
If you find yourself among the unsatisfied, Bigelow has some words for you. In an interview with Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, she justified her film’s lack of a payoff thusly:
I felt like the fact that the bomb didn’t go off was an opportunity to start a conversation. With an explosion at the end, it would have been kind of all wrapped up neat, and you could point your finger [and say] “it’s bad that happened.” But it would sort of absolve us, the human race, of responsibility. And in fact, no, we are responsible for having created these weapons and — in a perfect world — getting rid of them.
Holy Kamala word salad.
RELATED: Phones and drones expose the cracks in America’s defenses
Photo by dikushin via Getty Images
Bigelow-er
For much of her career, director Kathryn Bigelow has told real stories in interesting ways that — while not always being the full truth and nothing but the truth — were entertaining, well shot, and depicted Americans fulfilling their manifest destiny of being awesome.
That changed with Bigelow’s last film, 2017’s “Detroit,” a progressive, self-flagellating depiction of the 1967 Detroit race riots (final tally: 43 deaths, 1,189 injured) through the eyes of some mostly peaceful black teens and the devil-spawn deputy cop who torments them. “A House of Dynamite” continues this project of national critique.
But what, exactly, is the point? It seems the best Ms. Bigelow, Mr. Oppenheim, and the team at Netflix can offer up is a lukewarm “nukes are bad, mmkay?” This is a lecture on warfare with the subtlety of a John Lennon song, set in a world where the fragile men in charge must seek out the strong embrace of their nearest girlboss.
It’s no secret that 2025 carries a distinct “end times” energy — a year thick with existential threats. AI run amok, political fracture edging toward civil conflict, nuclear brinkmanship, even the occasional UFO headline — pick your poison. And it’s equally obvious that the internet, not the cinema, has become the primary arena where Americans now go to see those anxieties mirrored back at them.
“A House of Dynamite” is unlikely to reverse this trend. If this is the best Hollywood’s elite can come up with after gazing into the void, it’s time to move the movie industry to DEFCON 1.
Trump and Elon want TRUTH online. AI feeds on bias. So what’s the fix?
The Trump administration has unveiled a broad action plan for AI (America’s AI Action Plan). The general vibe is one of treating AI like a business, aiming to sell the AI stack worldwide and generate a lock-in for American technology. “Winning,” in this context, is primarily economic. The plan also includes the sorely needed idea of modernizing the electrical grid, a growing concern due to rising electricity demands from data centers. While any extra business is welcome in a heavily indebted nation, the section on the political objectivity of AI is both too brief and misunderstands the root cause of political bias in AI and its role in the culture war.
The plan uses the term “objective” and implies that a lack of objectivity is entirely the fault of the developer, for example:
Update Federal procurement guidelines to ensure that the government only contracts with frontier large language model (LLM) developers who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias.
The fear that AIs might tip the scales of the culture war away from traditional values and toward leftism is real. Try asking ChatGPT, Claude, or even DeepSeek about climate change, where COVID came from, or USAID.
Training data is heavily skewed toward being generated during the ‘woke tyranny’ era of the internet.
This desire for objectivity of AI may come from a good place, but it fundamentally misconstrues how AIs are built. AI in general and LLMs in particular are a combination of data and algorithms, which further break down into network architecture and training methods. Network architecture is frequently based on stacking transformer or attention layers, though it can be modified with concepts like “mixture of experts.” Training methods are varied and include pre-training, data cleaning, weight initialization, tokenization, and techniques for altering the learning rate. They also include post-training methods, where the base model is modified to conform to a metric other than the accuracy of predicting the next token.
Many have complained that post-training methods like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback introduce political bias into models at the cost of accuracy, causing them to avoid controversial topics or spout opinions approved by the companies — opinions usually farther to the left than those of the average user. “Jailbreaking” models to avoid such restrictions was once a common pastime, but it is becoming harder, as corporate safety measures, sometimes as complex as entirely new models, scan both the input to and output from the underlying base model.
As a result of this battle between RLHF and jailbreakers, an idea has emerged that these post-training methods and safety features are how liberal bias gets into the models. The belief is that if we simply removed these, the models would display their true objective nature. Unfortunately for both the Trump administration and the future of America, this is only partially correct. Developers can indeed make a model less objective and more biased in a leftward direction under the guise of safety. However, it is very hard to make models that are more objective.
The problem is data
According to Google AI Mode vs. Traditional Search & Other LLMs, the top domains cited in LLMs are: Reddit (40%), YouTube (26%), Wikipedia (23%), Google (23%), Yelp (21%), Facebook (20%), and Amazon (19%).
This seems to imply a lot of the outside-fact data in AIs comes from Reddit. Spending trillions of dollars to create an “eternal Redditor” isn’t going to cure cancer. At best, it might create a “cure cancer cheerleader” who hypes up every advance and forgets about it two weeks later. One can only do so much in the algorithm layer to counteract the frame of mind of the average Redditor. In this sense, the political slant of LLMs is less due to the biases of developers and corporations (although they do exist) and more due to the biases of the training data, which is heavily skewed toward being generated during the “woke tyranny” era of the internet.
In this way, the AI bias problem is not about removing bias to reveal a magic objective base layer. Rather, it is about creating a human-generated and curated set of true facts that can then be used by LLMs. Using legislation to remove the methods by which left-leaning developers push AIs into their political corner is a great idea, but it is far from sufficient. Getting humans to generate truthful data is extremely important.
The pipeline to create truthful data likely needs at least four steps.
1. Raw data generation of detailed tables and statistics (usually done by agencies or large enterprises).
2. Mathematically informed analysis of this data (usually done by scientists).
3. Distillation of scientific studies for educated non-experts (in theory done by journalists, but in practice rarely done at all).
4. Social distribution via either permanent (wiki) or temporary (X) channels.
This problem of truthful data plus commentary for AI training is a government, philanthropic, and business problem.
RELATED: Threads is now bigger than X, and that’s terrible for free speech
Photo by Lionel BONAVENTURE/AFP/Getty Images
I can imagine an idealized scenario in which all these problems are solved by harmonious action in all three directions. The government can help the first portion by forcing agencies to be more transparent with their data, putting it into both human-readable and computer-friendly formats. That means more CSVs, plain text, and hyperlinks and fewer citations, PDFs, and fancy graphics with hard-to-find data. FBI crime statistics, immigration statistics, breakdowns of government spending, the outputs of government-conducted research, minute-by-minute election data, and GDP statistics are fundamentally pillars of truth and are almost always politically helpful to the broader right.
In an ideal world, the distillation of raw data into causal models would be done by a team of highly paid scientists via a nonprofit or a government contract. This work is too complex to be left to the crowd, and its benefits are too distributed to be easily captured by the market.
The journalistic portion of combining papers into an elite consensus could be done similarly to today: with high-quality, subscription-based magazines. While such businesses can be profitable, for this content to integrate with AI, the AI companies themselves need to properly license the data and share revenue.
The last step seems to be mostly working today, as it would be done by influencers paid via ad revenue shares or similar engagement-based metrics. Creating permanent, rather than disappearing, data (à la Wikipedia) is a time-intensive and thankless task that will likely need paid editors in the future to keep the quality bar high.
Freedom doesn’t always boost truth
However, we do not live in an ideal world. The epistemic landscape has vastly improved since Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. At the very least, truth-seeking accounts don’t have to deal with as much arbitrary censorship. Even other media have made token statements claiming they will censor less, even as some AI “safety” features are ramped up to a much higher setting than social media censorship ever was.
The challenge with X and other media is that tech companies generally favor technocratic solutions over direct payment for pro-social content. There seems to be a widespread belief in a marketplace of ideas: the idea that without censorship (or with only some person’s favorite censorship), truthful ideas will win over false ones. This likely contains an element of truth, but the peculiarities of each algorithm may favor only certain types of truthful content.
“X is the new media” is a commonly spoken refrain. Yet both anonymous and public accounts on X are implicitly burdened with tasks as varied and complex as gathering election data, creating long think pieces, and the consistent repetition of slogans reinforcing a key message. All for a chance of a few Elon bucks. They are doing this while competing with stolen-valor thirst traps from overseas accounts. Obviously, most are not that motivated and stick to pithy and simple content rather than intellectually grounded think pieces. The broader “right” is still needlessly ceding intellectual and data-creation ground to the left, despite occasional victories in defunding anti-civilizational NGOs and taking control of key platforms.
The other issue experienced by data creators across the political spectrum is the reliance on unpaid volunteers. As the economic belt inevitably tightens and productive people have less spare time, the supply of quality free data will worsen. It will also worsen as both platforms and users feel rightful indignation at their data being “stolen” by AI companies making huge profits, thus moving content into gatekept platforms like Discord. While X is unlikely to go back to the “left,” its quality can certainly fall farther.
Even Redditors and Wikipedia contributors provide fairly complex, if generally biased, data that powers the entire AI ecosystem. Also for free. A community of unpaid volunteers working to spread useful information sounds lovely in principle. However, in addition to the decay in quality, these kinds of “business models” are generally very easy to disrupt with minor infusions of outside money, if it just means paying a full-time person to post. If you are not paying to generate politically powerful content, someone else is always happy to.
The other dream of tech companies is to use AI to “re-create” the entirety of the pipeline. We have heard so much drivel about “solving cancer” and “solving science.” While speeding up human progress by automating simple tasks is certainly going to work and is already working, the dream of full replacement will remain a dream, largely because of “model collapse,” the situation where AIs degrade in quality when they are trained on data generated by themselves. Companies occasionally hype up “no data/zero-knowledge/synthetic data” training, but a big example from 10 years ago, “RL from random play,” which worked for chess and Go, went nowhere in games as complex as Starcraft.
So where does truth come from?
This brings us to the recent example of Grokipedia. Perusing it gives one a sense that we have taken a step in the right direction, with an improved ability to summarize key historical events and medical controversies. However, a number of articles are lifted directly from Wikipedia, which risks drawing the wrong lesson. Grokipedia can’t “replace” Wikipedia in the long term because Grok’s own summarization is dependent on it.
Like many of Elon Musk’s ventures, Grokipedia is two steps forward, one step back. The forward steps are a customer-facing Wikipedia that seems to be of higher quality and a good example of AI-generated long-form content that is not mere slop, achieved by automating the tedious, formulaic steps of summarization. The backward step is a lack of understanding of what the ecosystem looks like without Wikipedia. Many of Grokipedia’s articles are lifted directly from Wikipedia, suggesting that if Wikipedia disappears, it will be very hard to keep neutral articles properly updated.
Even the current version suffers from a “chicken and egg” source-of-truth problem. If no AI has the real facts about the COVID vaccine and categorically rejects data about its safety or lack thereof, then Grokipedia will not be accurate on this topic unless a fairly highly paid editor researches and writes the true story. As mentioned, model collapse is likely to result from feeding too much of Grokipedia to Grok itself (and other AIs), leading to degradation of quality and truthfulness. Relying on unpaid volunteers to suggest edits creates a very easy vector for paid NGOs to influence the encyclopedia.
The simple conclusion is that to be good training data for future AIs, the next source of truth must be written by people. If we want to scale this process and employ a number of trustworthy researchers, Grokipedia by itself is very unlikely to make money and will probably forever be a money-losing business. It would likely be both a better business and a better source of truth if, instead of being written by AI to be read by people, it was written by people to be read by AI.
Eventually, the domain of truth needs to be carefully managed, curated, and updated by a legitimate organization that, while not technically part of the government, would be endorsed by it. Perhaps a nonprofit NGO — except good and actually helping humanity. The idea of “the Foundation” or “Antiversity,” is not new, but our over-reliance on AI to do the heavy lifting is. Such an institution, or a series of them, would need to be bootstrapped by people willing to invest in our epistemic future for the very long term.
‘You’re a piece of s**t’: Nancy Mace and Cory Mills clash in heated exchange after failed censure
Florida Rep. Cory Mills (R) evaded another censure effort Wednesday night, but not without some heated criticism from a Republican colleague.
Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina forced a censure vote on Mills Wednesday over “alleged stolen valor, arms deals he’s under investigation for and alleged abuses toward women.” Mace also went after Mills after a handful of Republicans blocked the censure of Democrat Delegate Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands, who colluded with Jeffrey Epstein during a 2019 congressional hearing.
‘The more we learn about this guy and his purported activities, the worse it is.’
Mace alleged that Plaskett’s censure failed because Mills cut a “backroom deal” to suppress his own censure. Similar allegations were made toward Mills back in September when he was the deciding vote to protect Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar’s censure for the insensitive comments she made following Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
“Another backroom deal so Cory Mills can’t get censored [sic] for Stolen Valor,” Mace said in a post on X. “I have the General who ‘recommended’ him for the Bronze Star on record saying he never wrote it, never read it and never personally signed it. This. Is. Washington.”
hoto by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
The two Republicans reportedly had a heated exchange on the House floor Wednesday night, with Mace calling Mills a “disgrace” and mouthing the words, “You’re a piece of s**t.”
Mace later addressed these outbursts in a post on X, saying the real scandal is Mills’ track record.
“While Rep. Cory Mills is worried about my ‘mean’ words on the Floor last night — I’m worried about our national security and what sort of arms deals he or his companies have with foreign countries. I’m worried about how court records show he abuses women and had to have a restraining order set against him for it. I’m worried about how stealing the stories of other soldiers constitutes STOLEN VALOR and spits in the faces of veterans who gave it all Hold your tongue and sit this one out Mr. Mills.”
The censure vote ultimately failed 310-103, with 204 Republicans and 106 Democrats defending Mills.
Only eight Republicans — Reps. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Kat Cammack of Florida, Joe Wilson of South Carolina, and Mace — voted to advance the censure measure.
Although the censure failed, Mace still called the effort a win.
Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images
“Last night was a win with either outcome of the vote,” Mace said in a post on X. “Now the Left can’t do any more backroom deals with Mills or use Mills as a bargaining chip whenever a Republican moves to censure another. And his investigation has been formally referred to an Ethics Subcommittee.”
“However, I pray leadership will remove Mills from his committees until Ethics is done with Mills. The more we learn about this guy and his purported activities, the worse it is.”
Blaze News reached out to Mills’ office for comment.
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