Happy Friday! Congratulations to USC quarterback Caleb Williams, who was selected #1 overall in the NFL Draft last night and is headed to the Chicago Bears.

We don’t follow the NFL quite as closely as *cough cough* some others on staff, but we follow it closely enough to know that getting to pick first isn’t exactly a sign of a thriving program. Anyway, we’re rooting for you, Caleb: The vibes of our Monday morning editorial meetings this fall depend on you!

Editor’s Note: Laugh all you want. The Bears’ general manager Ryan Poles’ years-long plan to “take the [NFC] North and never give it back” has now fully come to fruition.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The Ukrainian military received an American-supplied long-range version of the Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) this week, U.S. defense officials confirmed on Thursday, after the Biden administration had for months resisted sending the long-range weapons. The missiles were a previously undisclosed part of an aid shipment announced in March and have nearly double the range—190 miles—of the ATACMS Ukraine received last year. Ukrainian forces reportedly used the missiles in overnight strikes on Wednesday to hit Russian targets in Crimea. More of the longer-range systems are headed to Ukraine as part of the latest aid package, which included a clause mandating their delivery. 
• The Pentagon on Thursday announced the temporary withdrawal of approximately 75 U.S. Special Operations personnel from Chad. The African nation requested that U.S. forces halt operations at an airbase near the capital of N’Djamena but, unlike neighboring Niger, has not moved to eject all U.S. military personnel. American officials said the removal could be temporary and that they plan to continue reviewing the U.S. security partnership after Chad’s presidential elections on May 6. 
• Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry resigned Wednesday, clearing the way for a nine-member transition council to be sworn in Thursday morning. Henry has been unable to return to the country since he left in late February, as criminal gangs took over most of the capital. Michel Patrick Boisvert, a former economics and finance minister, was appointed acting prime minister. The council is expected to approve the arrival of a Kenyan peacekeeping force to combat gang violence and help restore order.
•  The Bureau of Economic Analysis reported Thursday that real gross domestic product (GDP) grew at an annual rate of 1.6 percent in the first quarter of 2024, significantly below expectations. A Dow Jones survey of economists had projected GDP to grow at a 2.4 percent annualized rate between January and March; the third and fourth quarters of last year saw such GDP growth of 4.9 and 3.4 percent, respectively.
• The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) restored net neutrality rules—regulations that prevent internet service providers from blocking or slowing traffic to particular websites—in a 3-2 vote Thursday. Net neutrality rules were first instituted in 2015 under the Obama administration but were repealed by the Trump administration in 2017.
• The U.S. fertility rate fell to 1.62 births per woman last year, according to a data analysis released on Thursday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics—a 2 percent decline from 2022 and another record low. The birth rate ticked up slightly during the pandemic, but the 2023 levels confirm the return to its long-term decline.

‘Oh, Sounds Like Fraud!’

By now, the story is a familiar one: On December 14, 2020, 11 people met at the Arizona Republican Party headquarters. The group included the chairwoman of the Arizona GOP, Kelli Ward, and her husband, Michael, as well as Gregory Safsten, the executive director of the state party, Jacob Hoffman, a representative-elect in the Arizona House, Anthony Kern, an outgoing member of the Arizona State Senate, and seven others.

They all signed a document stating they were the “duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States from the State of Arizona,” and they certified then-President Donald Trump as the victor of Arizona’s presidential election. And they posted a video of it. 

If any of this is starting to sound like a broken record, then you probably already know that these 11 people were not the “duly elected and qualified Electors” of their state, which President Joe Biden won by more than 10,000 votes in the 2020 election. 

What they are—if not true-blue electors—is a large chunk of the 18 defendants in a nine-count indictment unsealed in Arizona on Wednesday that alleges they conspired “to prevent the lawful transfer of the presidency to keep Unindicted Coconspirator 1 in office against the will of Arizona’s voters.” We’ll give you one guess as to who that secret coconspirator is.

It’s the latest in a series of indictments at the state and federal levels against individuals involved in …

As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. Our full 1,638-word story on the indictment against false electors and former Trump aides is available in the members-only version of TMD.

Worth Your Time

• Writing for The Atlantic, novelist Rachel Khong argued that the limits of human artistic creation are an asset, not a liability, in a world of artificial intelligence (AI). “Now ChatGPT and other [large language models], trained on a wide store of human-generated literature, stand on the cusp of writing novels in no time at all,” she wrote. “This seems, initially, discouraging. Here is an entity that can seemingly do what I do, but faster. … Unlike me, it won’t need sleep, or bathroom breaks, or patience, or life experience; it won’t get the flu. In fact, AI embodies hypotheticals I can just imagine for myself: If only I could write all day and night. If only I were smarter and more talented. If only I had endless knowledge. If only I could read whole libraries. What could I create if I had no needs? What might this development mean for writing? Considering limitlessness has led me to believe that the impediments of human writers are what lead us to create meaningful art. And they are various: limits of our body, limits of our perspectives, limits of our skills. But the constraints of an artist’s process are, in the language of software, a feature, not a bug.” 
• The U.S. healthcare system reflects a strange and costly mix of government-run care (Veterans Affairs), government-funded care (Medicaid and Medicare), and private care (like employer-sponsored insurance). Jim Capretta argued in Law and Liberty that reformers need to better frame arguments for market-reforms to American healthcare, or else the system will drift towards more and more government control. “The challenge is to create new structures that inject durable cost discipline into the provision of medical services without eroding their quality and timeliness,” he wrote. “That should be possible as studies show that much of the high-cost burden is associated with irrational pricing in some settings, frequent occasions when services are rendered to patients despite scant empirical evidence of their efficacy, and heavy administrative overhead and maddening levels of paperwork. … What’s needed is not one-off ideas but a system change that incentivizes continuous productivity and quality improvement in the processes governing patient care. Market proponents must convince voters such a system change is more likely to occur with their ideas and not with more centralized government control. It is a tall challenge, but not an impossible one.”

Presented Without Comment 

Baltimore Banner: Ex-Athletic Director Accused of Framing Principal With AI Arrested at Airport With Gun 

Baltimore County Police arrested Pikesville High School’s former athletic director Thursday morning and charged him with using artificial intelligence to impersonate Principal Eric Eiswert, leading the public to believe Eiswert made racist and antisemitic comments behind closed doors.

Also Presented Without Comment

New York Post: Biden Reads Out ‘Pause’ Instruction During Speech to Union Members in Gaffe Reminiscent of Ron Burgundy

Also Also Presented Without Comment 

Semafor: Russia Embraces K-Pop and Anime as Sanctions Limit Western Entertainment

In the Zeitgeist 

Audible and Pottermore—the digital publisher of Harry Potter—announced yesterday that they’ll produce new audiobooks, to be released in late 2025, for all seven Harry Potter books as “full-cast audio productions.”

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: Will unpacked the shortcomings of Yanis Varoufakis’ new book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Mike reported on what Trump’s New York trial reveals about how the former president operates behind the scenes, and Nick argued (🔒) that the abortion politics “system” is actually working.
• On the podcasts: Sarah is joined by Steve and Jonah on The Dispatch Podcast to discuss the successful passing of Ukraine and Israel aid and explore the intellectual history of the illiberal right.
• On the site: Kevin opines on Trump’s insistence on being called President Trump in court.