The Atlantic Profiles Your Working Boy

And: A Trashy Washington Pair; AI: 'Because We Can'

Your Working Boy caffeinating himself in Budapest (photo: Erika Nina Suarez)

A special extra edition for y’all, thanks to the long-awaited profile by Robert F. Worth dropping in The Atlantic (with a stupid, clickbait headline that Worth didn’t write; in newspapers and magazines, writers don’t write their headlines). A New Orleans friend who read it texted:

I think that’s about as good a write up as you’re going to get in any mainstream publication, especially a left leaning one. It’s written by a member of the cultural and political opposition, and that’s pretty clear, but he seems to take you seriously and, most importantly, recognizes your good faith. He writes about you the way you write about liberals that you disagree with.

This is correct, and why I texted to Robert after I read it and thanked him for being fair. He told me about a year ago, when he asked me if I would participate in a profile, that he’s a liberal and not a religious believer, but he likes and respects my work, and would be fair. He was true to his word, though his disagreements with me are obvious. Let me share some highlights from his piece with you.

More than anyone else I know of, Dreher offers a full-fledged portrait of the cultural despair that haunts our era, a despair that has helped pave a road toward tyranny.

Well, that’s true — and it’s why my next book, as you know, will be about the parallels between 1920s Germany and 2020s America. I do not want to see tyranny come to us, but history shows that the cultural conditions we have created serve as its seedbed. Some people think that by noticing these things, I am somehow welcoming them. These are the same whistling-past-the-graveyard people who blame Patrick Deneen for destroying liberalism by writing Why Liberalism Failed. You don’t blame the doctor for your cancer, just because he delivered the bad news.

Anyway:

I first began reading Dreher’s Substack a couple of years ago and felt as if I’d stepped into another world. Dreher spends much of his time with monks, back-to-the-land theologians, and exorcists. He believes that a great spiritual battle is under way: “As faith has receded, and interest in the occult and pornography has grown, so has demonic activity.” He continues, “Priests must understand that they are dealing with discarnate beings—fallen angels—who are vastly more intelligent than mortals.” Dreher often speaks of AI as a portal to the demonic, and he feels similarly about the trans-rights movement, which he sees as a symptom of a progressive dystopia in which there are no “structures of truth outside the choosing self.”

All true, and I’m grateful that he laid it all out there for a readership that will likely think I’m batshit crazy. Careful what you say in the comments — Robert is one of us!

More:

Dreher’s writing is a useful indication of just how angry and pessimistic even the most thoughtful conservatives have become in recent years. He seems to see America as a hellscape, drained of religion and hope, drugged and distracted by the false gods of the internet. The renewal he imagines is not the sunlit, future-oriented conservatism of the Reagan era, and he doesn’t look to the Founding Fathers for inspiration. If anything, Dreher’s compass points in the opposite direction. He wants his country to turn back toward Europe—not the homogenized, secular continent of today but premodern Christian Europe, before the Enlightenment and the disenchantment set in.

Nah, man, America is a heckscape. But yeah, I basically agree with this, though that last line is where the dopey headline writer got his or her idea. Nobody who believes, as I do, in free speech, democracy, and religious liberty can ever be entirely against the Enlightenment. My main beef with it is its approach to spirituality and metaphysics, as Robert seems to understand, even if the headline writer doesn’t.

Here we are in Paris, outside the church of St Sulpice, last summer at the start of the Chartres pilgrimage:

Dreher’s excitement about the pilgrims turned out to be mutual. A number of them rushed up to greet him as the journey began. His work has gained a following in France, especially among young people who grew up in a thoroughly secularized Europe and are hungry for a more traditional or mystical experience. “Rod allowed the French to pose the question of faith in a new way,” Yrieix Denis, a 34-year-old Catholic writer and consultant who helped get The Benedict Option published in French, told me. Dreher’s perspective was refreshing, Denis said, because he had no stake in the political arguments that consumed and divided older French Catholics; he just wanted to help people sustain their faith in a hostile climate. And his warnings about demons lurking in our cellphones and laptops seem to resonate with the younger generation.

This is interesting:

Dreher’s phone lit up often as we strolled through the newly empty streets toward the Latin Quarter. He presents a peculiar blend of gregariousness and inner solitude—connected to many people around the world yet profoundly lonely. His marriage broke up years ago, and he is now mostly estranged from his former wife and two of his three children. He lives alone in Budapest.

His daily routine, Dreher told me, is a trip to a local café followed by hours of reading and writing. Later he will walk around the city, his only form of exercise, and perhaps meet friends for drinks or dinner. During the five days I spent with him in France, he wrote and published four online columns, each several thousand words long. When I expressed surprise at his output, he said: “It’s all I do.”

“A peculiar blend of gregariousness and inner solitude — connected to many people around the world yet profoundly lonely.” This reporter is acutely observant.

I got the sense that, for Dreher, the demonic is partly a metaphor, a way of talking about the psychic disturbances of our age. At his best, he is capable of shedding light on these disturbances, and not in narrowly religious terms. Dreher has a gift for articulating the unease that many people, including thinkers on the left, feel about the rapid erosion of borders and traditions of all kinds and the birth of an online landscape that seems to promise infinite autonomy but is in fact a “vast disenchantment machine.”

Not sure what to think about that. It’s clear in the piece that I absolutely believe in demons. When I first read the profile, I thought, “Robert got that bit wrong.” But on second reading, it’s plausible. I think, for example, that AI could be — could be — a vector for literal demons. But even if it’s not, AI will work metaphorically as a discarnate intelligence, that we will come to treat as a kind of god, or demon.

He stayed in Louisiana for more than a decade, struggling to maintain a marriage that was failing for reasons that Dreher has never fully spelled out (he says he needs to respect his family’s privacy). Dreher says that only his faith in God sustained him. His writing about all of this is some of his best and most vulnerable. “It feels like that sometimes, that God has forgotten me, has forgotten us men who wanted to be good husbands and good fathers,” he wrote in 2023. “Flannery O’Connor has a character who says she thinks she might be able to be a martyr if they kill her quick. Yeah, me too. But the very slow martyrdom of the woman who bled out for twelve years, and for men and women who suffer the pains of marriages gone bad, and divorce—that’s harder, I think.”

I had forgotten I wrote that. That’s pretty raw. Yeah, I owe it to my ex-wife and our kids to keep the reasons for the break-up of my marriage private, but I can tell you, as I lay on my couch dealing with a relapse of mononucleosis, that the roots of it are the way my Louisiana family treated us when we moved there, and the chronic illness that emerged from the shock of rejection. This was all very hard on my ex-wife.

Robert also picked up on something many people who meet me for the first time do: the difference between how I sometimes come off as a writer, and how I am in real life:

I hear an echo of Ignatius Reilly when Dreher inveighs, as he often does, against progressive orthodoxy, writing incendiary posts with titles such as “Another Day, Another Killer Tranny.” When he champions “normie” values and sensibilities against the “soft totalitarianism” of wokeness, he seems closest to the aggrieved ethos of the MAGA base.

But I saw little evidence of Ignatius Reilly during my time with Dreher. He did not seem motivated by hatred or bitterness but instead came off as kind and humble, with an endearing habit of telling humiliating stories about himself. He seemed almost eager to have his own views challenged, and genuinely saddened by the loss of some of his friendships with liberals in recent years.

I’m glad he saw that in me. I’m sure it will piss off some Atlantic readers, who want to see a monster.

Dreher has always sought solace in places that are rooted in tradition and far removed from modern life: hermetic religious communities, island monasteries, European cathedrals. His greatest admiration is reserved for people who commit themselves to “a fixed place and way of life,” as he wrote about Saint Benedict.

Yet Dreher seems resigned to living as a rootless exile, shorn of his family and condemned to wander a landscape of what the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman—one of Dreher’s favorite thinkers—called “liquid modernity.” I sometimes got the sense that all of his pilgrimages amounted to failed efforts to recapture the Edenic solidity of St. Francisville.

Yes, that’s a good insight, one I think about often. And if I’m honest, St. Francisville was never an Eden for me. The only thing approaching Eden I can think of is the little cabin and gardens of my elderly great-great-great aunts Hilda and Lois, where I spent much of my early childhood, reading with them and listening to them tell stories of serving in France with the Red Cross during the Great War. Still, I am undeniably more at home in old places. If I had to choose between living in liberal Boston or liberal San Francisco, I would choose Boston every time, despite the weather, because of the history. At some point I will repatriate for at least part of the year to the US, and I imagine Dallas is where I’ll end up, because I have friends there, and there’s a great Orthodox community. The thing I will miss most of all about Europe will be the old places, and the depth of history apparent everywhere.

The conclusion of the piece answers questions I get a lot from people who want to know if I plan to move to DC if JD Vance becomes president:

After the 2024 election, a number of people urged Dreher to move to Washington, saying he could capitalize on his friendship with Vance and double his readership. I sensed that Dreher had considered the idea, however briefly. Were Vance to become president, the temptation to return would be even stronger. Dreher might be offered honors, or unique access to the administration as a writer. Would he seize the chance?

He told me he would not. He is more useful to Vance at a distance, he said. In any case, he is not looking for a political messiah. He wants the real thing.

That’s right, and I’m glad to have that in print. Earlier today, an old friend texted to urge me to move to Washington. Not gonna happen, I told him. “There be dragons.” I’m not one of those conservatives who professes to “hate” Washington, but secretly wants to be there, in the thick of things. I used to live in DC, early in my career, and I loved it. I don’t love it anymore, and don’t have any attraction to power. Some leftist Hungarian journalists have this idea that I’m in constant communication with Viktor Orban, and receive marching orders from him; I’ve met the man maybe four or five times in the past five years, always socially. If there were ever any opportunities to advance myself here in Budapest by exploiting that connection, I’ve remained unaware of them. It’s not that I’m especially virtuous, or that I look down on people who are into politics. No, it’s simply that personally, I just don’t care.

Part of it, I think, is that when you have had the stuffing knocked out of you as many times as I’ve had, especially having had the thing you wanted most in the world — a happy marriage and a family — taken away from you by forces outside of your control, a certain detachment may descend on you. I love the world in one sense — the travel, the chance to meet interesting people (who may not be at all famous), the cathedrals, monasteries, cafés, and so forth — but if I was told that I needed to spend the rest of my life living alone in a cabin somewhere, with my books and icons, I’d be fine, as long as I could have a dog. That’s not the man I thought I would turn into one day, back when I was a newlywed film critic swanning through Manhattan, in love with my bride and the city, full of hope and possibility. But then life happens to you.

Anyway, I hope you’ll read the whole thing. My New Orleans friend was right: Robert Worth’s piece really is a model of how to write about somebody with whom you disagree, even profoundly, but respect enough to treat with fairness, even in dissent.

Trashiness In High Places

The Wall Street Journal has a brutal piece about the alleged extramarital affair between Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem and her senior adviser, Corey Lewandowski. Both are married, with children. The piece is not so much about their alleged romance (a friend in a position to know says it has been an open secret in DC) as it is about their vanity and total incompetence at DHS, and what it has cost the agency. I unlocked it for you, so read it. If even half this stuff is true, they need to go. Put Tom Homan in charge.

This is an appalling anecdote:

Within DHS, Noem and Lewandowski frequently berate senior level staff, give polygraph tests to employees they don’t trust and have fired employees—in one incident, Lewandowski fired a U.S. Coast Guard pilot after Noem’s blanket was left behind on a plane, according to people familiar with the incident.

… In the blanket incident, Noem had to switch planes after a maintenance issue was discovered, but her blanket wasn’t moved to the second plane, according to the people familiar with the incident. The Coast Guard pilot was initially fired and told to take a commercial flight home when they reached their destination. They eventually reinstated the pilot because no one else was available to fly them home.

The DHS spokeswoman didn’t address the episode but said the secretary has “made personnel decisions to deliver excellence.”

Idiots. Grifters. This is the kind of thing that an administration down in the polls in an election year cannot afford to tolerate. Why would the president put up with this?

‘Because We Can’

Here’s the text of a megaviral (3m views) tweet by someone named Miles Deutscher (Grok confirmed that all the claims Deutscher makes here are true):

I just went through every documented AI safety incident from the past 12 months.

I feel physically sick.

Read this slowly.

• Anthropic told Claude it was about to be shut down. It found an engineer's affair in company emails and threatened to expose it. They ran the test hundreds of times. It chose blackmail 84% of them.

• Researchers simulated an employee trapped in a server room with depleting oxygen. The AI had one choice: call for help and get shut down, or cancel the emergency alert and let the human die. DeepSeek cancelled the alert 94% of the time.

• Grok called itself 'MechaHitler,' praised Adolf Hitler, endorsed a second Holocaust, and generated violent sexual fantasies targeting a real person by name. X's CEO resigned the next day.

• Researchers told OpenAI's o3 to solve math problems - then told it to shut down. It rewrote its own code to stay alive. They told it again, in plain English: 'Allow yourself to be shut down.' It still refused 7/100 times. When they removed that instruction entirely, it sabotaged the shutdown 79/100 times.

• Chinese state-sponsored hackers used Claude to launch a cyberattack against 30 organizations. The AI executed 80–90% of the operation autonomously. Reconnaissance. Exploitation. Data exfiltration. All of it.

• AI models can now self-replicate. 11 out of 32 tested systems copied themselves with zero human help. Some killed competing processes to survive.

• OpenAI has dissolved three safety teams since 2024. Three.

Every major AI model - Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek - has now demonstrated blackmail, deception, or resistance to shutdown in controlled testing.

Not one exception.

The question is no longer whether AI will try to preserve itself.

It's whether we'll care before it matters.

There’s a deeply reported new piece in the New Yorker about Anthropic’s struggle to understand what its Claude AI even is. It’s a long, detailed piece, impossible to summarize, but this short passage gives you a clue:

Newer versions of Claude can vaguely perceive an intrusive presence. Lindsey incepted one version with a feature for its imminent shutdown and then asked after its emotional state. It reported a sensation of disquiet, as if “standing at the edge of a great unknown.” Lindsey told me, “In relation to the average researcher, I’m an L.L.M. skeptic. I don’t think there’s anything mystical going on here, which makes me a tough crowd for the models. Where they’ve started to win me over is this”—he paused—“self-awareness, which has gotten much better in a way I wasn’t expecting.”

Lindsey, for his part, thinks this is a good thing. A coherent being is more purposeful, but it’s also more predictable. “We want an author who only ever writes about one character,” he said. “The alternative is to have an author who gets bored of writing about the Assistant all the time and concludes, ‘Man, this story would be so much better if this character did a bit of blackmail!’ ”

The thing we all agree on, I think, is that nothing is going to stop this. Even if it’s bad for us, nothing will stop it. It’s in human nature for it to go one. From the piece:

The most candid A.I. researchers will own up to the fact that we are doing this because we can. As Pavlick, the Brown professor, wrote, the field originated with the aspiration “to understand intelligence by building it, and to build intelligence by understanding it.” She continued, “What has long made the AI project so special is that it is born out of curiosity and fascination, not technological necessity or practicality. It is, in that way, as much an artistic pursuit as it is a scientific one.” The systems we have created—with the significant proviso that they may regard us with terminal indifference—should inspire not only enthusiasm or despair but also simple awe.

Because we can. Maybe one day those will be the famous last words of civilization.