College professor, Christian, computer scientist, board game enthusiast, husband, father of two. Author of "God and AI." Articles at @amspectator and @iffgcc.
Joined September 2010
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Just submitted the manuscript for my book "God and AI" to @IFFGCC Faith & Freedom Press. Expected publication is September 2026.
I've had a lot of fun this semester being in a book club with some other faculty, reading through James Hunter's "Democracy and Solidarity." Not a big fan of the book, but the conversations have been good.
What's not *obviously* a thesis of the book, but seems to come through anyway, is that a lot of the current problems are just the totalizing nature of contemporary political victory. If our politics doesn't immediately, substantively hurt each other, it's easier to get along.
Rewatched Cameron's The Abyss and was struck anew by how masterful it is; notionally a story about deep water and aliens, but actually about how much some guy and his estranged wife genuinely love each other.
The politics seem pretty simple: people don't like high prices; they don't like feeling like chumps; they don't like feeling like villains. There are half-a-dozen places in the current administration that read very straightforwardly as one of the latter two.
That's a grotesque incompetence. If there are places where badly-reading things *must* be done for good and moral reasons, all the more reason not to do them in unnecessary places.
Instead, we seem to have abandoned the most necessary places and staked entirely irrelevant ones.
This seems basically accurate.
Republicans are going to have a terrible night, and the simple reason why is that Trump has put up perhaps the worst *performance* this term of any president in a century or more.
Remember that he entered with an actual mandate: the House and Senate, a popular vote victory and a swing-state sweep, and 6-3 Supreme Court. Democrats were afraid enough to vote for mild but real immigration restrictionist legislation in the Laken Riley Act. Everyone wondered how far the "Vibe Shift" would go.
Trump managed to turn that into essentially zero durable wins whatsoever. He personally *hates* the very idea of legislation, the notion that he would have to spend time going back and forth with Congress, learning details and making compromises. So he simply didn't do it! He didn't make a compelling case for abolishing the filibuster. He didn't try communicating clearly to the public in support of popular bills to get to 60 votes. He just decided not to do it at all.
So they passed an unpopular tax cut, some funding for ICE, and a sop to the crypto industry, and that was basically it. Least productive Congress in decades, due to the tastes of one man.
Trump adopted one of the worst macro policies we've ever had: high deficits, high tariffs, and attacks on central bank independence. We managed to pay higher interest rates while still having high trade deficits AND weakening the dollar. Just a total failure.
On immigration, perhaps THE signature issue, Trump essentially min-maxxed effectiveness and backlash. Instead of trying to leverage the political moment for new laws and a self-deportation agenda (that is, walling off the economy to remove the benefit of irregular presence in the US), he opted for a maximally aggressive approach. The administration spent attention, funds, legal manpower on stunts like deporting random people to Salvadoran prisons with essentially no due process. ICE and Border Patrol were encouraged to be aggressive and confrontational, which helped contribute to the shooting deaths of American protestors. It turns out, that's extremely unpopular!
What about the approach of going after employers? The obvious vector? Trump hated that idea! He repeatedly has said he doesn't want to target businesses (especially farms) that use large amounts of illegal labor. This is just an incomprehensible position. Instead of charging a few dozen businessmen and removing the incentive for millions of illegal workers to be here, you arrest people off the street one by one at the cost of thousands of dollars in manpower per each, while their crying wives and kids post TikToks about it.
Upshot on immigration: electoral strength turned into a crippling electoral weakness in exchange for deporting maybe 6% of the illegally present population.
The tariffs were a total shitshow. Embarrassing rollout, no underlying theory of action at all. No targeted focus on key industries. Our country tariffed products we can't grow. We tariffed *inputs* of our own valuable exports. The schemes and amounts changed constantly, sending the stock market reeling and presenting scenes of chaos to the world.
Trump's messaging throughout has been generationally bad. While facing nearly 2:1 unpopularity, he spends his days posting AI slop, saying he'll rename New Mexico or invade allies, among other bizarre remarks. He brags about a ballroom and a pool repainting while gas hits records. At no point has he ever attempted any kind of message discipline.
Then there are the deeply unpopular attacks on rule of law, his "game-recognize-game" pardons for all manner of scammers and criminals, the crypto schemes that he and his family engage in, the evilly conceived and embarrassingly executed legal attacks on Comey, Jerome Powell, and others. With his monthslong stand on NOT releasing the Epstein files, he became maybe the first president ever to stake out a 99-1 issue on the 1% side.
That's not even getting into Iran, DOGE, his candidate recruitment choices, or countless other things. Simply put: Trump has managed to royally screw up virtually every single facet of his presidency. It's been undeniable, voters have noticed, and there's really no escape from it. This is what the GOP base chose in early 2024, and this is the world they're living with now. Where they handed the reins of history to a fat, vain, washed-up old man and let him drive.
Working my way through a Lean tutorial.
Problem 1: Prove 0^0 = 1.
Problem 5: Prove a^2 = a*a.
Problem 10: Prove Fermat's Last Theorem.