This is one of Paul’s more troublingly stupid and dishonest posts. I can’t count the number of falsehoods and fallacies, but here are two that stood out:

[The country] can prosper and flourish without Medicare for all, as it has throughout our history.

Paul conveniently elides the fact that individuals and families have been ruined, driven into bankruptcy and destitution, by crushing medical debt, a problem that exists only in our country in all of the Western world. He also seems to have forgotten that the country flourished—flourished—from the New Deal to Reagan due to socialistic government programs and policies that kept the rich in check and provided support for the people who most needed it. It’s how we built the most successful and prosperous middle class in the history of the world. Then came Reagan, deregulation, and ruin. How’s that working out? For CEOs and shareholders, pretty great, actually. For everybody else, not so much. Then there’s this:

Thus, the dispute is really about Anthropic’s attempt to place limits beyond those required by law on how America protects its national security. It’s an attempt by a private company to substitute its judgment for that of our elected officials in the all-important realm of national security.

 Well, no. It’s a private company that has decided how its product can be used. Anthropic isn’t insisting that the government use its software. It accepted the loss of its government contract, and the financial hit that entailed, without complaint. The government is free to develop its own software or to make an arrangement with another company. This is free speech and the free market at its finest, something Paul should celebrate. Also, Paul’s dismissal of the potential dangers of using AI for mass surveillance or to control lethal weapons systems with no oversight is either staggeringly dumb or staggeringly dishonest. Or both.