Explore this week’s op-eds from Dr. Gold:
WATCH: Clay Clark ReAwaken America Tour Reunion Featuring Dr. Simone Gold
BUY IT NOW: ‘Selective Persecution: The Legalization of American Fascism’ — by Dr. Simone Gold, foreword by Dennis Prager
Florida Demands Catholic Church Honor Religious Vaccine Exemptions
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is putting the Roman Catholic Church on notice: if Catholic schools want to keep accepting taxpayer-funded vouchers, they need to start accepting religious vaccine exemptions for students.
In a letter sent Friday to the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops, Uthmeier argued — citing the Catholic Catechism, Pope Leo, and scripture — that Catholic doctrine does not actually support denying students religious exemptions from vaccines.
The Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops says it’s reviewing the letter and will respond. “Be assured, Florida’s Catholic schools are operating in accord with the law and Church teaching,” said conference spokesperson Michele Taylor.
Uthmeier didn’t call out any single diocese by name, but he did reference the immunization policies of the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee. Notably, Uthmeier and several top Florida Republicans — including Gov. Ron DeSantis and Education Commissioner Henry Mack — are themselves Catholic.
This fight is part of a bigger, ongoing battle. DeSantis has repeatedly pushed to repeal Florida’s vaccine mandates and expand exemptions, but every legislative attempt has failed — including a bill earlier this year that would have created a new “conscience” exemption category and required health care workers to offer alternative vaccine schedules. The Catholic conference has lobbied against these efforts, urging lawmakers to keep vaccine requirements in place.
Religious freedom isn’t just about the right to go to church on Sunday. It’s the right to live by your deepest beliefs in the everyday decisions that shape a family’s life, especially decisions about a child’s body and health.
The Catholic Church has long taught that every human life has inviolable sanctity, and that no one should be treated as a mere means to someone else’s end. That’s the core of its opposition to abortion. The same logic should apply when parents believe a vaccine made with cell lines from an aborted fetus goes against their faith.
Making parents choose between a Catholic education and a medical intervention they see as a violation of human dignity violates religious freedom, full stop. You can’t tell society it has to respect the life of the unborn, then turn around and pressure families raising born children to override their own consciences on related issues.
I understand that the Church allows vaccines made from aborted fetus cell lines because there are no alternatives. But it is an unacceptable leap for dioceses to then enforce vaccine mandates. That sends a message that religious claims matter until they get inconvenient for school policy or optics.
If religious leaders want people to take their defense of life and liberty seriously, they should be leading the charge on parental rights and medical freedom, including a family’s right to refuse vaccines on religious or conscience grounds. Anything less is moral cherry-picking.
FTC Says Woke AI Could Be Breaking the Law
The Federal Trade Commission is coming after woke AI.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson issued a proposed policy statement on July 1, inviting businesses and everyday users to weigh in on their experiences with what the FTC calls “the suppression of accuracy” — cases where AI systems have been engineered, in the commission’s words, toward “ideological ends.”
The public comment period closed July 31.
The proposal follows a December executive order from President Trump and fits into the administration’s larger push for one national AI policy instead of fifty different state rulebooks.
The FTC’s argument is simple: Americans expect an AI tool to give them a straight answer. If a company is secretly steering that answer toward some other goal without telling the user, that’s fraud.
This is not hypothetical.
In 2023, a user asked ChatGPT to write a positive poem about Donald Trump. The bot refused, saying it wasn’t programmed to produce content that was “partisan, biased or political” in nature. Minutes later, the same user asked for a positive poem about Joe Biden — and ChatGPT delivered several stanzas without hesitation, describing him as a “leader with a heart so true.”
Independent researchers have since run the numbers and found the same bias baked into the model’s defaults: multiple studies using the Political Compass Test found ChatGPT’s baseline answers favor a Leftist worldview than the general public’s, and a 2024 analysis of the EU elections found ChatGPT consistently rated Left-leaning parties more favorably than Right-leaning ones. One academic paper went further, documenting that GPT-4 refused far more image requests from a Right-leaning perspective than a Leftist one.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has previously acknowledged ChatGPT’s bias, which has resulted in the chatbot asserting falsehoods to promote the Left’s agenda. In 2023, for example, ChatGPT generated a fake citation to push gender ideology. It has been known to praise Antifa while demonizing those who refused the COVID-19 vaccines.
In February 2024, Google’s Gemini image generator was caught rewriting history in real time. When asked to generate images of the Founding Fathers, it depicted them as Black men. When asked for the Pope, Gemini produced a Southeast Asian woman in papal attire, despite all 266 popes in history having been White men.
Google admitted it wasn’t a total glitch. CEO Sundar Pichai told Bloomberg the company had “overapplied” its diversity settings, including in cases where they should never have applied — “that was the bug,” he said. The tool was doing exactly what it had quietly been told to do, just not what users asked for.
Critics call the FTC’s rule a First Amendment violation. I disagree.
The FTC isn’t shutting anyone down. It’s asking companies to disclose that their products serve an ideology before they serve the truth. That admission is all this rule requires.
And that’s the real issue here. Millions of people turn to AI for the truth, and these tools are built not to give it to them.
A terrified parent whose 14-year-old daughter comes home talking about pronouns, puberty blockers, and surgery turns to AI to find out what to do. A parent weighing whether to inject their child with a dubious vaccine in exchange for the right to attend school turns to AI for a straight answer. A woman contemplating abortion turns to AI to find out its legal and moral implications.
This isn’t about a kid looking for footnotes on a term paper. AI is now woven into how people make the biggest decisions of their lives. And yes, banning AI outright would violate the First Amendment.
So we’re not banning it. We’re demanding something far more basic, something Elon Musk has been pushing for all along: AI that is maximally truth-seeking. Tools loyal to the truth first, so that truth is the product and AI is the delivery system.
Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic chose differently. They built recruiters instead, tools designed to brainwash users into a woke worldview one query at a time. Fine. That’s their choice.
But if they won’t tell the truth, let’s force them to at least say so. It might be the only truthful thing they say all day.
Daily Dose: ‘The California Mandate’ with Dr. Peterson Pierre
