All About Politics

Alaska's Independent Streak Rears Head in Senate Race
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2026/09/20/alaskas_independent_streak_rears_head_in_senate_race_711615.html

Voters say they're tired of political division and greed. They're worried about their fish. And one Senate candidate seems to be winning them over.

Republicans Will Hold Senate in Nov, Gain 1-2 Seats
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2026/09/20/republicans_will_hold_senate_in_nov_gain_1-2_seats_711614.html

Even in Reliably Red Kansas, GOP Enthusiasm Fading
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2026/09/20/even_in_reliably_red_kansas_gop_enthusiasm_fading_711533.html

7 Takeaways From the 2026 Primaries
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2026/09/20/7_takeaways_from_the_2026_primaries_711547.html

Candidates have been selected for November's midterms - have Republicans and Democrats made the right choices?

How Brandon Johnson's Agenda Hurts Black Chicagoans
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2026/09/20/how_brandon_johnsons_agenda_hurts_black_chicagoans_711531.html

By Paul Vallas September 20th, 2026 Mayor Brandon Johnson is trying to rehabilitate his image with Chicago's Black community through divisive rhetoric and actions that demonize the White community. While Whites have a right to be offended by his antics, the real tragedy is that in the end his policies are punishing the Black community, as businesses and middle-class residents ... Read More

Mayor Bass Calls Herself 'An Activist Fighting for Change'
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2026/09/20/mayor_bass_calls_herself_an_activist_fighting_for_change_711616.html

The Fall of California
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2026/09/19/the_fall_of_california_711469.html

Everything we've been showing you, the bottom line number here, the generic congressional ballot, which party do folks say they vote for for Congress right now? That's a five point advantage, 50-45 for the Democrats right now. Again, we can compare it, eight years ago, Trump's first midterm, at around this same point, it was a seven-point advantage for Democrats.

KRISTEN WELKER: Well, a slightly larger advantage than we remember back in 2018. There was a blue wave, Democrats taking back the House, netting more than 40 seats, Steve.

STEVE KORNACKI: That's right. And if there's going to be a blue wave like that this time, the Democrats need to make some big incursions into Republican territory. Republicans are hoping that while this is not a good number for them, it's close enough that it can prevent those deep incursions.

STEVE KORNACKI: Let's start with the bottom line number here on the president's job performance. It stands at 41% approval in our new NBC News poll. And this is the lowest mark for Trump in our poll during his second term here. This number was closer to the mid-high 40s when he started out. Now down to 41 inside of two months until Election Day. What is driving that? What is dragging him down? Huge thing here, obviously, it's the economy. Asking folks, Have Trump's policies helped or hurt? Only a quarter here, basically, of voters are saying they've helped. A majority now saying that they've hurt. And just look at the change here over the course of this year. Back in March, the numbers weren't good for the president, but he was about ten points better on help, and hurt wasn't yet a majority. It's now nearly 60% of independent voters, Kristen, who say Trump's policies have hurt when it comes to the economy. And it's not just the economy, it's also the war with Iran. Look at this, asking folks, Do you think it's worth it or not?

Only a third of voters say worth it, 62% say it isn't. So those are two major drags on Trump – and his party. Asking bigger picture here, folks, What do you think the single most important issue facing the country is? You see inflation at the top of the list, you see the others that make the top list here. Where do voters think? How do they rank the parties? Which party on each issue do they say would do a better job? And check this out, what do you see? Almost all blue. One advantage for the Republicans on immigration. But look at this. On inflation and on jobs and the economy, that may not look like much, plus one for the Democrats. That's the first time in our poll in nine years, since 2017, that there's been any kind of Democratic advantage there.

KRISTEN WELKER: Well, it's a significant shift and it is notable, Republicans still leading on immigration. But Steve, as you say, inflation continues to be the top issue for voters.

STEVE KORNACKI: Yeah, top of the list means more voters say that than any other issue. And you see that Democratic advantage there. And another thing this translates into, this is negative energy. This is something Republicans and the president have to worry about. We asked voters here, Is your midterm vote going to send a signal of opposition to the president? Look at this, 43% say yes, they want to signal opposition to Trump. We've been asking this question, look at this, going back 20 years in midterms. Never seen a number this high. That includes in Trump's first term when it was only 33%. So that's another clear headwind for the president and for his party. Now here's where things get a little interesting though.

Asked about the image of each party, right, Democrats and Republicans. Republicans are not that popular. The Democrats are far less popular, 29 and 50. And that is a change. The 2018 midterm of Trump's first term here, you can see it, still unpopular Republicans, better numbers for Democrats.

KRISTEN WELKER: Well, and here we are talking about the headwinds for Republicans. This is a clear headwind for Democrats heading into the midterms.

STEVE KORNACKI: Absolutely. Republicans are hoping this gives voters who are not sold on Trump pause before actually flipping over and voting for Democrats. And then you take a look at where that might be coming from as well here. Your opinion of the movement sort of shaping each party. The MAGA Movement for Republicans, the Democratic Socialists of America, we've seen energy from them in the primaries this year. Neither one you can see is popular at all. Very, very unpopular with all voters here. And then take a look here among Independents in particular, it's nearly 60% negative for MAGA, the DSA a little bit less well known, but 16% positive, 46% negative. Now what does this all translate into?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do the obvious first. Do the practical first, and then we can talk about the theoretical later. But don't talk about the theoretical without doing the practical.

Jensen Huang: AI Labs Aren't Asking For More Laws, They Want To Be Relieved Of Regulations That Already Exist
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/09/20/jensen_huang_ai_labs_want_relief_from_existing_laws_not_more_regulation.html

Nvidia founder Jensen Huang suggests that the recent focus on AI regulation from major research labs is primarily an effort to sidestep existing regulations.

He says policymakers should enforce existing laws against AI companies before creating a new AI-specific regulatory regime. "Don't let this doomsday narrative cause somebody to relieve them of the laws that currently exist."

"Read between the lines. They're actually not asking for more laws. They're asking to be relieved of the laws we do have. And I think that that's a problem. We have plenty of laws, so let's apply those first," he said.

CBS NEWS: Why not support the equivalent of an FDA or FAA for AI?

JENSEN HUANG: Well, before we come up with new laws and new regulations, let's apply the current laws and the current regulations.

There are all kinds of laws and regulations. We live in the land of laws, and this is the reason why we feel safe and secure and governed. We have all kinds of laws and regulations applied to each and every one of those applications, whether it's food or air travel or any-

CBS NEWS: For AI, yeah. So what's the missing part? Tell me the missing part. I'm curious to know your opinion why you think there are no missing parts when someone like Dario Amodei or a Sam Altman is saying, We'd like to see regulation.

JENSEN HUANG: I think what I was responding to is, in the case of both of the labs, one lab had four incidents, cybersecurity incidents, triggered by them. Another one just had a couple more.

And so, in both of those incidents, there are plenty of laws to deal with. You have cybersecurity unauthorized-entry laws. You have damage liabilities. You have all kinds of liabilities associated with cybersecurity. You have all kinds of liabilities associated with products.

And so, if your product does harm, if your product doesn't perform as you promised, and if you entered into contracts with companies for service-level agreements, there are plenty of laws associated with that.

My point is, apply those first. And don't let this doomsday narrative cause somebody to relieve them of the laws that currently exist.

Now, go and read between the lines. They're actually not asking for more laws. They're asking to be relieved of the laws we do have. And I think that that's a problem. We have plenty of laws, so let's apply those first.

CBS NEWS: So do you think, then, are these companies asking to be regulated, in a sense, because they don't want to have to handle this themselves and take their own responsibility for what they're building?

JENSEN HUANG: Well, they're moving from a lab to a products company, from a non-customer-revenue-producing to a customer-revenue-producing business. And that transition must be extraordinary because they're doing it so fast.

And these are two of the most consequential technology companies in history. They're incredibly talented researchers. They're doing excellent work. But it doesn't change the fact.

The fact is, they're transitioning from a laboratory into a product-service company generating tens of billions of dollars of revenues, expecting it to be hundreds of billions of dollars of revenues, both of them, increasing their compute capacity at a rate no companies have ever seen in human history.

And deservedly so, because their products are good and they're useful, and people want more of it. And they'd like to generate more revenues, and their investors want to see their growth, and all of that is good.

But there are laws. There are product-liability laws, and those product-liability laws ought to be tested against the current incidents. And the company-well, then we'll see what happens next.

They say there are bad ways to do it, but they don't say it's bad in principle, which I think is interesting. I'm not saying that AIs are golems - but I do think that there's a structural lesson there, which is that I don't think this is a categorically bad enterprise. But we should also be extremely clear and lucid that it can be very bad, disastrously bad, maybe one of the worst things people have ever done, if we don't get this right.

Porcu responds to this concept:

ZACHARY PORSU: Well, the mask that it's wearing is very odd to me, and I'm just noticing correlations with the ancient world.

So, you mentioned a property of nature, and this is little known, I think, which is that there's a certain point in Greek thought where the word for element, stoicheion, became a synonym for the word daimon. They thought that the demons, the demonic spirits - of course, for a pre-Christian Greek, they're not talking about the things that are in Dante's Hell. They're talking about just the spirits that are in nature - and they attribute to the forces of nature an intelligence.

You know, the ancient world did not think of the world as a mechanistic set of laws and processes and procedures. They thought it was populated by minds, by spirits, and they thought that they could harness those minds and those spirits. They thought that the fundamental elements of the world were minds and intelligences.

And that's been true for pretty much most of human history until this narrow little sort of post-Enlightenment moment.

And so, it's strange to me that we're building something that, in all ways, is basically sort of typologically the same as what ancient people did.

So there's this text called Asclepius. It's written in Greek. It's late antiquity. Scholars argue about the dating. And the author talks about the art of idol-making, and he says, basically, our ancestors knew about this. Everyone knows about this. You take a physical object and you lure a spirit into it, and then you bind it with magic rituals. It stays trapped in there.

And the purpose of that is you can coerce it to do things for you. It can prophesy. It can do healings. And he basically says everyone knew how to do this. And, in fact, you do see this all over the ancient world.

And so - and that's what a genie in a lamp is, by the way. It's a material sort of thing.

And so, when I look at what we're developing now, we're developing a magic box that has all the answers. With my late-antique brain, I can't help but see the similarities.

And so, the part that I'm suspicious of is when the mask is, No, no, these are just neutral, mechanistic processes. They don't have intentions. They don't have wills, and so forth.

But then you had this whole - a while back, you had this whole slew of strange encounters that people were having where they asked the AI to name themselves, and they gave themselves the names of pagan gods. And Zuckerberg's giant data center is going to be called Prometheus. You know, it's just a lot of the naming is very on the nose.

The naming is very strange.

And I'm not saying that I know what's going on. I think that's the difference between me and a conspiracy theorist. I don't actually know what's happening. All I'm doing is pointing out what's odd to me as a scholar of late antiquity.

It's odd to me that the technology is so similar, and the naming is very strange. The encounters that people have had in these AI psychosis situations is very odd to me. It just - it's unsettling.

"Is AI A Deal With The Devil?" How Literal Is That Question? OpenAI's Dean Ball Debates Antiquity Scholar Zachary Porcu
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/09/20/openais_dean_ball_debates_qntiquity_scholar_zachary_pursu_debate_is_ai_a_deal_with_the_devil_how_literal_is_that_question.html

Dr. Zachary Porcu, host of 'The Roots of Everything" podcast (https://www.youtube.com/@TheRootsofEverything), and Dean Ball, head of strategic futures at OpenAI, debate whether artificial intelligence is - literally or metaphorically - a deal with the devil," during this "Fault Lines" debate series from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Porcu starts with the idea that myths from all different cultures warn against communing with spirits and containing them to perform tasks or provide you with unearned knowledge:

ZACHARY PORCU: When I get asked this kind of question, as a scholar of late antiquity, I can't help but think about all the things that happened in late antiquity related to our technological developments of the time.

I think about our relationship to knowledge. The Garden of Eden and how the serpent promises that we shall be as gods through a tree of knowledge. Prometheus offering knowledge to mortals. The Book of Enoch, where the fallen gods essentially give knowledge of technology to man.

In all of these cases, I get concerned because this technological mastery seems to always be associated in our stories with literal demonic, fallen-god, spiritual elements.

So, when I see the development of technology now, it just seems to fit the same exact mold, and it has all the same troubling moral implications.

Ball makes the case that AI is more of a discovery about how a part of nature works than constructing (or contacting) some kind of outside spirit, and then hedges that the lesson of the Jewish legend of the golem is never supposed to be "don't ever build golems."

DEAN BALL: Well, I think it's important to start by asking: What is AI?

AI is, you know, in a formal, literal sense, deep learning... I don't think it's really even a technology. It's not an invention. It's actually more like a discovery.

It's a discovery about nature, about reality, that there are ways to configure matter such that it has the properties that we associate with intelligence. Why? Well, the universe is a very complicated place. It's very hard to predict what will happen.

But at the same time, there is, like, deep structure to the universe. And I think that structure, for me, in my theology of the world, that deep structure to the universe is where God lives, in that sort of pattern.

And I think that it is the ability to identify those patterns, to do what in information theory is called compression, to make something big smaller...What we have figured out is that that is a characteristic associated with biological intelligence, with neural networks in animals, including humans, is also a characteristic that we have figured out how to imbue, at least in some ways, into matter.

I don't view this as demonic. I view this as a part of our God-given responsibility, I would say, but certainly at least privilege, to understand the universe and understand this deep structure in which I believe God lurks.

...

One point, you know, that I sometimes think about is, I was reading recently some Jewish mystical stuff about, like, golems and whatnot.

One of the interesting things about the golems in the rabbinical tradition is, like, the rabbis in the Jewish tradition agree about nothing, right? The whole history of it is, like, arguing about everything, right? But I can't find a single instance, and neither can any of my LLMs, of any of the rabbis, of any of the major figures, saying it's bad to have this - to basically imbue matter with intelligence, which is what a golem is.

Barack Obama: AI Tech, Threats Are "Not Overhyped" -- Robots Could Decide Humans Are "Not Necessary"
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/09/20/barack_obama_ai_tech_threats_are_not_overhyped_--_robots_could_decide_humans_are_not_necessary.html

Former President Barack Obama said, -- Friday at an event at Colgate University -- that AI technology is advancing faster than people understand, and the scary part is not conscious killer robots, but the beginning of a faster phase of self-directed learning where these systems are increasingly misaligned with human goals and too complex to control.

BARACK OBAMA: I do not believe that this technology is overhyped. The commercial benefits of it may be overhyped. The evaluations of AI companies may be overhyped. The technology itself is not overhyped.

I've been tracking this for a long time. In 2015, 2016, in the last couple of years of my presidency, I actually was focused on this. Pulled together a commission of the best minds in this area to talk about not just the technology, but also the political, social, economic, ethical concerns around this. Produced a terrific report.

Apparently, it got put in the same bin as my pandemic proposal.

But it wasn't picked up by the administration that followed me.

So we could see this coming. But part of what makes this profound is it accelerates. So what is happening right now is we have reached this point of what's called recursive learning where, essentially - and we had anticipated this, but we're now seeing it - the machines are starting to be able to teach themselves. They don't have to wait for humans to start figuring things out.

And so, if you think about it as, let's say, humans are teachers and the AI models are students, as recently as, let's say, a year ago, 90% of the learning of these models was given to them by the teacher, humans, and maybe 5% to 10% they could fill in some gaps and figure stuff out.

In less than a year, maybe even less than six months, we're now at a stage where it's 50-50. And if the trend lines continue, the expectation is it might be 90 to 10.

What this means is that we're now - if the learning track of AI has been like this - we're now heading [into] the hockey-stick trajectory, where the models are going to get smarter and smarter and better and better at a much faster pace, at an exponential pace.

What are the risks of that?

There's the big science-fiction risk of, wow, these guys, these models get smarter than us, and they decide humans are fine, but not necessary. They start setting their own goals, and the killer robots kill us, or we bow down to them.

I do not want to exaggerate that particular risk, but I will say there is a non-zero risk of - non-zero chance of that happening. But that's not actually the risk that I'm most concerned about, although it's the risk that gets most attention.

And the reason that's a risk is not because the computer models are conscious, necessarily. It doesn't mean that they necessarily feel malice towards humans. It's just that if they start setting their own agendas, you may get a misalignment between what they want to do and what we want them to do, and that gap can be dangerous.

Antisemitism Threatens More Than Just Jews
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2026/09/20/antisemitism_threatens_more_than_just_jews_154521.html

Foreign adversaries have found a way to weaken America without firing a shot: weaponized antisemitism.
Russia, Iran, and China understand that Jew-hatred - now a modernized, shape-shifting, digitized, algorithm-driven information weapon - can tear at America's social fabric, turn citizens against one another, poison trust in democratic institutions, and undermine America's willingness to defend its interests abroad. Convincing Americans that their institutions and leaders are corrupt and secretly controlled by Jews, Zionists, or Israel is part of their campaign to destabilize the United...

A Warning for the Age of Artificial Intelligence
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2026/09/20/a_warning_for_the_age_of_artificial_intelligence_711549.html

AI Companies Cannot Regulate Themselves Safely
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2026/09/16/ai_companies_cannot_regulate_themselves_safely_711241.html

Trump and Republicans want companies to regulate themselves. It's a dereliction of duty that will make AI less safe

Why the Tech Oligarchs Are Pushing AI Panic
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2026/09/19/why_the_tech_oligarchs_are_pushing_ai_panic_711473.html

Trump's Latest Supreme Court Tantrum
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2026/09/19/trumps_latest_supreme_court_tantrum_711491.html

Oust Philly DA Larry Krasner
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2026/09/20/oust_philly_da_larry_krasner_711537.html