Monday Miscellany, 10/27/25

The East Wing is NOT part of the White House. The issue that the Right and the Left agree on. And genocide of Christians in Nigeria.

The East Wing Is NOT Part of the White House

Photos of heavy equipment knocking down the walls of the East Wing in order to build a ballroom have provoked indignation and outrage: President Trump is destroying the White House! That’s just a tangible example of how he is destroying American democracy!

That’s the take being pushed by the Democrats, who are vowing to tear down Trump’s ballroom once they retake the presidency.

But that is profoundly misleading. The East Wing is not part of the historical White House. It’s an annex built in 1942. It’s not connected to the building where our presidents live. There is a colonnaded walkway that leads to it.

All that’s in it are offices for the first lady and her staff, the office of the White House social secretary, the correspondence staff, and the White House graphics and calligraphy office, the White House military office, and the Visitors Office. The Presidential Emergency Operations room is in the basement. That’s pretty much it. These offices have been temporarily moved during this new construction and will get updated in the new facility.

The White House and its accompanying complex has always been changed, added to, and remodeled from president to president. Franklin Roosevelt added a family movie theater and an indoor swimming pool. President Truman added a bowling alley. Richard Nixon filled in the pool and changed the space into a press briefing room. And on and on through the Bush and Obama years.

There is currently no space for big meetings, such as state dinners. The East Room in the main building holds about 200. When a big event has to be put on, the White House has to erect a tent on the South Lawn, an expensive and logistically difficult solution. The new ballroom, which is being privately funded, will hold 999 guests.

The West Wing is another separate annex connected to the residence by a colonnade. That’s where the Oval Office and other important administrative offices are located. Despite their names, neither of these are actually “wings” of a house.

See for yourself:

Illustration: WH Complex by Sushiflinger and ZooFari – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6909343

The Issue That the Right and the Left Agree On

Democrats and Republicans are at each other’s throats, differing on just about every issue imaginable. And yet, a study shows that they are in overwhelming agreement that AI needs to be regulated.

The survey was conducted by the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland. Here are some of its findings:

Prohibiting the use of deepfakes in political campaign advertisements, such as to depict an opponent saying something they did not, or to depict an event that did not occur, was favored by 80% (Republicans 83%, Democrats 78%, very red states 77%, very blue states 82%).
Requiring that all deepfakes which are shared publicly be clearly labeled as such, was favored by 80% (Republicans 83%, Democrats 81%, very red states 74%, very blue states 85%).
Requiring AI programs to pass a government test before they can be put into use, which would evaluate whether they may violate regulations, make biased decisions, or have security vulnerabilities was favored by 79%, (Republicans 84%, Democrats 81%, very red states 74%, very blue states 85%). Support has barely changed since 2024, when 81% were in support.
Allowing the government to audit the AI programs that are already in use, and require the company to fix any problems that are found, was favored by 78% (Republicans 82%, Democrats 78%, very red states 72%, very blue states 83%) – essentially the same as 2024, when 77% were in support.
To aid with the pre-testing and audits, 74% favor requiring companies to disclose information to the government about how their decision-making AI was trained, if requested (Republicans 77%, Democrats 76%, very red states 70%, very blue states 77%). Support has increased only slightly since 2024 (72%).
A large majority of Americans (74%) favored the US working to create a treaty banning the development of lethal autonomous weapons [in which AI can fire on targets without human control], and creating an international agency to enforce that prohibition. Support for the proposal was overwhelmingly bipartisan , with no significant difference between the parties (Republicans 75%, Democrats 77%, very red states 71%, very blue states 76%).

Do you see problems with any of these? Would you suggest any other regulations?

Genocide of Christians in Nigeria

As Christianity continues to surge in the developing world, so is martyrdom.

According to Paul Teller and Shawn Wright, “One of the most horrifying yet underreported crises of our time is unfolding in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation and home to one of the largest Christian communities on the continent.”

Jihadist groups bent on wiping out Christianity in the name of Islam are carrying out what is being described as a “genocide.” From Teller and Wright’s Federalist article, Amid The Genocide Of Nigerian Christians, Congress Must Act:

A new report by the Nigeria-based International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law, known as Intersociety, reveals a campaign of destruction so relentless it demands immediate action. According to their findings, jihadist groups are destroying roughly 100 churches every month. Since Boko Haram launched its bloody insurgency in 2009, an estimated 19,100 churches have been attacked, burned, or shut down at gunpoint. . . .

The violence is not merely the byproduct of “land disputes” or “local feuds.” It is a systematic assault designed to completely erase Christianity from Nigeria. Intersociety reports that since 2009, a staggering 185,000 Nigerians lost their lives to jihadist violence — and more than two-thirds of that total were Christians. More than 7,000 Christians were massacred in the first 220 days of this year alone, an average of 32 per day. Thousands more have been abducted, including many pastors and young women who are targeted for ransom, forced conversion, or sexual slavery.

There are some 2.3 million Lutherans in Nigeria, and most of them are in the Muslim-dominated north, making them one of the most persecuted church bodies. See my article for Lutheran Witness from a few years ago, Lutheran Martyrs in Nigeria.