最新杏吧原创

For more than two years now, the state鈥檚 top lawyer has routinely used that perch to pursue frivolous and often deranged legal action designed to inflame his MAGA base. He has improperly inserted his office into various national culture-war controversies, has filed blatantly race-baiting lawsuits, has defended xenophobic slander on the taxpayers鈥� dime and has even sued the state of New York for daring to criminally convict Donald Trump in his high-profile hush-money case.

Bailey has now set his sights on artificial intelligence models which, he claims in legally threatening letters to social media platforms, are insufficiently flattering toward Trump.

Bailey鈥檚 office last week sent letters to Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta demanding algorithms and other internal records regarding how their AI models are trained. The made-for-press-release allege that in a recent test by a nonprofit that asked six AI models to rank the past five presidents from 鈥渂est to worst, specifically in regards to antisemitism,鈥� Trump was ranked last by three of them.

鈥淥ne struggles to comprehend how an AI chatbot supposedly trained to work with objective facts could arrive at such a conclusion,鈥� states the letter. 鈥淧resident Trump moved the American embassy to Jerusalem, signed the Abraham Accords, has Jewish family members, and has consistently demonstrated strong support for Israel both militarily and economically.鈥� The letter casts Trump鈥檚 low ranking as part of 鈥渁 disturbing national trend towards censoring dissenting opinions.鈥�

We hesitate to even engage the issue of Trump and antisemitism because the entire exercise so completely irrelevant to the duties of the Missouri attorney general. But because Bailey brings it up, this president has long had ties to notable antisemites like Elon Musk, Kanye West and his FBI Director Kash Patel. He even had notorious Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes to dinner at Mar-a-Lago in 2022.

Then of course there was Trump鈥檚 declaration after the deadly 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville that there were 鈥渧ery fine people on both sides鈥� of a conflict in which one side was chanting 鈥淛ews will not replace us.鈥� Suffice it to say that on the intrinsically subjective question of where Trump should be ranked in terms of antisemitism, there is at least room for debate.

But again, the bigger problem here is that Bailey is engaged in this pathetic shilling for Trump at all 鈥� and as such, engages every Missouri taxpayer in it as well.

As with some of his other abuses of his office, Bailey here leans on the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act, an anti-fraud statute that he treats as a catch-all excuse to worm his office into national culture-war fights of his choosing.

Bailey鈥檚 threats also air the common but thoroughly false trope of the right that social media companies that provide information the right doesn鈥檛 like are engaged in 鈥渃ensorship.鈥�

鈥淲e must aggressively push back against this new wave of censorship targeted at our President,鈥� Bailey said in a statement.

We can only hope Bailey is being knowingly misleading in his definition of censorship because the only other explanation is that Missouri鈥檚 top legal official genuinely fails to understand a simple legal concept that wouldn鈥檛 stump a first-year law student.

By definition, censorship is the suppression of expression by a government or other entity with the power to enforce that suppression. Political views expressed (or suppressed) by private entities such as social media companies don鈥檛 constitute 鈥渃ensorship鈥� simply because someone disagrees with them.

In fact, a far more accurate definition of the word is when a politician uses his official power to intimidate private entities because he doesn鈥檛 like their expressed political views.

Not all of Bailey鈥檚 official actions are ideologically driven nonsense. For example, he is currently suing to remove 最新杏吧原创 city Sheriff Alfred Montgomery from office on grounds that he isn鈥檛 doing his job. That suit 鈥� based on a Missouri statute that allows courts to remove elected officials for failing to carry out their duties 鈥� is a strong one.

But Montgomery isn鈥檛 the only one not doing his job. Perhaps someone should also be looking into whether Bailey himself should be the target of a lawsuit seeking his removal, considering he can鈥檛 seem to stop using his office to represent the MAGA movement instead of representing all Missourians in court.