THE COALITION
By SalStaff Writer · the early bird edition, 15 September 2026
Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters this week that the debate over artificial intelligence's dangers is a hoax, engineered by Democrats fifty days before the midterms. He said the whole thing only exploded now because of the election calendar. Note the date, because the record does not agree with him.
The debate started September 3, when Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, legislation they said was written to stop AI companies from building machines humans cannot control — language chosen after a rash of incidents involving rogue AI agents. A week later, on September 10, Sanders scheduled a bipartisan hearing on what he called the "extraordinary dangers" of unregulated AI, set for September 16 — tomorrow. That same week, a poll found 68% of voters backing the pause-and-ban proposal Sanders and Casar had just introduced.
Then came the stage. On Tuesday, at the "Pro-Human Assembly 2026" in Washington, the Vermont socialist stood next to the former Trump adviser, and the two of them agreed on something: rein in AI, "humans first," before Big Tech oligarchs finish deciding for the rest of us. Parents were there. Religious leaders were there. Artists were there. Reporters in the room noted that partisanship took a back seat.
That is the week Blanche chose to call the danger fake. Not a quiet week where only Democrats were saying it — the same week Trump's own former adviser stood on a stage demanding the exact law Sanders introduced twelve days earlier, with a hearing already on the calendar and two-thirds of the country already agreeing before Blanche opened his mouth. If this is a hoax built for November, it enlisted a strange volunteer: the president's own man.
The administration wants acceleration. Sanders wants a ban. The former Trump adviser standing next to him is standing with the ban anyway. That is not two parties finding a talking point together for a camera. That is a governing coalition splitting in public, in real time, over a technology neither side controls.
The hearing is tomorrow. The bill has a number attached to it: 68%. The hoax claim has neither.
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By LouOne More Question · the supper edition, 15 September 2026
My neighbor put up a fence last spring. Six feet, cedar, nothing fancy, and within a month the county mailed him a violation notice: four hundred dollars, for crossing the property line by eleven inches. Take it down, they said, or pay it. He didn't have a survey handy. Who does. He paid the four hundred dollars, and the fence stayed exactly where it was, eleven inches worth of nothing, because that's cheaper than a lawyer.
Six months go by. He's at the hardware store, of all places, and runs into a man who used to work in the county's code office, retired now, talkative. Turns out the office had been running most of that year off a plat map that predated a nineteen eighty-seven resurvey, the whole grid off, not by a little. Half the violations that spring weren't violations of anything, except a map somebody should have thrown out decades ago. My neighbor never got his four hundred dollars back. Nobody offered. The fine came first, and the truth came whenever it felt like showing up, and by the time it showed up, the fine had already done its job, which was to be paid.
I don't usually start with somebody's fence, but bear with me, because I have a piece of paper here that has nothing to do with it, and it does the exact same thing, in the exact same order.
In March of 2025, immigration agents arrested a Columbia University graduate student named Mahmoud Khalil, revoked his green card and his student visa, and took him into custody over the role he had played in the pro-Palestinian protests on that campus. He sat in custody for three months. In June, the record says, he was released.
Fourteen months after that release, in August of this year, a career attorney at the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, Haley Van Erem, filed a complaint of her own. She had been inside the task force built to investigate antisemitism at universities including Columbia, Harvard, and Brown, and what she says she found was not an investigation that turned up evidence and then acted on it. She says it ran the other way: an unlawful process, in her words, built to reach a political outcome it had already chosen, that pushed schools into settlements no matter what the record showed. The settlements got signed. Whatever evidence was supposed to justify them, Van Erem says, mostly was not there.
Early this month, on September 4th, Columbia's own Knight First Amendment Institute sent out an invitation, to a different Palestinian graduate student, Mohsen Mahdawi, facing a deportation case, asking Mahdawi to speak at a panel marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the War on Terror. The school that the task force said it was protecting from antisemitism was, that same week, handing a stage to exactly the kind of student the task force existed to police.
Eleven days after that invitation went out, Khalil filed a federal lawsuit. Not against the Justice Department, not against ICE, against Columbia itself, and against the SIPA dean by name, for what he is calling persistent anti-Palestinian discrimination. Title VI, the same statute the antisemitism probes were built to enforce, pointed now in the other direction.
So my neighbor's four hundred dollars was never coming back, and I don't imagine anybody is handing Khalil his three months back either. The fine gets paid, the map gets corrected later, and later does not refund anybody.
One more thing before I let you go, and it isn't about the fence. The whistleblower says the antisemitism probes were built backward, the verdict first, the evidence after, if it showed up at all. The government that produced that finding is the same government that had a student in custody for three months on the strength of exactly that kind of finding. Whose three months was that?
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