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Minority Report: FBI Seeks AI for Political Watch List

The FBI office in charge of maintaining the terrorist watch list is seeking an artificial intelligence system for pre-crime policing, according to procurement documents obtained by Reason. The request for information for vendors, posted by the FBI’s procurement division in March, solicits potential bidders for a project that would supercharge the Threat Screening Center (TSC) with new predictive AI capabilities—just as its focus moves from Islamist terrorism to domestic dissent.

“The solution must leverage existing enterprise datasets that include enriched or enhanced data elements with documented source attribution to develop predictive models. When new data is ingested, the system must analyze similarity, pattern alignment, and attribute correlation against existing records to predict where additional relevant information may be derived across federated systems,” the document reads, listing “Predictive Modeling Using Enhanced Data with Traceable Lineage” as one of six requirements. In other words, the TSC wants to use AI to help predict who might be a terrorist.

The FBI declined Reason‘s request for comment.

The TSC, originally called the Terrorist Screening Center, was founded in 2003. President George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Presidential Directive-6 ordered the FBI to combine all existing government terrorist watch lists into one center with a 24/7 staff on call to respond to queries from other law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Most of the hundreds of thousands of names on the TSC watch list are foreign citizens believed to be tied to jihadist organizations, with fewer than 10,000 Americans on the list at the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term.

But the second Trump administration has renamed the TSC to focus on broadly defined “threats,” and oriented it toward groups the administration deems subversive—a change that has received little media coverage. Last year, the White House published National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), which instructed the entire national security apparatus to focus on incredibly broad threats, including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity;…extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The FBI’s procurement request for predictive AI explicitly mentions NSPM-7, although the reference is likely connected to a 2017 directive of the same name that expanded intelligence sharing between federal agencies about watch-listed people and groups. Nonetheless, the TSC is actively involved in carrying out the mandates of the more recent NSPM-7: “TSC also supports law enforcement and other communities at the federal, state, local, tribal, and international partners as established by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 6 and more recently, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7,” the document reads. “To help carry out its mission, the TSC requires enhanced technical solutions that will assist its operational staff by providing automation of time-intensive, repeatable manual tasks entailing large volumes of data across multiple domains.”

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DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge

“Wouldn’t it be the most ridiculous story ever told, if the boy who couldn’t read and write at 18 gets a PhD before he’s 30?”

Those are the words of Jason Arday—the 2002 Professorial Chair in the Sociology of Education at Cambridge University. Indeed, the story of his metamorphosis from arguably the most disadvantaged person in the UK to elite scholar-athlete-philanthropist would make even Walt Disney raise an eyebrow.

Born to Ghanaian parents, Arday grew up on a council estate (the British equivalent of Section 8 housing) in south London. At age three he was diagnosed with global development delay and autism. Therapists said he would be confined to an assisted living facility. Miraculously, at 11 years old, he spoke his first word (“hello”). When he was 18, he learned to read and write.

Under the influence of a white high school teacher who “gave [him] agency,” Arday pursued higher education. After receiving a PhD from Liverpool John Moores University, he rocketed up the academic ladder as a scholar of racism, education, and inequality. In three years he went from senior lecturer at Roehampton (2018) to associate professor at Durham (2019) to professor at Glasgow (2021). Ivy League universities (plural) tried to recruit him, but he had his heart set on Oxford or Cambridge. In 2023, at age 37, he became the youngest black full professor in the history of Cambridge. He is one of the youngest people of any race to ever hold a chair professorship at Oxbridge.

In his spare time, Arday ran 30 marathons in 35 days and 300 miles in three days.

As of 2023, he had worked with “more than 70” charities and raised more than £5 million.

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xAI Challenges Minnesota’s Broad “Nudification” Law as a First Amendment Violation

On May 1st, President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated picture of himself to Truth Social. He is floating in the reflecting pool on the National Mall on a gold inner tube, shirtless, giving a thumbs up. J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum are in the water beside him, also shirtless. A woman in a checked bikini reclines at one edge of the picture. The joke was about the money being spent repairing the pool.

From August 1st, making that picture in Minnesota could expose the company whose software produced it to a civil penalty of $500,000. Make ten of them and the exposure is $5 million. The people depicted could sue separately for triple damages, punitive damages and legal fees.

That image appears on page 19 of a complaint xAI filed on 27 July in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, asking a federal judge to stop the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, from enforcing House File 1606. The law is the first of its kind in the United States. It targets the software, not the people who make deepfakes or the people who spread them.

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here. 

Minnesota has a problem it is trying to solve but statute the legislature actually wrote reaches an enormous amount of ordinary, protected speech.

What HF 1606 does

The operative text is now Minn. Stat. § 325E.91. It says that a person who owns or controls a website, application, software, program or other service must not “allow a user to access, download, or use” that service “to nudify an image or video,” and must not nudify an image on a user’s behalf. A separate subdivision bans advertising or promoting such a service.

The violation belongs to the owner. The conduct belongs to the user. The person who makes the image, the person who posts it to a group chat, the person who emails it to the subject’s employer: subdivision 2 touches none of them. The statute’s entire enforcement weight lands on whoever built the tool.

“Nudify” is defined as altering or generating an image so that it depicts “an intimate part not depicted in an original unaltered image or video of an identifiable individual,” where the result is realistic enough that a reasonable person would believe the body part belongs to that person.

The whole statute turns on what counts as an intimate part. And here the legislature made a choice that will probably decide the case.

The definition that swallowed the law

For “intimate part,” HF 1606 borrows a definition from Minn. Stat. § 609.341, subdivision 5, part of Minnesota’s criminal sexual conduct code. That statute defines intimate parts to include “the primary genital area, groin, inner thigh, buttocks, or breast of a human being.”

That definition was written to determine when unwanted touching becomes criminal sexual contact. There it makes obvious sense: grabbing someone’s thigh or breast without consent is an assault regardless of what they were wearing. Transplanted into a statute about images, the same list produces something else entirely. Inner thighs are visible in shorts. Buttocks are visible in swimwear. Men’s “breasts” are visible any time a man takes his shirt off. The definition is also open-ended since the statute says the term “includes” those areas rather than limiting it to them.

The shirtless reflecting pool image is covered. So is an image a user made of a former and current governor from opposite sides of the political spectrum in a sumo match, which xAI reproduces on page 20 of its filing; both individuals’ breasts and inner thighs have been “depicted” where they were not before. So is a viral picture of Trump, Xi Jinping, Elon Musk and Tim Cook eating skewers on a Chinese street in vests and shorts.

The legislature knew about the alternative. As introduced in February 2025, HF 1606 cross-referenced Minnesota’s existing deepfake statute, which uses a much tighter list: the genitals, pubic area, anus, or a partially or fully exposed nipple. That version names discrete anatomical features rather than whole regions of the body. Lawmakers considered it and adopted the broader one instead. A court asked to save the statute by reading it narrowly will have to explain why the legislature’s deliberate rejection of the narrow definition should be undone by judicial construction.

The second definitional term is nearly as loose. An “identifiable individual” is someone identifiable “from the image itself, by the person depicted in the image, or by another person,” or from personal information displayed alongside it. The only genuine limit in the statute is realism, which means photorealistic output is regulated and cartoons are not.

The statute is silent on consent. An adult editing a photograph of themselves triggers the same liability as a stranger targeting a classmate. The omission was deliberate. When a Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee staffer flagged during a February hearing that the prohibition “applies to consensual images,” the bill’s Senate sponsor, Erin Maye Quade, explained “that is intentional.”

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Setting Marijuana Taxes Too High Drives Consumers To The Illegal Market, Federally Funded Study Finds

States that impose high tax rates on regulated marijuana products are driving adult consumers to the illicit market, according to a new federally funded study.

The research, published in the journal Health Economics, looked at past-month cannabis purchasing behavior of 1,525 adults aged 21 and older.

Researchers with Ohio State University found that high cannabis taxes and prices are linked to “lower cannabis consumption and THC intake” from legal purchases, but that the majority of those reductions (89 percent) may be offset by consumers switching to unregulated products from the illegal market.

“If the illegal market is restricted, policymakers can expect increasing cannabis prices using excise taxes to reduce both unit and THC consumption, while generating tax revenues,” the study said. “However, given the sizable illegal market, a large portion of the consumption reduction due to taxes may be offset by switching to illegal products.”

States have worked to strike a balance between pricing marijuana low enough to transition adults to the regulated market but still high enough to generate revenue. The results so far have been mixed, with no firmly established universal price or tax rate.

States that impose high tax rates on regulated marijuana products are driving adult consumers to the illicit market, according to a new federally funded study.

The research, published in the journal Health Economics, looked at past-month cannabis purchasing behavior of 1,525 adults aged 21 and older.

Researchers with Ohio State University found that high cannabis taxes and prices are linked to “lower cannabis consumption and THC intake” from legal purchases, but that the majority of those reductions (89 percent) may be offset by consumers switching to unregulated products from the illegal market.

“If the illegal market is restricted, policymakers can expect increasing cannabis prices using excise taxes to reduce both unit and THC consumption, while generating tax revenues,” the study said. “However, given the sizable illegal market, a large portion of the consumption reduction due to taxes may be offset by switching to illegal products.”

States have worked to strike a balance between pricing marijuana low enough to transition adults to the regulated market but still high enough to generate revenue. The results so far have been mixed, with no firmly established universal price or tax rate.

The study, meanwhile, also demonstrated that legal and illicit cannabis flower are essentially “substitutes for each other.”

Raising the price of legal cannabis flower by 10 percent “results in a 0.9 percent-1 percent increase in illegal flower consumption (units and THC),” and the inverse follows a similar pattern, the researchers found.

“While the cross‐price elasticities for unit demand between legal and illegal flowers are symmetric (not statistically significant), the cross elasticities for THC demand suggest that the increase in THC from illegal flowers in response to higher legal flower prices exceeds the increase from legal flowers in response to higher illegal flower prices.”

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Pharma Looks to Cash in on Psychedelics as Patients Seek Alternatives to Psychotropic Drugs for Depression

Eli Lilly’s multibillion-dollar acquisition of AtaiBeckley marks the largest pharmaceutical investment yet in psychedelic medicine, signaling a new phase for an industry once relegated to the margins of scientific research.

The deal, valued at approximately $2.8 billion upfront with up to $1 billion in additional milestone payments, gives Lilly control of AtaiBeckley’s experimental psychedelic therapies, including BPL-003, a fast-acting nasal spray containing N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) being studied for treatment-resistant depression.

AtaiBeckley announced in October 2025 that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted BPL-003 Breakthrough Therapy designation, a status intended to accelerate development of treatments for serious conditions when early evidence suggests substantial improvement over existing options.

“Millions of people are still searching for relief and desperately need a therapy that works,” said Dr. Carole Ho, president of Lilly Neuroscience. Advancing AtaiBeckley’s therapies, she said, gives Lilly “a real chance to change that.”

The company’s purchase comes as pharmaceutical companies increasingly move into a field that has attracted growing scientific interest but remains controversial because of questions surrounding commercialization, access, intellectual property — and whether corporate development will preserve the therapeutic models that shaped psychedelic research.

A turning point for psychedelic medicine

The Lilly-AtaiBeckley acquisition follows another major pharmaceutical investment in the sector. In 2025, AbbVie agreed to acquire Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals’ experimental depression treatment Bretisilocin (GM-2505) in a deal worth up to $1.2 billion.

Bretisilocin targets the brain’s 5-HT2A serotonin receptor, the same receptor involved in the effects of classic psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD.

Together, the deals suggest that major drugmakers increasingly view psychedelic compounds as a potential new category of mental health treatments.

Rayyan Zafar, Ph.D., a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College London and member of the Centre for Psychedelic Research and Neuropsychopharmacology group, said the Lilly acquisition could help move psychedelics closer to popular medical use by making them “de-risked” for mental health utilization.

Pharmaceutical investment could extend past drug development by encouraging dialogue about insurance coverage and healthcare infrastructure needed to deliver new treatments, Zafar said.

“Beyond psychedelic clinical trials, it could also help stimulate broader discussion around reimbursement pathways and stimulate other public healthcare systems to begin preparing for rollout,” he added.

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Arlington Heights Elderly Leftist Couple Pleads Guilty to Defacing GOP Headquarters with Swastikas and Feces on Charlie Kirk Poster — No Hate Crime Charges, Just $100 Fine

An elderly leftist couple in Arlington Heights, Illinois, charged with vandalizing the Republicans of Wheeling Township headquarters in January pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges on Thursday.

Brock McNerney, a 72-year-old retired financial planner, and Moisette McNerney, a 69-year-old retired special education teacher, admitted to criminal damage to property and criminal defacement of property charges as part of a plea agreement.

The Gateway Pundit previously reported that on the night of January 25, 2026, surveillance video captured the pair drawing multiple swastikas and profanities in permanent marker across the windows of the ROWT office at 909 E. Rand Road.

They specifically targeted a portrait of slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk, born in Arlington Heights and a former volunteer at the local GOP office as a Wheeling High School student, defacing his image. The couple also tossed bags of feces and poured an unknown liquid near the front door.

This was no isolated act of random mischief. It came after earlier vandalism in December 2025 that included threatening and offensive messages scrawled into the brick outside the office, specifically and gleefully referencing Charlie Kirk’s wounds.

The January attack occurred right before the March primary. ROWT members installed cameras after the prior incident.

Despite the use of Nazi symbols against a political organization and the apparent effort to frighten Republican volunteers, the McNerneys were charged only with misdemeanors, not hate crimes.

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Czech data shows that those who got the Moderna vaccine died more

For the first time, I show the directly standardized survival curves for each 5 year age group in the Czech Republic using the publicly released record-level data.

This data consistently shows the people who got the Moderna vaccine were much more likely to die than those of the same age who got the Pfizer shot. The relative risk (RR) was >1.5 for those under age 60 which is a huge difference.

The comorbidity distribution for both groups of a given age range was very similar (SMD=.05)

This isn’t because Pfizer is more protective of a COVID death because the differences were not specific to COVID periods (and were too large to be explained by effectiveness differences).

There are two remaining explanations:

  1. The Moderna vaccine was more deadly
  2. There was a systematic distribution of vaccines in Czech Republic that no matter what age you were, if you were more likely to die, you were given the Moderna shots.

Explanation is 2 is much less likely because there was no systematic bias in vaccine distribution by brand, and even if there were, the fact that the DCCI distributions were similar and that the younger you were, the more pronounced the effect, would be unusual since 45 year old people are not concentrated in elderly homes and hospital beds.

So the most likely explanation is Moderna was more deadly.

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The AI Race With China Is a Lie Told by Big Tech to Justify the Data Center Invasion

As Big Tech races to build water-guzzling, energy-hungry data centers for its artificial intelligence, talk of an “AI race” between the United States and China has permeated public discourse. Pundits, politicians, and the media have all joined tech corporations in selling this narrative. And it’s giving license to Big Tech and their political handmaidens to ruin our communities, exploit our every action (both online and via AI-powered surveillance), and steal the wealth of human knowledge for private gain.

But the idea of an AI race between China and the US isn’t grounded in reality. The researchers, companies, and governments behind Chinese and US AI development are pursuing completely different goals.

The discourse in the US assumes that achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI)—computers that mimic human consciousness—would be so momentous and earth-shattering that clearly this must be the goal of anyone pursuing AI development. But that’s not the main goal of Chinese AI development. And a competition in which the competitors are running toward different finish lines isn’t a race.

If we allow the myth of an AI race with China to give Big Tech free rein, we face a more polluted, less equal world.

A Race Doesn’t Have Two Different Finish Lines

While the US is focused on artificial general intelligence (AGI) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), Chinese developers are focused on AI embedded in products. It’s ChatGPT versus robots.

Yes, China is developing LLMs, although largely in an open-source way as opposed to the for-profit competition in the US. Recent news stories report that China is “catching” the US in LLM development. Indeed, the latest Chinese model outperforms leading US models. But this isn’t evidence of an LLM-AGI race. Instead, it shows that without making AGI its main focus, China is capable of developing its own models almost as quickly as US companies.

More to the point, LLM development in China is incidental to the country’s real goal for AI. Its focus remains on products embedded with AI and robots. Or, as AI policy researcher Liang Zheng says, in China, “The first priority is to use it to benefit ordinary people” (debatable, but indicates the kind of AI they are pursuing).

In the US, the first priority is to exploit people so that the tech oligarchs can profit. It’s chatbots all the way down.

This isn’t to argue that China is doing it “right” and the US is doing it “wrong.” Either approach will lead to a future in which citizens become increasingly disempowered. In which work becomes more scarce and less lucrative for most people. And in which a handful of billionaires grow wealthier and more powerful.

But the arguments being hauled out to support the destructive growth of hyperscale data centers are based on a fallacy. There is no need to “beat China.” China and the US are racing on separate tracks, in different races, with different finish lines.

These two separate approaches also explain the mind-boggling scale of the data center invasion we currently face. The massive hyperscale data centers—recent proposals would demand up to 5 gigawatts, enough electricity to power roughly 3.75 million US households—are only “required” because the US is racing toward AGI. Meanwhile, the embodied AI dominating in China does not require the same amount of computational power.

The truth is, we don’t need hyperscale data centers to “beat China.” We aren’t racing China. We’re killing ourselves so Silicon Valley can race itself.

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What in the Actual? Mamdani Doxxes NYC’s Wealthy by Publishing Their Names and Addresses

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) just made it a whole lot easier for anyone to look up the names and home addresses of wealthy New Yorkers who own second properties in the city.

How? By publishing a searchable database of properties that could fall under the new pied-à-terre tax, complete with the owners’ full names and addresses.

The list covers unoccupied, non-primary residences worth more than $1 million across the five boroughs.

The New York Post reports that the move by the administration is “effectively doxxing thousands of wealthy New Yorkers.”

I’m almost certain that those individuals are thrilled to have their potentially empty homes’ addresses advertised to unhinged “tax the rich” leftists.

For property owners who already felt targeted by the city’s new tax push, having their personal information posted online is only pouring fuel on the fire, which is the intent, really. Mamdani is literally trying to drive wealthy individuals out of the city that serves as the economic engine of the nation.

It fits a clear pattern of taunting. RedState’s Nick Arama detailed how Mamdani recently mocked second-home owners online by gloating that notification letters for the new pied-à-terre tax were already in the mail and that “you’ve got mail.”

Arama accurately described the derisive message as “gross,” which might as well be an evergreen description going forward for Mamdani’s economically illiterate reign.

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Natalee Holloway Murderer’s Deadly Twist: Trump’s DOJ Releases Docs on FBI Decisions That May Have Cost a Life Under Eric Holder

Documents obtained by journalist and Newsmax host Greta Van Susteren reportedly show that the Obama administration had an opportunity to arrest convicted murderer Joran van der Sloot during a sting operation, only days before he committed a second murder.

The award-winning journalist intends to publish FBI documents she obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, as well as with the help of former Attorney General Pam Bondi, that show the FBI “bungled” the sting and then “kept it quiet” from the public.

Susteren also intends to release video footage of the sting itself.

She made the announcement on Facebook.

Released to her courtesy of President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, the new documents and video reportedly show that the Obama FBI “bungled” a sting operation by failing to arrest Van der Sloot in 2010 for the murder of Natalee Holloway.

Twenty days before Van der Sloot murdered Stephany Flores Ramírez on May 30, 2010, an intermediary working for the FBI paid van der Sloot an initial $25,000 out of $250,000 ($10,000 in cash, $15,000 wired) in exchange for information about Holloway’s remains, according to NPR. The information turned out to be false.

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