OXON HILL, Md.—Tech companies have done a “horrendous” job pitching the benefits of AI to the American people, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday.

“The SI, the large language labs that are creating it, and the companies and the folks building the data centers have done a horrendous, terrible job explaining the value proposition to the American people,” Bessent said at The Heritage Foundation’s “Forum” conference.

He referred to AI as “super intelligence,” a term coined by President Donald Trump to describe the technology.

The secretary stressed the importance of maintaining U.S. dominance in AI, saying that development “cannot slow down.” Strong American models are the best protection against the rise of Chinese artificial intelligence models, which lack safety guardrails, he said.

American models will “put a shield around our businesses, around our personal finances around everything,” he said.

Bessent acknowledged that all technological change can cause uncertainty, but he expressed confidence that artificial intelligence will create, not slash, jobs.

“Twenty-five percent of the jobs in America right now did not exist in the year 2000,” he said, noting that AI has not yet caused mass job losses as many people fear.

“So far, companies that use [AI] are hiring more people,” he said. “People who know how to use SI are getting bigger pay raises.”

The secretary warned about security risks of Chinese models.

“The Chinese, like with everything, are copying what we do, there’s the scientific word word distillation, and industrial scale distillation,” he said.

“Chinese models are very cheap. Another thing the Chinese are very good at, and their models are dangerous because they don’t have guardrails on them,” he continued.

Bessent predicted that if a big AI-related incident happens somewhere around the world, Chinese technology will be to blame.

“I don’t know who here saw the refrigerators in 150 grocery stores in France that got turned off,” he said. “That was a Chinese model. Probably the worst of all worlds.”

Bessent laughed at anyone who thinks Trump is a lame duck after Democrats won control of the House and Senate in the midterms.

“I couldn’t be more optimistic on the American economy,” he said.

Within the span of a few days, Jensen Huang went from being one of the world’s most powerful men to an admitted adulterer and unemployed billionaire. His rapid fall will have profound consequences for Nvidia, AI, and our national security for years to come.

Most alarming, Huang used his power and influence to lobby his own government to relax export rules for selling Nvidia chips to China, an enemy of the United States.

Huang’s affair with Alice Huang, an alleged Chinese spy who doubled as an executive at a Singapore-based company called Megaspeed, raised serious questions about his motives. While it appeared Huang might survive the spy scandal, albeit with a damaged reputation, news of a second affair with an Nvidia executive was too much for his company’s board of directors. Huang resigned Thursday, capping a whirlwind week.

>>> CHINA EXPERTS REACT TO NVIDIA CEO’S ALLEGED AFFAIR WITH CHINESE SPY

The story shouldn’t end here, however. Just because he’s no longer running Nvidia doesn’t resolve the company’s troubling relationship with China.

“The much bigger scandal,” said Jeff Smith, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center, “is what has been happening with these Nvidia chips and the degree to which they have been flowing to Chinese companies inside and outside China with almost no oversight or restriction from Nvidia and the U.S. government.”

Jensen Huang’s Fingerprints

Rewind to last December. That’s when President Donald Trump announced Nvidia could sell its lucrative H200 chip in China. Huang’s fingerprints were all over the decision. Given his close relationship with Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Huang’s personal lobbying likely played a major role.

We learned in recent days that a Chinese intelligence agent could’ve been a reason why.

On the latest episode of the “Heritage Explains” podcast, Smith noted that Huang, “at the same time he was reportedly engaged in a romantic relationship with a potential CCP spy, was lobbying the U.S. government to ease technology controls on exports to China.”

Megaspeed should have been a red flag. The U.S. government raised concerns with Nvidia in 2025 that the company was diverting chips to China, Smith said. Nvidia reported back that nothing was wrong. We now know that wasn’t true. Bloomberg reported that Megaspeed couldn’t account for 50,000 Nvidia chips it had purchased.

“If it wasn’t a honey trap situation, then it was ignorance or negligence,” Smith said. “But either way, there is something fundamentally wrong.”

Why the Chips Matter

China is in a race against the United States to gain ground on AI. While the Chinese Communist Party has long-term plans to produce its own chips, the country is desperate for U.S. chips right now.

“They are looking for every advantage they can,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday at The Forum. “The Chinese are copying what we do.”

Smith explained the threat that China could pose to U.S. national security if it makes advancements in artificial intelligence. He pointed to Anthropic’s Mythos model, which cracked previously unknown cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

“Thank God we found that first,” Smith said of the United States. “You can imagine if China had reached that capability before us, it would now possibly be able to engage in even more aggressive espionage than it’s already doing.”

>>> DON’T FEED THE BEAST: AMERICA SHOULD NOT BE SENDING H200 CHIPS TO CHINA

The economic case for selling to China is just as weak.

“U.S. companies are literally begging for more chips,” Smith said. “What’s so perplexing about this situation is even if it costs Nvidia significant profit, the U.S. government should still be intervening in this situation and restricting the chips going to China,” he added.

Huang previously suggested China is just “nanoseconds behind” the United States and that selling chips keeps Beijing hooked on American technology. Smith said those arguments are “either made from a position of ignorance or bad faith.”

By independent estimates, the U.S. produces roughly 20 times as much compute as China.

“What you’re really doing is just giving them compute that they desperately need in the short term to keep up with us until they’re completely self-sufficient, at which point they’ll kick us out,” Smith said.

‘Asleep at the Wheel’

Smith pinned the blame on the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, which is responsible for U.S. export control policy and enforcement. He said the agency has been “asleep at the wheel.”

“During a period of unprecedented chip smuggling and diversion cases, they have effectively paralyzed operations,” Smith explained. “They could, under their current rules and authorities, be cracking down on this remote access, this smuggling. They could be issuing rules and regulations, and they have been doing none of it.”

That remote access loophole lets sanctioned Chinese firms rent Nvidia chips in Southeast Asian data centers that they can’t legally buy.

“Chinese company X can’t buy a Nvidia chip, but Chinese company X can rent a Nvidia chip from Oracle and can rent as many of them as it wants,” Smith said.

As a result, Smith said, there are now more Nvidia chips in Southeast Asia feeding China’s economy than there are inside China itself.

Heritage Action is backing several bills to close those gaps, including one that would build location verification into chips. Smith called that idea “sensible and overdue.”

There appears to be bipartisan support to act in the wake Huang’s downfall. Smith said it was “sensible and overdue,” but noted that Congress isn’t the only option.

“I’m concerned that there has been unusual levels of cooperation between parts of the Commerce Department and Nvidia that has resulted in a lack of enforcement of Nvidia chips going to China and being accessed by China in Southeast Asia,” he said. “Unfortunately, that’s a bigger scandal that we’re likely to find more about in the months to come.”

Axios reported Wednesday that Trump told Lutnick to crack down on chip exports, saying, “Let’s get it done.” All eyes are now on him to make sure it happens.

Ohio was not spared last week’s blue wave. Yet Secretary of State Frank LaRose managed to pull off a win for his race as state auditor, even as his predecessor and other statewide Republicans lost their races. How did he do it?

In a phone interview with the Daily Signal, LaRose spoke about how he “invested the time over many years to build deep relationships in diverse parts of Ohio.” He also discussed the importance of focusing on “the basic nuts and bolts things that people care about,” which he feels he’s done in his current, term-limited role.

The Ohio auditor will be busy, as both LaRose and outgoing Auditor Keith Faber have previously discussed tackling Ohio’s Medicaid fraud involving home health care centers—an issue LaRose says he’ll be working on.

LaRose’s agenda includes “catching crooks that are stealing your tax dollars, making sure that they face justice, and working to make government more efficient so that they’re not taking more money out of your pocket,” as he also stated throughout his campaign.

“If you steal our tax dollars, I’ll make you a felon, and if you waste our tax dollars, I’ll make you infamous,” he said in his victory speech following the election.

“When people pay their taxes, it’s a form of public trust. And anybody that would betray that trust, I’m going to catch them, and we’re going to make sure that they face justice. It also means partnering with various other levels of government at the local level—but also at the federal level, with the anti-fraud task force, working with the president’s administration on fighting fraud.”

Ohioans may have voted for Democrat Gov.-elect Amy Acton, but LaRose is not deterred by having to do his work in a Democrat administration. Instead, he stressed the independent nature of his new role.

“The state auditor, for that matter any of the constitutional offices, are independent, separately elected offices,” LaRose said, noting it will be his job “to hold the governor accountable.” He also stressed that his boss is “the taxpayers of the state of Ohio.”

In reflecting upon the election, LaRose praised the American system, adding that the “voters made a different choice.”

“We run our elections so well that even the loser knows they lost,” he said.

“We need to do it so well, so honestly, so transparently, so by the books, that even those candidates that come up short see those results on election night, recognize that they were honest, and then call and congratulate their opponent. And that’s what happened in all of these cases.”

LaRose’s win is not only impressive in light of Ohio’s statewide races, where Democrats took every office, but because he was the only Republican to win statewide in several states, including the once solidly red state of Texas.

Does this make LaRose a formidable candidate for higher office in the future? He lost the primary in 2024 to now Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno, but he has never lost a general election. But as LaRose made clear in his interview, he is focused on being “Ohio’s chief accountability officer.”

“Too many people in public service are daydreaming about the next job. Do the job you have. The voters of Ohio have just given me a very important responsibility, and I’m going to pour my whole self into that,” he said.

“My job will be to hold government accountable at all levels, and what that means is restoring trust so that people know that when they dutifully pay their tax dollars, they’re going to be spent honestly and efficiently. [It also means] holding politicians accountable. And again, any politician who wastes your money, I will make them infamous; any politician that steals your money, we’ll put them in jail. That’s the role of the state auditor, and I will roll up my sleeves that embrace that role,” LaRose added.

He did offer advice for Republicans in future elections, however.

“I think our challenge as Republicans [is to] make sure that the pendulum swings back to the right. So, that can happen in two years, that can happen in four years, that can happen in eight years,” LaRose said. This will be up to us to lay out a clear vision, not just how terrible our opponents are. I think that people get a little sick of that.”

He said the GOP stands for free market principles, the rule of law, strong national defense, public safety, and human freedom.

“When the Republican Party stands on principle and talks about what they’re for, and has real policy solutions to challenges that people face in their lives, then we’ll be successful.”

For your general information, there may be some slight disruptions to the website tonight as we update some site security measures adding a few layers of AI protection. Protecting you, our website and the security of our platform is our top priority. Should you experience an inability to access the site, all is okay – just […]

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Profound cultural changes in the West necessitate that church leaders more actively participate in public life, said Protestant and Jewish scholars.

“Now we have a civilization at war with creation order and that’s the issue,” said R. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, at The Heritage Foundation’s conference The Forum on Thursday.

Clergy need to “have the bigger picture of the created world” and must understand that the political word grows out of the moral, said Yoram Hazony, president of the Herzl Institute.

“I’m not saying the president needs to be preaching Sunday sermons necessarily on television, but the president is a figure of tremendous religious significance just as the pastor is a figure of tremendous political significance,” he said.

The two scholars spoke on the role of religion in American politics. Mohler said that the old broad religious cultural consensus has shattered, making political issues far more existential to citizens.

“That radical break that really took place in the United States took place after 1950,” Mohler said, citing a “series of secularizing decisions” by the Supreme Court that assumed a “firm separation between church and state, and religion and the political system.”

Debates never faced by the church are suddenly coming under scrutiny, Mohler said, referring to “LGBTQ, plus, plus, plus” issues.

“The average Evangelical pastor now in a very real sense understands that … it’s going to be of public significance one day that he won’t marry a man to a man,” Mohler said.

“John Calvin didn’t worry about that, Augustine didn’t worry about that, Jonathan Edwards didn’t worry about that. The pastor of the First Baptist Church now has to worry about that.”

Hazony said that the idea of a separation of church and state as a part of the Constitution is now widely accepted as how things have always been, even though the First Amendment wasn’t interpreted that way until 1947. The amendment was originally understood to mean that the federal government was not allowed to favor one church or denomination, he said.

He later said that because Western societies now have this “hang up” about the separation of church and state, there are now downstream “side effects,” including making clergy hesitant to speak out.

This is a mistake, Hazony argued.

In contrast to America, Europe moved from a state where it was impossible not to believe in God toward allowing for doubt, and now generally holds the position that it’s impossible to believe, Mohler said.

“I don’t believe we are in that third condition, comprehensively, in the United States,” Mohler said. “I think the Democratic Party is in that position, but I still think there’s a significant Protestant, Catholic, Jewish presence that represents a theological challenge to the total secularization of the age.”

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.

Monday and Tuesday marked the 88th anniversary of something called Kristallnacht that occurred in November of 1938 in Nazi Germany.  

What was it? It translates as Crystal Night, or the Night of the Broken Glass. And what it was was a pre-planned massive demonstration against Jewish shop owners in Vienna, Austria, that had been part now of the Third Reich due to the Anschluss, as well as Berlin and the major cities, but mostly in Berlin and Vienna. 

And what happened? A 17-year-old Polish Jewish teenager had killed a German ambassador in France. That was what they were waiting for, any excuse. And out poured the SS and the SA and all of the shock troops of the Third Reich. Up to that point, Hitler had been very, very careful not to scare away Western support—he had had the Olympics in ’36—about what his ultimate plans for Jews were. But he felt at this point, 1938, given his successes, diplomatic, that it was time to be overt. 

And what was that? What happened? People poured out in the streets from the Nazi Party, and they terrorized synagogues and shops. They deliberately identified Jews. They killed hundreds of Jews. They injured them. They put thousands in camps. And they destroyed their businesses. When the owners who had survived and filed claims, they even stole their insurance money.  

So from that point on, there was no going back. That was a straight linear road to Auschwitz and Treblinka years later. 

Okay, so that was an odious moment in Western civilization. And what are we doing as I speak? Today, there is a Philadelphia bike ride that’s organized by a lot of leftist groups and mostly, to be honest, socialist Islamicist groups. And they want to ride their bikes through the streets of downtown Philadelphia, and they want to identify Jewish stores and mostly restaurants. And then they’re going to demonstrate, harass, point them out, and who knows what level of violence will occur unless there’s sufficient law enforcement. They have no idea whether the owners of these restaurants are pro or against Israel. It has nothing to do with—it has everything to do with they’re Jewish. 

Now, why are they doing this?  They’re doing this because we have lowered the bar on what is acceptable.

Take Mr. Abdul El-Sayed. He’s the new senator-elect from Michigan. [The uncle of] Hasan Piker, [who he campaigned with], ran an ad, and it said in the ad that Jews were responsible, i.e., Zionists and Israel were responsible for the price hikes on bananas and food products, eggs and things.  

Think about that. Because of aid to Israel, about three and a half billion. Three and a half billion to Israel, which will cease entirely at the end of the year, is one percent of the foreign aid budget. It is one-twentieth of one percent of the federal budget. That is a complete lie, complete lie, that that minuscule amount has anything to do with inflation. And they know it. 

Hasan Piker recently said he’s the new guru, the fixer, the new James Carville of the Democratic Party. What did he say? He said if Jews want to support Israel as a group—and there’s no evidence that they do, because I think you could argue that the majority of Jews in the last midterm election, even after these anti-Semitic incidents, voted for candidates that could not be pro-Israel. They wouldn’t—if they were pro-Israel in this election, they were done for most part. But nevertheless, he said if Jews support Israel, they’re gonna be targeted, and this is what happens. 

So if you elect a senator who has an ad and he won’t disavow it, and it’s clearly antisemitic, and you have the guru of the party, the young party, the socialist Islamic’s base, say that Jews were gonna be targeted, what do you expect will happen? And now we’re out in the open. 

Let me just finish by reminding people that the reason that we support Israel, it’s the only consensual society. It’s the only democracy in the entire 500-million-person Middle East. Let me ask all of you who are saying, “Free Palestine, free Gaza.” It’s mostly about Gaza.

Gaza, after 2005, had no Israelis. They wouldn’t allow Jews to live there. There are two million Arab citizens inside Israel. If Jews wanted to become citizens of Gaza, they couldn’t do it. It was an apartheid state. It was an Arab-only state. Israel had no presence in Gaza. It was supplying its power, much of its fuel, much of its water, much of its trade. 

If you go to Gaza and looked at the so-called fence that was breached on Oct. 7, it’s not as impressive as the Egyptian fence. In other words, if Gaza was being oppressed by Jews, why did Egypt have a greater barrier between Gaza and Egypt than Israel did between Gaza and—why were there 20,000 people coming across and making three times the wage that they could in Gaza until Oct. 7? 

Another thing, just as a thought experiment. Let’s say any of the people who are on the bikes this weekend pointing out Jewish stores and saying, “Free Palestine,” I challenge you to do two things.  

One, go to any Arab country and stand on the street and say, “I am a Muslim and I renounce Islam, and I am a citizen of Kuwait, of Egypt, of Syria, of Saudi Arabia, and I detest the government, and I say they’re corrupt.” And see what happens to you. 

One of three things will happen immediately. Either a mob will kill you, or you will be put in jail, or, worse, you will be exiled.  

Try the same thing in Israel. Go to Israel and say, “I hate the Netanyahu government, and I’m a Jew who am ashamed, and I’m going to be an apostate and become a Muslim.” What’s gonna happen to you? Nothing. Nothing. It’s a free society. 

I’ll finish with this. There’s a hit show called “Fauda.” It’s about the Israeli intelligence services battling radical Palestinians. And the reason that it’s either the first or second rated show in places like Egypt and the Gulf States and Jordan, throughout the 500-million-person Middle East, is that it doesn’t show Palestinian terrorists and the people who support them as completely evil, and it doesn’t show the Israelis as saints or perfect people. In other words, it tries to explore why the Palestinians are killing innocent Israelis and why the Israelis react in the way they do. Don’t listen to me. Listen to the 500-million-person Middle East that likes what they see, and they’re fascinated by it. Why? Because they could not film that anywhere in an Arab country. 

If you said to the Arab world, “Make a picture about the Israeli-Palestinian fight,” what would they do? It would be completely censored, and it would be one view only, and it would resemble what Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza learn every day in their schools. But the reason that “Fauda” is very popular is it’s a product of a free, self-critical society. 

And the idea now that we hate Jews, and we hate a democratic Israel, and we have not just a desire to go out and target stores in Philadelphia, we have a desire to do it on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, one of the most reprehensible and shameful episodes in the West.  

And so warped have we become that we take a moral travesty of the past and we celebrate it by repeating it, if we could, in the present. 

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

OXON HILL, Md.—Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s alleged affair with a Chinese spy should cause the United States to rethink its export control policy, China experts said.

“It’s good news what happened today because it does clarify things,” said Piero Tozzi, senior director for China policy at the America First Policy Institute, on Thursday. “I think we were under this China fantasy.”

Tozzi appeared on a panel with Cato Institute Senior Fellow Katherine Thompson and Heritage Foundation Asia scholar Steve Yates at The Heritage Foundation’s “The Forum,” discussing the threats posted by the Chinese Communist Party.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stepped down on Thursday after reports that he had an affair with an alleged Chinese spy while seeking to influence President Donald Trump on access to Chinese markets.

The news could cause Congress to impose additional export controls on Nvidia chips being sold to China.

“It does get people’s attention,” Tozzi said. “People start to say, ‘Well, wait a second,’ and I think it will lead to Congress taking action on export controls. Overall, it is a positive breakup.”

Thompson said that Congress needs to evaluate the scope of the president’s waivers on export controls.

“This is a top of mind policy question for Congress to consider,” she said.

“Oftentimes, export control policy includes a waiver that the president can issue for any blanket national security related concern and that sort of exercise of executive power, where we may not want export control policies or restrictions to be waived,” she said. “I think this becomes really important when you have you know individuals who have White House access who are around a president.”

Yates said the U.S. needs smarter capacities to combat China.

“We have nowhere near the access into China that we have allowed them to have access into our country,” Yates said, “and that might seem innocuous until someone is bringing a deadly pathogen into a research laboratory in Michigan under the guise of academic exchange, where someone sets up an illegal police station in Flushing, and they’re actually persecuting people, not just saying mean things to them, but actually physically harming people because they sought asylum here to escape religious persecution or other kinds of thought crime inside inside China.”

The U.S. is in the process of diagnosing the problem, Yates said.

“We need to go back to funding and authorizing the part of the FBI that deals with this,” he said.