Today, Princeton professor and prominent conservative political theorist Robert George resigned from the Heritage Foundation board in protest of Heritage President Kevin Robert's defense of anti-Semitic "influencer" Tucker Carlson and his support of Nick Fuentes, an even more virulent right-wing anti-Semite. George's resignation is the latest of a wave of departures from Heritage, including that of my George Mason University colleague Adam Mossoff, who wrote an eloquent statement explaining why he resigned from his position as a visiting fellow at Heritage.

For more detailed accounts of the Heritage controversy and reactions to it, see accounts by Cathy Young at the UnPopulist, and conservative Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby. See also David Bernstein's post about the recent Federalist National Lawyers' Convention panel that addressed the issue of right-wing anti-Semitism, including the Heritage incident.

As Young indicates, the rot at Heritage extends far beyond this one incident, and began years ago. George and Mossoff are far from the first to leave Heritage in reaction to its descent into illiberalism and bigotry. Several leading Heritage scholars and policy analysts departed for similar reasons during the last decade, including Todd Gaziano (founding director of Heritage's Edwin Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies), fiscal policy expert Jessica Riedl (then known as Brian Riedl), and foreign policy analyst Kim Holmes (a former Heritage vice president).

I myself was a Heritage intern  way back in 1994 (when I was a college student and Heritage was a very different institution). I would not  work with them today, and I reached that conclusion years ago, based on their descent into illiberal nativism and nationalism. In December 2022, I turned down an invitation to contribute to the new edition of Heritage's Guide to the Constitution. I told the editor (who is my former student and current co-blogger Josh Blackman) that I was busy. That was true, in so far as it went. But my main reason was revulsion at Heritage's shift towards illiberalism and nationalism. If Heritage was still the organization I remembered from 1994, I might well have found the time to contribute.

Not wishing to provoke an unpleasant exchange, I shied away from telling Josh the full truth about my reasoning. I was wrong to do so. I should have told the full truth. I hope it is better to do it late than never, so I am doing so now.

Sadly, the problem here goes beyond the bigotry of a few "influencers" or the flaws of specific leaders at the Heritage Foundation and other conservative institutions. Rather, as Kim Holmes put it, this is the predictable consequence of "replacing conservatism with nationalism." A conservative movement that increasingly defines itself in ethno-nationalist terms as a protector of the supposed interests of America's white Christian majority against immigrants and minority groups cannot readily avoid descending into anti-Semitism, as well. 

My Cato Institute colleague Alex Nowrasteh and I wrote about the connections between nationalism and bigotry in some detail in our 2024 article "The Case Against Nationalism." We are working on a follow-up piece that specifically addresses links to anti-Semitism and relate it to current controversies.

Obviously, in addition to right-wing anti-Semitism, there are also left-wing varieties, some of which have also become more prominent in recent years. I wrote about them in a 2023 post on the roots of far-left support for Hamas. Right-wing anti-Semitism should not lead us to turn a blind eye to the left-wing varieties (and vice versa).

In his resignation letter from the Heritage board, Robert George urged his fellow conservatives to be guided by the principles of the Declaration of Independence, especially the idea that "that each and every member of the human family, irrespective of race, ethnicity, religion, or anything else, as a creature fashioned in the very image of God, is 'created equal' and 'endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights.'"  George is right. Unlike nationalist movements focused on ethnic particularism, the American Founding was based on universal liberal principles. Those principles remain the best protection for Jews and other minority groups. Left and right alike would do well to recommit to them.

The post The Heritage Foundation Scandal and the Growth of Anti-Semitism on the Right appeared first on Reason.com.

Hello, my friends. Have you been feeling too sane lately? Have I got something for you! It is a company called CoreWeave.

You may not have heard of it because it's not doing the consumer-facing part of AI. It's a data center company, the kind people talk about when they say they want to invest in the "picks and shovels" of the AI gold rush. At first glance, it looks impressive: it's selling compute, the hottest resource in the industry; it's landed a bunch of big-name customers such as Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta; and its revenue is huge - $1.4 billion in the third quarter this year, double what it was in the third quarter of 2024. The compa …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Together with its with its partners at Highland Electric, Blue Bird, and local Exelon utility ComEd, the West Aurora school district kicked off this week by deploying 27 fully electric school buses — the largest such deployment in the state. Here’s how they made it happen.

Online survey research, a fundamental method for data collection in many scientific studies, is facing an existential threat because of large language models, according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The author of the paper, associate professor of government at Dartmouth and director of the Polarization Research Lab Sean Westwood, created an AI tool he calls "an autonomous synthetic respondent,” which can answer survey questions and “demonstrated a near-flawless ability to bypass the full range” of “state-of-the-art” methods for detecting bots. 

According to the paper, the AI agent evaded detection 99.8 percent of the time.

"We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people," Westwood said in a press release. "With survey data tainted by bots, AI can poison the entire knowledge ecosystem.”

Survey research relies on attention check questions (ACQs), behavioral flags, and response pattern analysis to detect inattentive humans or automated bots. Westwood said these methods are now obsolete after his AI agent bypassed the full range of standard ACQs and other detection methods outlined in prominent papers, including one paper designed to detect AI responses. The AI agent also successfully avoided “reverse shibboleth” questions designed to detect nonhuman actors by presenting tasks that an LLM could complete easily, but are nearly impossible for a human. 

“Once the reasoning engine decides on a response, the first layer executes the action with a focus on human mimicry,” the paper, titled “The potential existential threat of large language models to online survey research,” says. “To evade automated detection, it simulates realistic reading times calibrated to the persona’s education level, generates human-like mouse movements, and types open-ended responses keystroke by-keystroke, complete with plausible typos and corrections. The system is also designed to accommodate tools for bypassing antibot measures like reCAPTCHA, a common barrier for automated systems.”

The AI, according to the paper, is able to model “a coherent demographic persona,” meaning that in theory someone could sway any online research survey to produce any result they want based on an AI-generated demographic. And it would not take that many fake answers to impact survey results. As the press release for the paper notes, for the seven major national polls before the 2024 election, adding as few as 10 to 52 fake AI responses would have flipped the predicted outcome. Generating these responses would also be incredibly cheap at five cents each. According to the paper, human respondents typically earn $1.50 for completing a survey.

Westwood’s AI agent is a model-agnostic program built in Python, meaning it can be deployed with APIs from big AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, but can also be hosted locally with open-weight models like LLama. The paper used OpenAI’s o4-mini in its testing, but some tasks were also completed with DeepSeek R1, Mistral Large, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Grok3, Gemini 2.5 Preview, and others, to prove the method works with various LLMs. The agent is given one prompt of about 500 words which tells it what kind of persona to emulate and to answer questions like a human. 

The paper says that there are several ways researchers can deal with the threat of AI agents corrupting survey data, but they come with trade-offs. For example, researchers could do more identity validation on survey participants, but this raises privacy concerns. Meanwhile, the paper says, researchers should be more transparent about how they collect survey data and consider more controlled methods for recruiting participants, like address-based sampling or voter files.

“Ensuring the continued validity of polling and social science research will require exploring and innovating research designs that are resilient to the challenges of an era defined by rapidly evolving artificial intelligence,” the paper said.

Orange County is suing, alleging that most of the money that was supposed to be allocated to a Vietnam War memorial was instead used for personal gain.