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Artificial intelligence has already transformed the way Americans work and research.But BlazeTV host Daniel Horowitz believes the public is being sold an inflated vision of artificial general intelligence — and pouring staggering resources into the wrong model to achieve it.“I actually like AI,” Horowitz tells BlazeTV host Steve Deace. “And I believe for narrow tasks, edge computing, localized sovereign data ... there’s a lot of good stuff being done.”“My concern is, we’re misallocating resources away from the most useful, least painful, least consuming analogues of AI and using an all-of-government approach towards this AGI, which in my view is the least useful ... most expensive, really unfeasible the way they’re trying to do it, and also problematic,” he explains.“For the average person out there, like me, that only knows about AI doing that or asking ChatGPT questions, help them understand the distinction that you just drew in ways that would relate to their understanding of the technology,” Deace says.“If you want an ‘ask me anything,’ what they did was get people addicted to it, and then they’re like, ‘OK, it doesn’t cost anything,’” Horowitz explains.“But then it does. Actually, we’re going to have to build five hyperscales in every county, and this much power, and yada yada, and make everything else more expensive,” he says.“So, now that’s an ROI thing,” he continues. “It’s not that there is no use to artificial general intelligence, right — this open-ended generative AI. It’s not that there’s no use to it. It’s that there is a question of an ROI in the way they’re going about doing it.”“Is it accurate to say that you believe, therefore, we’re overselling this technology to the American people based on what you just told us?” Deace asks.“We’re overselling the need and utility of centralized cloud hyperscale model for AI. In terms of deploying it in low latency, narrow at the edge, there's things like the Iron Dome in Israel. You know, Israel has no hyperscale,” Horowitz replies.“My core thesis is what they’re selling you on — again, and people could disagree with me, but my contention is that, just the opposite. Not only am I not opposed to it, I believe they are doing what government does in health care and many other sectors,” he continues.“They’re misallocating resources towards a bubble and to Oracle’s grift of their 1970s technology of a centralized cloud in an impossible way that would perpetually have to scale in a way that either becomes obsolete or unfeasible,” he adds.Horowitz goes on to explain that one of the only reasons this is being done is “a surveillance state.”“Remember, China doesn’t have nearly as many of these because they built their surveillance state — in large part from these same companies, by the way — before AI. So, they already have it. They don’t need it,” he says.And what Horowitz finds extremely concerning is that auto companies have just “won the rights to your texts when they get cycled through the car player.”“They got all of it, and they won in court that they’re able to keep it,” he says.“Your car, your home, your appliances. They would ideally want every step you make, every breath you take,” he adds.Want more from Steve Deace?To enjoy more of Steve's take on national politics, Christian worldview, and principled conservatism with a snarky twist, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Humility is the necessary virtue.Let me unpack that a little: Without humility, Saint Peter will not let you pass through the Pearly Gates.Our culture has moved so far toward autonomy that we can barely imagine obedience as anything other than weakness.And what is humility?Like the old adage says, humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less. If you study the lives of the saints — or, for that matter, almost any historically admirable person — you’ll recognize that humility is an immensely attractive quality.Celebrity clericBlessed Fulton J. Sheen, America’s most famous Catholic bishop of the 20th century, had plenty to be proud of. Now on his way to sainthood, Sheen was a brilliant scholar, a gifted writer, and one of the most compelling communicators of his age. His radio broadcasts reached millions. His television program, “Life Is Worth Living,” drew audiences in the 1950s that rivaled the biggest entertainers in America.Yet two episodes in Sheen’s life suggest that one of his greatest virtues was not eloquence at all. It was obedience.The first came before almost anyone knew his name.After his ordination in 1919, Sheen pursued advanced studies in Europe and distinguished himself at the University of Louvain in Belgium. He became the first American to win the prestigious Cardinal Mercier Prize and earned the university’s coveted agrégé degree. By the time he was 30, Oxford and Columbia reportedly wanted him to teach philosophy.Then, in 1926, his bishop ordered him home to Peoria, Illinois — not to a university, but to St. Patrick’s, one of the city’s poorest parishes.Sheen went.He visited the sick, celebrated Mass, begged for parish funds, and preached. Nine months later, his bishop explained what had happened. People worried that Sheen’s European success had made him “high-hat,” too important to take orders. The parish assignment had been a test.He passed.Entertainer in exileSoon Sheen was sent to teach at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., beginning the public career that would eventually make him famous.Four decades later, obedience cost him far more.By then, Sheen was a household name. His television audience reached into the tens of millions. But he had also clashed with New York’s powerful Cardinal Francis Spellman over money Sheen raised for the missions. Sheen appealed the dispute to Rome and prevailed. Spellman, according to accounts of the dispute, did not forget it.In 1966, Sheen was sent to Rochester, New York. Many biographers have interpreted the transfer as a form of exile: One of the world’s most famous religious communicators suddenly found himself running a relatively modest diocese far from the center of American media.His years there were difficult. Accustomed to packed auditoriums around the world, Sheen once gave a series of retreat talks in Rochester’s largest auditorium and drew a disappointing crowd.“The whole world comes to hear Fulton Sheen, except his own diocese,” he reportedly told a fellow priest.RELATED: Tens of thousands attend beatification of anti-communist TV star priest Fulton Sheen Dick Lewis/New York Daily News/Getty ImagesRight or wrongIt’s tempting to make the lesson here that Sheen’s superiors were right. They were not necessarily right at all. Spellman may have acted vindictively. Sheen himself made mistakes in Rochester. Authority can be petty, shortsighted, and simply wrong.But that’s precisely why obedience — like its close friend, humility — is a virtue.Obedience means little when the person in authority agrees with you. Its real test comes when you believe you are more talented, more informed, or more capable than the person giving the order — and perhaps you are.Modern celebrity culture teaches almost the opposite. Discover your gift. Build your brand. Grow your platform. Maximize your reach. If an institution doesn’t recognize your genius, leave it. If a boss frustrates your calling, find another boss. If a church constrains your ministry, start your own.That instinct is not always wrong. Institutions can become corrupt, and conscience has claims no human authority can erase. Obedience is not servility, nor does it require cooperating with evil.But our culture has moved so far toward autonomy that we can barely imagine obedience as anything other than weakness.Serving in silenceThere is a particularly American — and, yes, Protestant — dimension to this. The Reformation elevated individual judgment against ecclesial authority, while the American experiment elevated independence and suspicion of hierarchy. Those impulses produced real goods. But untethered, they can also produce a Christianity in which everyone becomes his own pope, pastor, and doctrinal court of final appeal.Catholicism proposes something harder: Your gifts are not entirely your own. Your vocation does not entitle you to the largest audience. You may be called to serve where no one applauds. You may even be badly deployed by legitimate authority.Sheen, who had every reason to believe his voice belonged on the biggest stage available, accepted assignments beneath his stature and endured humiliations he did not deserve.In 1979, near the end of Sheen's life, Pope John Paul II embraced the frail priest in St. Patrick’s Cathedral and offered what may be the perfect summary of his legacy: “You have written and spoken well of the Lord Jesus Christ. You are a loyal son of the Church.”Not the most famous son. Not the most brilliant.A loyal one.In an age obsessed with building our platforms, Fulton Sheen leaves us with a harder question: Can we remain faithful when obedience costs us the audience we think we deserve?

For policymakers and citizens sick of decades wasted on failed globalist experiments, Marco Rubio’s nationalist speech in Athens on Wednesday was a huge gulp of fresh air. The alternative to collectivist one-world ideology can sound almost embarrassingly obvious: Nations should pursue their own interests, recover confidence in their inheritance, and cooperate from a position of strength rather than dissolution.Rubio’s setting made the point for him. Speaking at the Pnyx beneath the Acropolis, he traced America’s inheritance through Athens, Rome, Christendom, medieval Europe, and England. He called for the West to recover the ambition, confidence, and national power it once took for granted. His speech made the civilizational case in deliberately grand terms.Pretending the Eastern Romans never existed — or that they have nothing to tell us about who we really are — leaves us poorer, more arrogant, and less prepared for the trials ahead.But his civilizational reset could have been stronger and surer. The great omission was the thousand-year span defined not by Athens, Rome, or even Jerusalem, but by Constantinople — capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and guardian of a Roman Christian civilization that survived long after the political West had collapsed.Its final outposts fell only about three decades before Columbus reached the Americas. For perspective, 30 years ago the Unabomber was arrested, the first Motorola flip phone appeared, and IBM’s Deep Blue became the first computer to beat a reigning world chess champion in a game under standard tournament conditions.That Byzantium received no real showing in Rubio’s address is hardly surprising. Despite its millennium-long life after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Eastern Empire has endured generations of Western neglect, condescension, and selective amnesia.There are many reasons. One is that the modern West became preoccupied almost to obsession with its own political development — its revolutions, constitutions, ideological struggles, and repeated attempts to construct an order that could tame human nature without destroying liberty. Somewhere along the way, the East came to seem like the place where history had stalled.“Byzantium” — no longer “really” Rome in Western eyes — became shorthand for decadence, intrigue, stagnation, and oriental despotism. The important action supposedly moved elsewhere: to the Latin West, where Europe would eventually beat back Islamic power at Tours, Lepanto, and Vienna and narrate the victories as its own civilizational story.That is an impoverished self-understanding. Excising the Eastern Roman Empire deprives the West of some of the warnings it most needs as it flails through geopolitical waters that seem unprecedented, mostly because we have forgotten so much precedent.The Eastern Romans spent centuries fighting for survival against great powers on their frontiers. Their long rivalry with Sasanian Persia culminated in a ruinous early-7th-century war that exhausted both empires. Almost immediately, Arab Muslim armies surged through territories Rome and Persia had fought over for generations. Centuries later, Latin Christians inflicted one of Byzantium’s worst wounds themselves when the Fourth Crusade diverted to Constantinople and sacked the city in 1204. The empire was restored in 1261, but it never recovered its former strength.RELATED: Rubio celebrates Western exceptionalism, warns civilization is at an ‘inflection point’ Mark Schiefelbein/POOL/AFP/Getty ImagesThe point is not that the modern West owes Byzantium an apology, although some historical humility would be healthy. The point is that civilizations sometimes face grueling, protracted defense requiring a spiritual sobriety to match. Today the West is dangerously tempted by visions of global end-zone dancing — speedrunning the uncool parts of geopolitics in favor of a world-war blitz won by super-duper wonder-weapons.Some Constantinopolitan emperors knew the temptation. Nikephoros II Phokas, the warrior-emperor who reigned from 963 to 969, won spectacular victories against Muslim powers and reportedly sought church recognition of soldiers killed in those campaigns as martyrs.The church refused. Patriarch Polyeuctus invoked St. Basil’s Canon 13, which says that although killing in war had not traditionally been treated as murder, soldiers who shed blood should abstain from communion for three years because their hands were not clean. Whatever else one makes of the canon, the answer to Nikephoros was unmistakable: Military victory did not automatically confer holiness.That is a useful warning against today’s temptation to treat defeating our enemies by whatever means we choose as the height of spiritual purity and moral heroism. It is also a reminder that strong, healthy, independent churches can serve as an irreplaceable counterweight to political rulers who begin to imagine themselves as spiritual authorities and their regimes as godlike powers before which citizens and foreigners alike must bow and scrape.RELATED: The last knight of Europe rides again Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesAnd Polyeuctus’ victory points toward something still more important. Spiritual authority does not arise from the top-down power of worldly lawgivers. Holiness begins with people willing to make the difficult purification of their own hearts a lifelong athletic practice — the opposite of the performative, self-flattering spiritual box-checking Jesus decried in the parable of the Pharisee and the publican.The West would benefit from reordering its sociopolitical habits in that direction — not to weaken itself or retreat into inert obscurantism, but to recover clarity and responsibility at a time of immense division and instability.Much of today’s turmoil arises from efforts to turn political might, now amplified by astonishing technology, into a new god and a new church with very old stripes. Rubio is right that the West must remember what it is. But Athens and Rome are not enough, and “Christendom” becomes dangerously abstract if we skip the civilization that carried Roman Christianity for a thousand years while the Western world was being remade.Pretending the Eastern Romans never existed — or that they have nothing to tell us about who we really are — leaves us poorer, more arrogant, and less prepared for the trials ahead.

Americans shouldn't wait until Sharia courts become widespread before deciding where they stand — and Brigitte Gabriel is doing everything in her power to help them see the threat before it's too late. Gabriel tells BlazeTV host Nick Freitas that she was shocked to relive her upbringing in Lebanon — where her home was attacked by Islamic extremists — on 9/11, when her daughter sat watching the towers fall on the news and asked her, “Mommy, why did they do this to us?”“And I found myself, Nick,” she explains, “looking into my daughter’s eyes and repeating to her the exact same words my father said to me when I was a 10-year-old little girl, laying wounded in a hospital in Lebanon, hooked up to IVs on both arms, one blood bag in one arm, one IV in another, asking my father, ‘Why did they do this to us?’” “And my father told me, ‘They hate us because they consider us infidels, and they want to kill us.’ Here we were two generations apart, two continents apart. I had to look into my daughter’s eyes and repeat to her the same words my father said to me,” she continues. “That day I was reborn as an activist,” she adds, noting that this is why she started the Act for America foundation in 2002. This foundation serves to “organize people in chapters nationwide to teach them how they can impact policy at their local level.” Not only does the foundation now have over 5 million members nationwide, but it has successfully passed 300 bills at the federal and state level. And the latest bill it is putting through Congress is the Preserving Our Constitution Act of 2026. “It says no Sharia courts are allowed to operate in the United States. We are building the firewall to make sure that this does not happen,” Gabriel explains.Freitas warns that this could easily become a problem for the U.S., as in the U.K. right now, there are 84 Sharia courts. “Please understand that when Brigitte here is talking about Sharia courts in the United States, it is an inevitability unless you’re proactive,” Freitas says. “Because the moment they start going, and you haven’t prepared yourself for this, now all of a sudden, they win a couple of cases in court, and nobody wants to challenge them, and they start setting them up everywhere.” However, Gabriel has some bad news. “The Sharia courts are already operating in the United States,” she says. “The first Sharia court was established in Richardson, Texas, in 1991. Since then, we have documented 150 cases judged under Sharia law in the United States in 23 states.”This is why in 2009, Gabriel got to work on the American Laws for American Courts bill, which says that “no law that is not compatible with the U.S. Constitution would be allowed to be practiced in an American courtroom.” “We were able to pass that law in 13 states,” she explains. “We’ve been fighting this battle for a long time,” she adds. “Making the Argument with Nick Freitas” is available on BlazeTV+, YouTube, and major podcast platforms.Start watching Nick Freitas NOW at blazetv.com and use the promo code NICK for $20 off your BlazeTV+ subscription.