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Превращение обычной фотографии в профессиональный мультяшный арт или аниме-персонажа перестало быть задачей для художников-ретушеров.

Теперь мне необходимо 2-3 минуты, чтобы нейросеть сделала из моего фото, персонажа под стиль любого мультфильма. В этой статье разберем как с этим справляются, лучшие ИИ-сервисы.

Analysis shows public understanding about vaping, which is far less harmful than smoking, has plummeted in past decade

More than half of adult smokers in the UK wrongly believe that vaping is as harmful or more harmful than cigarettes, making them less likely to switch to vapes and quit the deadly habit, research has found.

Evidence from scientific studies shows that, while vaping is not risk-free, it is far less harmful than smoking tobacco, which produces thousands of chemicals, including toxic metals, poisonous gases and substances that cause cancer.

Its origin story may be full of holes, but there’s no disputing this American classic’s status as a world beater when it comes to a tasty, satisfying salad

According to the US Institute for Culinary Education, the cobb salad is an embodiment of “the spirit of American ingenuity”, thanks to a strangely familiar creation myth involving a restaurateur (in this case, at Hollywood’s Brown Derby) throwing it together for a late-night snack. It’s also perfect game-day food: satisfying, flavour-packed and, crucially, easy to eat while all eyes are on the pitch.

Prep 30 min
Cook 30 min
Serves 4, and easily scaled up or down

Это подробный разбор одного эксперимента. Я взял god node из реального LangGraph агента и попросил 5 американских и 6 китайских моделей сначала предложить, как её распутать, а потом оценить предложения друг друга. Дальше тремя разными способами пытался понять, кому из них в этом деле верить.

Месяц назад мы переехали из старого дома с садом в высотку-новостройку. Настолько "ново-", что стройка (отделка квартир застройщиком) еще продолжается. С точки зрения локальной экологии это значит, что местная экосистема только формируется. Обычно термин "сукцессия" применяют к ситуациям восстановления после катастроф, в частности, лесных пожаров. Но его вполне легитимно приложить и к ситуации формирования экосистемы в новосозданном [антропогенном] ландшафте. Вот как в доме в целом и квартире в частности. Интересно это наблюдать в процессе.

Как устроен SFU изнутри: Publisher, Subscriber, комната-маршрутизатор и никакого перекодирования. Дневник разработки на Rust.

‍♂️ Riders travel 168.5km from Tarragona to Barcelona
‍♂️ Stage-by-stage guide | Team guide | Email Andy

141km to go. After initial resistance from the peloton, a breakaway has established itself. The three leaders are Alex Molenaar (Caja Rural-Seguros RGA), Frank van den Broeck (Picnic PostNL) and German champion Felix Engelhardt (Jayco Alula).

Lotto Intermarché rider Baptiste Veistroffer is briefly stuck in no man’s land as the bunch slows for a “nature break” (pee stop). They are 3mins 20secs behind the frontmen.

All the latest news from Sunday’s live action at SW19
Swiatek and Rybakina go out | Order of play | Mail Sarah

I can’t wait to see Naomi Osaka’s look today, she has been using fashion to express herself and represent her heritage across all of the slams. So far at Wimbledon she has been wearing a white kimono and she told the BBC about it:

When I think about Wimbledon, it’s obviously the all white. There’s obviously the tradition of it all. In my head, when I think about that, I think about my cultures, my heritage, which is Japanese and Haitian.

Then, if I dive deeper into Japanese culture, I think about the most iconic silhouette, which for me is a kimono. You don’t have to see the colour of a kimono to know that it is a kimono.

Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.

Being online is extremely stressful and unpleasant, and on days I don’t use Twitter, or Bluesky, or any other social media, I typically feel much better mentally — less stressed about the posts I see and less upset about the state of the world. 

There’s two problems: The first is that I think it’s pretty irresponsible to put yourself and your emotional comfort above being informed and active in debates about the future. I have a non-insignificant following on both sites, and it would be a bit of a dereliction of duty to give up my influence over my followers for it. The other part is that this non-insignificant online presence has helped me in my non-professional writing career pretty significantly, and I wouldn’t have either source materials or similar opportunities if it wasn’t for my online presence.

So, all in all, there’s pretty strong reasons to not be there. There’s pretty strong reasons to be there. There’s pretty strong personal benefits from leaving and pretty strong personal benefits from staying. Should I stop being online?

Dear Wishfully-Off-the-Grid, 

I feel you. In late June, throughout New York City, I started noticing posters appearing for the “Summer of Ludd” — a series of very offline events organized by a group trying to bring back the philosophy of the Luddites, the 19th-century movement against automated machinery. I attended one of their lectures recently in Manhattan, and I have a hunch that the Luddites could help you with your concerns about becoming detached from the world if you leave social media. 

The word “Luddite” has, for the most part, become an insult (even if deployed for self-deprecation), used to describe a person who won’t keep up with the advancements of their time — rejecting innovation in favor of older, slower, and less effective products. There is a hint of this in your question: You’re worried that social media is the more potent way to be informed and to communicate with others. If you leave these platforms, will you lose that ability?

First, the real Luddites were more complex than how we refer to them colloquially. They were English clothmakers who saw how machines owned by wealthy merchants resulted in lower wages and worse working conditions. After trying to organize in support of workers’ rights failed, Luddites broke the looms that were automating their labor. “They would sneak in through the windows or hold up the overseer at gunpoint, and methodically smash just those machines that were de-skilling their work,” wrote journalist Brian Merchant, author of the excellent book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. 

Luddites weren’t against all technology, Merchant notes, just the tech that took away resources from humans or gave too much power to those at the top. The British government retaliated against the Luddites, and laws were passed that made it punishable by death to break a machine. 

The neo-Luddites that I saw and met at The Luddite Conference on Participatory Futures event were bound by a similar distrust and antagonism towards, in this case, big tech. But there was another question they grappled with that was even more closely aligned with your concerns. “This week is just sort of an experiment, right?” said one of the organizers during opening remarks. “Can we get a bunch of people together in a room without using any of these platforms?”

Based on the turnout, the answer was a resounding yes. The large auditorium was standing-room only. It was filled with young people in their 20s in cool outfits who I heard giving each other advice about switching to flip phones. 

These neo-Luddites would say to you that learning about the world is an act that is better done offline. In fact, in-person meetings are not only the superior medium through which to express your politics — it is the politics. The act of organizing IRL creates deeper relationships unfettered by algorithms, which build stronger foundations for talking about or acting on any issues that you may care about. This applies to finding sources and opportunities for your writing career, too. The neo-Luddites would challenge you to imagine the rich and exciting people you might meet if you seek out and spend time in what they described as “social infrastructure”: public places where people meet face-to-face — not only for political solidarity, but also for learning, support, play, and rest. 

This resonates with me; I only felt connected to my community once I spent a lot less time online and got involved in local organizing a few years ago. As part of my neighborhood’s mutual aid group, I help run our community garden, which teaches people about the area’s environmental history, food justice, and climate change and grows hundreds of pounds of produce for free fridges. I rarely post about this publicly, but I’ve met dozens of neighbors and local politicians and feel much more agentic as a result.

I also should mention the limitations of making a difference through online posting. 

Many of us, of course, are trapped in echo chambers in our online communities. Even if you break through, the likelihood of online discourse being the most effective way to share your values is low. I think often about an experiment researchers from Princeton and Stanford did to see if people would change their minds if they saw posts on their Facebook or Instagram that differed from their own perspectives. In the end, they found very little effect on altering people’s opinions or political behaviors. 

Not only that, but the more likely, and more disturbing, outcome of a lot of posting is the impact it can have on your own views. In the book The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World, reporter Max Fisher explains that when you get feedback in the form of likes and replies, it provides powerful positive reinforcement that gives you the signal that your beliefs are good, and you should hold onto them even more tightly. If someone starts contradicting you or pushing back, you’re likely to double down to further emphasize your point. This means that you yourself may end up with even more extreme opinions than you started out with — all without swaying anyone else’s beliefs (potentially even pushing the other person further into more entrenched versions of their views). That doesn’t sound like a very effective technology, does it? 

This might seem like I’m telling you to go off social media entirely and join the neo-Luddites. But, actually, I’m not. I do think there are compelling reasons to be on social media platforms, but they are human ones, not political. 

Researchers have described our access to the internet and social media as a “mobile connectivity paradox.” Even though we are able to, in unprecedented ways, connect with anyone at any time, it can make us feel isolated. Yet, I haven’t been able to fully give up on the “connection” piece of the paradox; I like seeing pictures of my friend’s baby who lives far away from me! I got a lot out of posting pictures of my wedding party! I’ve tried to (lovingly) cull my followers to only people I really know, but whom I might not get to see as much as I’d like in person. Going on Instagram feels more joyful as a result. 

You say that being on social media makes you feel terrible, and you should pay attention to that signal. People respond differently to social media, and it could be a reflection of other aspects of your life. For those who are already feeling vulnerable, lonely, or depressed, spending time on social media tends to make them feel worse. 

Where and in what contexts you use social media can also affect how it makes you feel. People feel more lonely when they use social media while in transit, around people they have close relationships with, and when they are in nature. In contrast, when people use social media for shorter periods when they are alone at home or in study locations, it doesn’t have as much of a negative effect. And when people share big life events, like weddings or births, it can even increase their happiness.

Reclaiming social media for quieter and more intimate uses could make you feel lighter. At the same time, perhaps you can redirect some of your activism energy away from the digital sphere and see what happens if you take it offline. 

That doesn’t mean, of course, that your IRL life should become unduly heavy either. During the Q&A at the Luddite talk, a person from San Francisco, who was part of a group organizing to get Mark Zuckerberg’s name removed from a local hospital, asked how best to reduce personal social media use. Bill Hartung, a political scientist there, didn’t suggest guilt or recrimination. “I think we just need to make real life more attractive,” he said. 

Anyone dabbling in Luddism today is lucky; this is a more enjoyable call to action than meeting up to smash looms in the middle of the night. One of the best ways for you to be invested in the future is to make sure that at least part of yours takes place offline.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Now that summer is in full swing, I’m re-reading chapters of my copy of How to Be Idle, a book by Tom Hodgkinson, the founder of the similarly themed publication The Idler. Each of the book’s chapters documents an hour of the day and how to be as lazy as possible during that time. Fun to read as inspiration, even when you’re not able to loaf. 
• At the Folk Art Museum in midtown, I saw a group exhibition of American self-taught artists as part of the celebration of the country’s semiquincentennial. I was riveted by paintings of pastel, layered, topological landscapes by Joseph E. Yoakum, who was a Chicago-based artist. I recommend this 2021 New York Times profile of him, which explains how his drawings don’t represent real places but figurative terrains from his mind. 
• Not something to read, but a fun game called Anthropeum that gives you 10 objects to assess per day. Try to guess where and when they were made and see how you compare to other players. I’ve learned I’m much better at guessing where things are from than their time period!

Как разработчик, я должен пользоваться ИИ на работе. Я бы, конечно, предпочел безлимитный Claude, но мне доступен только Qwen Code, а он часто галлюцинирует. В этой статье я расскажу, как искал причины галлюцинаций, устранял их и к чему это привело.

Первая моя задача для ИИ-помощника – CLI-агента, была простой, её можно было бы решить инструментом «найти и заменить» в IDE минут за 20, а агент трудился – часа два, что непозволительно много. Он постоянно галлюцинировал, добавлял ненужные артефакты, а я продолжал попытки направить его в нужное русло уже из спортивного интереса. Только после этого замечательного опыта я наконец решил «прочитать инструкцию»...

A viral phrase that translates to "What if we do?" in English is being used by Mexican soccer fans and players dreaming about seemingly impossible wins.

Michael Phillips says he suffers from micropenis – but he’s now fundraised enough to increase his member’s girth

A US man who has staked the uncontested claim of having the smallest penis in the world says he has booked a procedure to enhance his member at least somewhat after soliciting the online public’s financial support for that purpose.

In a brief interview on Saturday, 38-year-old Michael Phillips described himself as “really thankful and surprised” over the GoFundMe platform users who supported his campaign for help to pay for the procedure in question.

Finding that Norfolk butterfly has been distinct subspecies for 200,000 years could transform conservation approach

The endangered swallowtail butterfly Papilio machaon britannicus, which is only regularly found breeding in Britain on the Norfolk Broads, has been a distinct subspecies for at least 200,000 years, according to a study.

Smaller, darker in colour and much rarer than the continental swallowtail, britannicus was previously considered to have developed its distinctive form during its confinement in the wetlands of eastern England over the last 8,000 years, after the flooding of Doggerland.

An English Democrats voter and a retired university tutor had different ideas about whether it’s OK to fly flags, but could they find something to agree on?

• Want to meet someone from across the divide? Click here to find out how

David, 70, York

Occupation Retired modern foreign languages tutor at a university

Michael Phillips says he suffers from micropenis – but he’s now fundraised enough to increase his member’s girth

A US man who has staked the uncontested claim of having the smallest penis in the world says he has booked a procedure to enhance his member at least somewhat after soliciting the online public’s financial support for that purpose.

In a brief interview on Saturday, 38-year-old Michael Phillips described himself as “really thankful and surprised” over the GoFundMe platform users who supported his campaign for help to pay for the procedure in question.

Whether you’re learning guitar or trying to get fit, short bursts of effort can work wonders

You could call it the tamest of mid-life crises, but as I turned 40 last year, I decided to devote myself to a long-neglected ambition – learning the guitar. I dutifully set myself the task of practising for 30 minutes a day, with the aim of strumming my way through the Bob Dylan songbook by my 41st birthday.

What stood in the way, of course, was life. With work and family commitments, I was lucky to find a free half-hour time more than once or twice a week. Each day that went by without practice left me feeling more demotivated, and the guitar soon started gathering dust next to my piano.

DISCLAIMER:
Решив использовать все описанные далее методы, предоставленный ниже код и перечисленные виды программного обеспечения, Вы должны предельно чётко понимать всю полноту юридической ответственности за их несанкционированное применение в условиях реального пентестинга и неукоснительно соблюдать требования Закона в этой области!

Пару недель назад я всерьёз открыл для себя новую “забаву” - использование локальных моделей ИИ для полуавтоматического “белого” пентестинга.

Мой исходный “суповой набор” из “железа” и софта.

When Deckers, the company behind fleece-lined UGG boots, recently took Quince to court over its lookalike boots, it tried to bar Quince from referencing “dupe culture” at trial.

The bid failed, confirming that “dupes” and “dupe culture” — a commercial ecosystem built around providing consumers cheaper alternatives to name-brand products — are cultural phenomena here to stay.

The trial focused on whether Quince’s shearling boots that really, really look like UGGs violated the existing patent for the design. And in a twist, the jury ruled that yes, Quince had copied the UGG design — but the patent over the UGG boot should not have been issued in the first place because the design was too generic to protect. The ruling opened the door for Quince and any other brand to make a similar-looking boot, opening up a new frontier for “dupe culture.”

And the culture is, undoubtedly, thriving. While it used to be embarrassing to own a fake, that’s no longer the case. Today, if you can find a cheaper, knock-off alternative – that’s a life hack.

In our online age, social media and online shopping exist awash in copies, dupes, and knock-off versions of name-brand products. Rather than outright counterfeits, these products carefully step around trademark and copyright rules with the express purpose of offering consumers cheaper alternatives to something a different brand created. It’s become an entire industry, embraced by influencers and companies like Quince.

In her recent piece, “Knock It Off!,” Mia Sato, a senior reporter at The Verge, outlines just a few things that have been duped recently: makeup, Le Creuset Dutch ovens, hand sanitizer, designer perfumes, Apple AirPods Max, Oura Ring fitness trackers, viral phone cases, dishwasher pods, famous banana pudding recipes, Pilates workouts, and the entire island of Santorini.

“We could probably surmise that there will be even more dupes in the future,” Sato told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram, “but I think there are more dupes than have ever existed in the history of mankind right now.”

She joined Sean on Today, Explained to discuss the rise of “dupe culture” and changing ideas of ownership and originality in an era of internet-driven mass consumption. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What exactly is dupe culture? What has it become?

Dupe culture is this idea that the limitlessness of the internet allows you to find a cheaper alternative, a copy, something that is a reasonable stand-in for the thing that you actually want. And it has permeated every industry: guitars, clothing, makeup, food, recipes.

There are dupes for Lululemon pants. There are dupes for Birkin bags, which are incredibly expensive, incredibly hard to purchase designer handbags that go for tens of thousands of dollars. There was a $50 version for sale at Walmart. It was called the ‘Wirkin.’

There are dupes for fancy pots and pans. There are dupes for lip glosses and lip oils and lip stains. There are dupes for vacations — someone was marketing a different island as a dupe of Santorini, right? You can apply this dupe framing to just about anything. 

What’s different now is that dupes are kind of just a way of life, in that you don’t have to go somewhere seedy or weird or black market-y to get a dupe. Anything you can think of, dupe culture means that there is a dupe out there somewhere. But it’s walking a line, being very careful not to infringe on things like trademarks or copyright.

And how do you find your dupes? Do you just go to dupe dot com?

Dupe dot com is a thing. Dupe.com, basically, you can copy a URL to any product, plug it into dupe.com, and it will do a reverse image search of the web and find products that look similar. Some of them might be cheaper, some of them might be expensive, but the whole idea is you’re looking for lookalikes. 

A lot of modern online shopping actually has all the tools you need to find a dupe. Amazon, for example, just introduced a new feature where you can write out a text version of what you’re looking for, and it will use AI to generate an image of what it thinks you’re describing and then use that AI-generated image to look for similar products. It’s basically a reverse image search. 

TikTok has a feature where if you pause a video, it will highlight products in the video and you can click those products and find similar-looking dupes on TikTok Shop. So finding dupes has never been easier because a lot of these features are built into the platforms that we’re using in the first place.

When you talk about copying and pasting a URL into dupe.com or all these reverse image searches, where do we end up on the legality?

That’s sort of the million billion dollar question: What is allowed?

Obviously I’m not a lawyer, but when IP attorneys describe this to me, every, every question I would ask them, they’re kind of like, It depends. When you get down to something like fashion, one expert told me that a lot of it is not protectable. This shirt that I’m wearing, right? It’s like a button-down shirt with a lace pattern. No one should be able to own that specific thing. And just because a fast-fashion company were to rip this off, is there legal grounds to sue them? Maybe not. Just because two products look the same doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s illegal.

And it can turn people against you, right? People feel like they can rip off [guitar manufacturer] Fender because Fender’s the biggest fish. And people feel like they can rip off UGGs because for a decade, it was the boot to have and it doesn’t feel like they’re struggling. 

Is that a part of this broader dupe culture that may or may not be peaking right now?

The public’s engagement with dupe culture is endlessly fascinating to me because people have a lot of thoughts. Often, the thoughts are, ‘Of course I’m going to buy a dupe of a Birkin because I can’t afford a $50,000 handbag. If there’s a cheaper alternative, I’m just going to buy that because poor people deserve nice things too, or I shouldn’t have to be mega-wealthy to afford a bag that I like.’ That thinking often colors the dupe discourse. 

It gets messy and it gets really heated and emotional, I think, because we’re talking about something that Americans love to do, which is to consume, which is to shop. People get really defensive and protective of what they’re able to buy and the morality of dupes.

The dupe, I think, is never enough. This is my hot take, but I think when you have a dupe, you still lust over the product it’s duping. And in that way, it’s doing the opposite of putting them out of business. It’s actually making them even more aspirational.

I think that modern online shopping has kind of lied to consumers and almost rewired our brains to make us think that there is such a thing that costs five dollars and will last a really long time and is ethically made and looks good. Often, that is not the case. And often, that’s what dupes are. 

They give you the illusion of finding something nice or finding something beautiful or something that you identify with, but when you strip away a lot of it, it’s a lie. You get what you pay for. And the cost of things has gone down so much, especially since Temu and SHEIN, these ultra-fast-fashion brands, that I think consumers have forgotten what is literally possible when it comes to cheap and good products. I think cheap and good products do still exist, but not to the extent that we would like to believe. 

How did you think when you’re writing your piece, Mia, about where the internet has taken the idea of originality?

I think our current algorithm-driven feeds make it so that copying someone or recreating something is not just easier, but it actually sometimes makes more sense. Think about the way that trends circulate, right? The platforms encourage us to use the same sounds as other people, do the same dances, edit in the same way, pick up on the same formats. They want dupes of the content. 

What I was interested in when I was writing this piece was that the textures of the internet, the endless copies and the similar but different creators and the little niches were recreating themselves in our physical world, in the things that we surround ourselves with. If you went home and looked around your house, you probably have a dupe of something. I have dupes of stuff in my house that I didn’t even know were dupes. They’re all over, and sometimes you buy a dupe without even realizing it.

Дисклеймер: все события основаны на реальном кейсе борьбы за гарантийный ремонт топового железа в СЦ DNS. Диалоги воспроизведены по памяти, максимально близко к оригиналу, технический абсурд передан без приукрашиваний. Авторское настроение: «мне не смешно».

Представьте ситуацию: вы покупаете бескомпромиссную рабочую станцию. Вся система в сборе приобретается в DNS, там же заказывается сборка. Всё официально и находится на гарантии, кроме одной детали — процессора. Он шёл как OEM, и его годовая гарантия уже благополучно истекла, в то время как на остальные ключевые компоненты (включая дорогущую RTX 4090) гарантия продолжает действовать. Запомните этот факт — вокруг него СЦ построит свою главную защитную стратегию.

В один прекрасный день ваша ультимативная машина превращается в генератор бесконечных аппаратных ошибок шины данных, а мастера из сервисного центра выдвигают техническую гипотезу, достойную Шнобелевской премии по физике. Они заявляют, что пробой PCIe произошёл из‑за троттлинга процессора, который таким образом «убивает» видеокарту. Такое невозможно придумать самому без использования тяжёлых веществ (которые автор статьи категорически осуждает).

В этой статье разберём, почему «волосатый бублик» бессилен против стека ИИ, как контроллер памяти GPU тихо умирает под CUDA‑нагрузкой, и как разворачивался этот комедийный баттл с СЦ DNS.

Roblox — онлайн‑платформа, где пользователи могут не только играть в созданные другими людьми проекты, но и разрабатывать собственные. С момента запуска в 2006 году проект завоевал огромную популярность по всему миру, особенно среди детей и подростков. Рассказываем в нашей статье, в чём же секрет успеха Roblox. И как платформу запретили (а потом разрешили) в России.

The husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was involved in a hit-and-run in California that left a parked car with "major" damage, authorities said Saturday.

(Image credit: Adam Gray)

When the Founding Fathers began their work to unify the colonies, America’s religious landscape looked nothing like today’s marketplace of ideas. Mainline Protestants — Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Puritans, Quakers, and Lutherans — dominated the budding nation, and Protestant Christianity was fused with public life.

To talk of religious liberty back then was a question of how to handle these various Protestant denominations and, essentially, keep them from killing or oppressing each other. There were hardly any Catholics; there were very few Jewish people; there were essentially no Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists. What the Founding Fathers eventually arrived at was a plan for tolerance — an early version of freedom from official religions and a freedom to exercise faith without being punished.

Yet a new draft report from a Trump administration task force presents a competing vision of America’s tradition of religious liberty — one that argues that the founders wanted as much religion, everywhere, as possible — and that makes the case that our understanding of religious freedom has been corrupted by 20th-century European secularists and radical progressives aiming to eliminate religion from public life.

Late last week, the Trump administration’s Religious Liberty Commission, housed within the Department of Justice, released a draft 224-page report pushing the idea that belief in God should be the bedrock of American law and society, and proposing dozens of policy proposals and legal recommendations to restore the place of religion in daily life. It argues that when the Founders chose to declare independence, drafted up the Constitution, and debated the Bill of Rights, they “drew from religious traditions of man being made in the image of God,” and that belief in a Christian God was the starting point for individual rights. “The uniquely American approach to religious liberty,” they argue, is one “in which religion is not merely indulged by the government, but rather honored as a natural right, fundamental to the flourishing of a free society.”

It’s this privileged position for religion that was corrupted in the 20th century by “a new [European] philosophy,” which “laid the intellectual foundations for threats to American religious liberty which persist even today.” In this telling, it’s philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Jean-Paul Sartre who rejected God, inspired American thinkers and leaders to embrace relativism, and constructed a “‘Berlin wall’ of separation” that restricts religious life today and must be corrected. As a result, the government took an “increasingly hostile view towards those who embrace Judeo-Christian values” and interpreted the law to shut down practices like school prayer and open displays of religious texts in public buildings.

Using this history, the commission calls for the creation of a national religious liberty violation hotline, creating a DOJ task force to enforce freedom and hear claims of violations, and appointing federal judges who err on the side of religious liberty, as they define it.

They cite examples of religious oppression and anti-Christian bias in schools, workplaces, the military, and the healthcare system: restrictions on teachers, coaches, and students leading prayers, limits on students wearing religious symbols and delivering religious speech, limits on displaying the Ten Commandments in public schools, the pushing of “gender ideology” on Christian students, and requirements for faith-based college groups to accept non-believers. They cite COVID-19 vaccine mandates as violations of religious liberty in the military, coercion for religious medical providers to offer care that conflicts with their beliefs, and overly restrictive rules for military chaplains.

In all, it calls for a plethora of policy and legal changes rooted in an alternative history that government should be welcoming religion into daily public life, not concerned with limiting or restricting it, even if it’s in the name of religious pluralism. To deny this is to attack religious liberty. 

But this history is wrong.

The federal government has grown more secular in some ways since its founding. But the story of America’s relationship with religion is the story of the Founders’ vision in action, of religious pluralism at work and evolving with a changing nation. It’s a tale of how political and legal leaders tried to apply those core values in response to growing and new religious communities in America who arrived after the revolution. 

The twisted history of the Religious Liberty Commission

At its core, the report argues that American law and society have veered too far away from what the Founders intended, that they have been infected with the ideology of liberal secularism, and that the government has gone too far in subsuming the church to the state. That Jeffersonian wall of separation between church and state, they argue, is a myth, and religion instead should have a privileged place that creates a “bridge” between the faithful and the government.

But that’s a fundamental misreading of both colonial views of religious liberty and the modern landscape that they are critiquing, historians argue.

Let’s start with where they all agree. These commissioners are right to point out that Protestant Christianity did infuse every part of American life in the colonial era, and that colonists believed it should continue to do so, the historian Matthew A. Sutton told me. 

“You can find example after example of the government endorsement of not just religion, but a very particular kind of religion, Protestant Christianity,” he said. “But there really wasn’t religious liberty for those too far outside the boundaries.”

The commission’s document acknowledges this context, but goes on to argue that the founders took a more pluralistic approach while still advocating for a government that encourages widespread public adoption of faith.

It pulls the story of the First Continental Congress in 1774, where colonial leaders gathered, put aside their religious differences, and, inspired by Samuel Adams, prayed together as they prepared for war. In retelling the writing of the Declaration of Independence, they similarly argue that belief in a Christian God was the bedrock of individual liberty and the cause for independence. And in drafting the Constitution, religious liberty was the “first freedom” from which other liberties could flow.

But Sutton, whose new book “Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity” traces this history, told me that this historical account of colonial America and the Framers’ intent is oversold. The thinkers who helped to establish America were responding to very real and practical concerns — how to unite the colonies — not necessarily to push a unified vision of religious pluralism, with state encouragement for faith. 

“The First Amendment is also about a practical response to the fact that you have 13 colonies that you need to unify, and many of them have established churches, but they’re different churches,” Sutton said. “The First Amendment is not this kind of high ideal about freedom of religion. It’s simply about how can we keep these people from killing each other when we know for the last 300 years, different groups of Christians have killed each other in Europe.”

In trying to figure out how to keep these various colonies together in a united nation, they reached a negative clause, Sutton said: “There will be no establishment of religion.”

Sutton told me that the reference to the First Continental Congress’s prayer is selective — just a couple of years later, Benjamin Franklin’s suggestion to start the meetings of the Constitutional Convention with prayer would be shot down.

“In 1774, it’s not clear there’s going to be a revolution. They have not left, and the clergyman they chose for this prayer is a member of the Church of England. They were trying to signal to England that they did want to maintain their unity, that they wanted to keep their religious bonds together. It was very practical,” Sutton said. “But this is the selective cherry-picking that the Trump people do. They didn’t have a prayer at the Constitutional Convention. So you can’t have it both ways. If you’re going to talk about when you do, you need to talk about when you don’t and see those as equally valid.”

To speak of the founders wanting anything in common is itself a bit preposterous, the politics and religion scholar Dave Campbell, a professor at the University of Notre Dame, told me, since the leading thinkers of the time had different visions of the relationship between the government and various churches: Jefferson wanted the wall of separation; Washington wanted mutual support between the state and Protestant Christianity in general; Madison wanted competition between sects and a marketplace of ideas free from government punishment. And all of these are very different from both the version of religious liberty we have today and the one the commissioners claim has been distorted. 

“It’s a misnomer to speak of the Founders as though they had one view. They had different views, but they did agree, even though they had to compromise, on the wording of the First Amendment,” Campbell said. “Whatever this amorphous group that the Founders is, they disagreed, and yet they nonetheless could come to consensus that there should be no established religion, which was very novel at the time, and there should be as much latitude given to the free exercise of religion as possible.”

It’s this “latitude” that the commission argues has been overly restricted since the turn of the 20th century. And they argue that European existentialists and post-modern continental philosophers have perverted religious liberty in the quest to destroy organized religion. 

“This new [secular] ideology gave ‘complete prioritization…to individual autonomy, [the idea] that we decide value, we decide meaning, we decide purpose,” the report’s authors write, and it’s this dangerous ideology that has led to a crisis of religious oppression today, the commissioners argue.

But this retelling is ahistorical, Sutton told me. The driving force behind a more secular interpretation of the law was that America’s religious makeup changed, with millions of Catholics and Jews entering the country in the 19th and early 20th century, along with the spread of new religions like Mormonism. American leaders and thinkers were responding to these trends, not modern and postmodern European intellectuals.

“It’s ridiculous. It’s definitely not those guys,” Sutton said. “The courts were moving in the 1880s, 1890s, toward slowly recognizing that the nation is growing more diverse, and as they do that, they begin to think about the ways in which the free exercise clause can be protected, guaranteed, and applied.”

Instead of this being some project of post-war secular liberals to try to rein in organized religion and religious practices, Sutton and Campbell told me the modern iteration of religious liberty was more of a practical and realist project from American legislators and courts: Protestant Christians were no longer the only group that needed protection.

“It starts in the 1880s, 1890s, where some of the states are working towards taking out established prayers from public schools and reducing the kinds of explicit Protestant curriculum in their education,” Sutton said. “And so it’s not European intellectuals or secularists or any kind of global conspiracy that are driving this. It’s about how do you build laws to govern an ever more diverse country.”

This shift continued into the 20th century, and especially in post-World War II America, when demonstrating tolerance in contrast to hateful and antisemitic Nazi Germany became a more urgent priority. By then, the country had further integrated its newer immigrants and religious groups across generations, which helped reinforce the idea of secularism as a sign of mutual respect between differing faiths, rather than an attack on religion. 

The point of this commission’s twisted history

To the authors of the White House-led report, this modern trend has been a new kind of oppression: a stripping of faith of all kinds from the public space. 

But a major reason these newer interpretations of secularism and religious liberty took off was a concern over how a predominant faith could end up dictating or setting the rules of engagement for other minority religions, particularly as new faith traditions entered the fray. Without this more neutral approach, a majority faith community might still be able to, in practice, define what a pro-religious government policy or attitude could look like. In America, this typically means Protestant Christianity.

That tension continues to this day: many of the religious liberty disputes the report cites involve the dynamic of a Protestant community action being roped back a bit because of the potential infringement it could have on non-Protestant Christians. In an overwhelmingly Protestant community, school prayer in practice could be used to pressure or isolate non-Protestants with different prayers or rituals. Displaying the Ten Commandments in a community where religious minorities are facing prejudice could end up infringing the ability for non-Christians to freely exist in their faiths. In Texas, for example, leaders are pursuing mandated Bible excerpts in schools at the same time there’s a statewide political backlash against Muslim communities. 

That’s one reason there has been so much suspicion of this particular commission, which was presented as an interfaith group but was dominated by members who neatly fit into the stream of Christian nationalist sentiment that has infused the White House and its partnerships in the Trump era. In many cases, adherents support linking the US to a specific interpretation of Christianity as the nation’s state religion, of rooting laws and regulations in Biblical teaching, and of prioritizing and elevating Protestant evangelicalism as the preferred way to view Christianity.

“To them, religious freedom means not respecting all religions equally, but instead ensuring that Christianity and particularly their flavor of Christianity has a favored place in the public square and in law,” Campbell said.

This is the context in which the report is landing. Though not an explicitly Christian nationalist document, it fits into the social, legal, and political framework that has been ascendant in the second Trump term. 

“The Bremerton decision on the high school football coach being allowed to pray [at games], the recent debates about whether or not Christian charter schools are going to receive state financing, debates about the Ten Commandments on school grounds —  we can see just a concerted effort by attorneys through these religious organizations that have made this kind of document essentially marching orders and used it to try to reestablish or bring us back to a world in which the Protestant majority can try to impose its will on everybody else,” Sutton told me. “The courts seem more open to that than they have been in a couple of generations.”

The version of religious liberty the Founders ended up signing might have been written in an era when intra-Protestant conflicts were their chief concern, but it proved flexible enough to protect the growth of non-Protestant faith traditions. That protection is now being tested, but as we celebrate 250 years of our nation’s history, it has survived until now alongside a still-thriving faith community that’s unique to our country.

“You don’t have to read Tocqueville for that,” Campbell told me. “Just ask these people visiting for the World Cup, and they’ll say, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s a lot of religion around here.’”

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