Jared Kushner
Humanize From Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism
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Jared Kushner, the Transhumanist in the White House

Originally published at National Review

Jared Kushner might have used The Transhumanist in the White House as the title for his new memoir. Apparently, he has bought into the transhumanist idea — also embraced by the likes of Ray Kurzweil and Zoltan Istvan — that through the wonders of applied science he can live forever, telling Richard Grenell in a recent podcast interview:

From the last year, the one thing I’ve tried to put a priority on since I left the White House was, you know, getting some exercise in. I think that there is a good probability that my generation is, hopefully with the advances in science, either the first generation to live forever, or the last generation that’s going to die.

So, we need to keep ourselves in pretty good shape.

Transhumanism is a dangerously Utopian, materialist social movement that worships technology, and believes that a point in time is coming at which the crescendo of scientific breakthroughs — known as the Singularity — will enable us to live forever. How? The most popular idea is to upload one’s mind into a computer and live the good eternal life in cyberspace. But what happens if there is a power outage that shuts down all the servers?

It’s fun to make fun, but there is a darkly serious side to transhumanism, a deep nihilism that seeks to replace hope lost when God is rejected, and when we are believed to be nothing more than carbon molecules.

To hear more details about this philosophy, you might want to listen to my Humanize podcast interview of Istvan, who ran for president in 2016 on the Transhumanist Party ticket promising to end death — and made international headlines by campaigning in a bus converted to look like a coffin. Yes, he’s a great self-promoter, but he is also — pardon the pun — deadly serious about this. And, apparently, he now has Kushner joining the great transhumanism cause.

Wesley J. Smith

Chair and Senior Fellow, Center on Human Exceptionalism
Wesley J. Smith is Chair and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Wesley is a contributor to National Review and is the author of 14 books, in recent years focusing on human dignity, liberty, and equality. Wesley has been recognized as one of America’s premier public intellectuals on bioethics by National Journal and has been honored by the Human Life Foundation as a “Great Defender of Life” for his work against suicide and euthanasia. Wesley’s most recent book is Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine, a warning about the dangers to patients of the modern bioethics movement.