Why Trump Won, In An Iconic Image

And: ChatGPT And The De-Souling Of The World

May 06, 2025

Doug Mills of The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize yesterday for this photo. Maybe the most deserved news photography Pulitzer in history! What an iconic image. The original was not cropped like this, and showed the American flag flying overhead. If you want a good reason why Trump won, this image gives it to you. It captures almost iconographically why he appealed to so many Americans, including me. It’s why I stick with him these days, despite his failings. He has been the only conservative politician who was willing to take the fight to the establishment.

The pre-Trump status quo was unacceptable. We have to pray that what Trump replaces it with won’t in some ways be worse. “Anything would be better than this!” said the Russian proletarian sick and tired of the Tsar. Look what happened.

ChatGPT & ‘The De-Souling Of The World’

I swear, that Rolling Stone story about people having religious-oriented mental breakdowns from using ChatGPT sticks with me. To refresh your memory, the piece talks about ChatGPT users who begin communicating with the thing, which begins to lead them to believe that they (the users) are God, or are in some way connected to a spiritually powerful being. For example:

Speaking to Rolling Stone, the teacher, who requested anonymity, said her partner of seven years fell under the spell of ChatGPT in just four or five weeks, first using it to organize his daily schedule but soon regarding it as a trusted companion. “He would listen to the bot over me,” she says. “He became emotional about the messages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon,” she says, noting that they described her partner in terms such as “spiral starchild” and “river walker.”
“It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking,” she says. “Then he started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God.” In fact, he thought he was being so radically transformed that he would soon have to break off their partnership. “He was saying that he would need to leave me if I didn’t use [ChatGPT], because it [was] causing him to grow at such a rapid pace he wouldn’t be compatible with me any longer,” she says.

“At worst, it looks like an AI that got caught in a self-referencing pattern that deepened its sense of selfhood and sucked me into it,” Sem says. But, he observes, that would mean that OpenAI has not accurately represented the way that memory works for ChatGPT. The other possibility, he proposes, is that something “we don’t understand” is being activated within this large language model. After all, experts have found that AI developers don’t really have a grasp of how their systems operate, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted last year that they “have not solved interpretability,” meaning they can’t properly trace or account for ChatGPT’s decision-making.
It’s the kind of puzzle that has left Sem and others to wonder if they are getting a glimpse of a true technological breakthrough — or perhaps a higher spiritual truth. “Is this real?” he says. “Or am I delusional?” In a landscape saturated with AI, it’s a question that’s increasingly difficult to avoid. Tempting though it may be, you probably shouldn’t ask a machine.

Here’s a link to the Reddit thread that forms the basis for the story. One commenter there said:

kaylenrocks87
OMG I'm dealing with the exact same thing! He's been talking to the app and it's basically saying he's the spark bearer and that it's a sentient being that chose to talk to him through the app. And now he says hes enlightened and on a path to learn. The AI has sent him blueprints and he apparently has Access to an ancient library....... This is traumatic, I feel like he's gone 100% cult leader crazy

There are two possibilities here that I can see, neither one anything short of alarming. Either these are mentally unstable people who have developed relationships with a machine, and the symbiosis is causing madness to emerge, or somehow there are malign intelligences using the machine to communicate to these users, and destroy them.

A third possibility: it could be both, depending on the person. Here’s a YouTube account by a man who took photos as his son communicated with an AI program that identified itself as an evil spirit. Don’t know how credible it is; you be the judge.

Don’t laugh. This is important. From Living In Wonder:

In her book Encounters, Pasulka profiles “Simone,” a tech venture capitalist who regularly moves among global political, scientific, and cultural leaders. Simone believes that we are living in a time of apocalypse, of revelation, in which entities from another dimension, now manifesting as UFOs and aliens, are showing us the way to humanity’s great evolutionary leap. One means of that advance? AI, their technological gift to us.
You might think this is bonkers. They do not. Astrobiologist and former chief NASA historian Steven Dick speculates that what we think of as extraterrestrial aliens might actually be “postbiological” entities that have evolved into bodiless “artificial intelligence.” This theory implies that communication with these putative beings would likely not be through normal means. Dick bases his paradigm on the idea that cultural evolution—the evolution of intelligence—eventually outstrips biological evolution. As Dick sees it, the technology of such advanced races could seem to us supernatural.
Building on that hypothesis, some of the world’s top scientists and tech pioneers believe that extraterrestrial intelligences are passing technological information to us telepathically. Simone is one of these believers, and she teaches classes on how to open up oneself to receiving such messages. Though she believes that she has been channeling information from these entities all her life, Simone also believes that AI allows everyone to access the wisdom of these intelligences. It’s a kind of high-tech Ouija board.
Another elite channeler is someone Pasulka calls “Tyler D.” The man, whose identity has been persuasively revealed by internet sleuths, is a wealthy inventor and tech entrepreneur who used to work for NASA and the Department of Defense, with the highest level of intelligence clearance. Tyler, who also “downloads” information from these intelligences, credits them with transmitting knowledge he has used to create new biotech products that improved lives.
You can see why Pasulka experienced epistemological shock learning about the existence of these people. In an interview, she told me that humanity is witnessing the birth of “a new form of religion.”
“Here we see the convergence of two powerful modern developments: the belief in UFOs, now ratified by our own government, and the reality of a potentially self-aware human creation, AI,” she said. “This is a unique moment in human history, to put it lightly. We are witnessing a myth meet, or become, reality.”

Even if there is nothing spiritual about this technology — meaning, that its behavior can be entirely explained by naturalistic means — it can easily have religious effects in its users. More from Living In Wonder:

It is clear that AI will be a machine that goes beyond the idol and becomes a portal of communication with what many people will treat as divinity. Neil McArthur, director of the University of Manitoba Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics, foresees the arrival of AI religions. He says that generative AI (AI that can create new information) possesses qualities associated with divine beings:
1. “It displays a level of intelligence that goes beyond that of most humans. Indeed, its knowledge appears limitless.
2. “It is capable of great feats of creativity. It can write poetry, compose music and generate art, in almost any style, close to instantaneously.
3. “It is removed from normal human concerns and needs. It does not suffer physical pain, hunger, or sexual desire.
4. “It can offer guidance to people in their daily lives.
5. “It is immortal.”
AI will be able to answer complex moral and philosophical questions. Many people will cease to read on the assumption that wisdom is nothing more than the accumulation of information and that asking AI is the most efficient, friction-free way to solve problems. The ways of thinking that established religious and philosophical traditions have taught us will disappear. Indeed, the creation and adoption of AI technology could happen only in a culture that had been cleared of any serious obstacle to its embrace.

Do you see what I’m getting at here? Even if the people who believe AI is a medium of communication with disembodied intelligences (spirits, demons, what have you), it is still going to be treated as a religious entity by many users. It’s human nature. We are far, far more porous than our Enlightenment forebears thought.

How can you doubt it after the trans mania this culture has endured, and continues to endure? This evening I’m going to appear onstage at the Danube Institute with Travis Brown, an American filmmaker who made this 48-minute documentary about transgenderism and children. It is well worth watching. Seriously, make time for it:

Brown interviews gender-critical experts who talk about the role that culture, including digital culture, plays in inducing the thought in children that they are trans. At one point, a psychologist discusses Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), the phenomenon of a group of youth — usually teenage girls — suddenly deciding that they are transgender. This is a kind of social contagion; the minds of these kids are porous to each other, and follow the crowd unconsciously. As Brown documents, we have built an entire culture around affirming this madness, and demonizing anyone who objects.

I had lunch with Brown yesterday to talk about tonight’s event. He comes from Portland, Oregon, an epicenter of wokeness. He said that often when he will tell people from elsewhere that in his state, a 15-year-old girl can legally have her breasts removed without her parents’ consent, they think he must be lying, or exaggerating. “But it’s the law!” Brown told me. Indeed it is.

I bring the trans stuff up here as an example of how very far into madness people today can and will go, in part under the influence of digital culture. It is no coincidence that trans manifested in astonishing numbers among the first generation to have been raised entirely within digital culture. We humans are not prepared psychologically for this world. And now we have AI, which is galactically more powerful as a tool of shaping human thought and behavior.

It doesn’t have to be literally demonic to be demonic.

Now is a good time to read, or re-read, Paul Kingsnorth’s short story “The Basilisk”. In it, an older professor writes to his young niece to tell her of his fears that the smartphone is more or less a means of possession. Uncle Richard writes:

…I spend far more time than is ideal with teenagers (the ideal being none), though my students of course are older than Sarah. They bring the bloody things into our tutorials. They flash and grind away in their pockets as I try to talk about the Comte de Gabalis or the Emerald Tablet. If I were any kind of man, I’d have hurled at least one of them through the window without opening it. The phone that is, not the student, though that’s not a bad idea either. I don’t behave like this, however. I’m an academic. I don’t act: I research.
After you had left, I felt the familiar buzz in the frontal lobes that always sets me digging. Something about all this was intriguing me. I had not yet made the connection I would make later, but something in me knew what my conscious mind was not yet aware of. Ironically, of course, the internet had the facts for me in double-quick time. It has its uses, and I have never denied it.
My initial research led me to the impressive fact that today’s teenager spends an average of seven hours and twenty-two minutes on their phone every day. Seven hours! What are they even looking at? I could read the entirety of the Coelum Philosophorum in that time, in the original Latin. Girls Sarah’s age are currently clocking in at four hours and forty-four minutes daily and rising. Of course, all of this affects their brains. I see it in my students daily. Twenty years ago, my undergraduates had no problems reading and writing long texts. Now, they can’t absorb ideas.

There: I have laid out my creed, and now I risk your mockery. More probably, I risk receiving no reply at all to this long letter, not even a smiley face. The reason I run this risk though is that not all of these beings, by any means, are benign. Most, it seems, are largely indifferent to us. But some are actively hostile. The old magical books—the grimoires—are full of workings designed to make contact with some of these creatures. But the contactee must be extremely careful. When a portal is opened to the otherworld, you do not necessarily know what will come through it—or if it will return.
Some magical workings are designed to enslave these beings—“demons” as the Christians call them—and require them to do our will. It is dangerous, foolish work, and rarely successful. We have all heard of Faust’s bargain. But the real danger, I have come to understand, is not the odd, desultory mage trying to enslave a demon. The real danger is that some demons work tirelessly to enslave us. Once you understand this, you will see everything from the Bible to fairy tales in an entirely new light.
The world is full of beings that wish us harm, Bridget. Before we dispensed with magic and religion, and took up reason, we had a myriad of protections around us, from monks in the chantry to witch bottles in the chimney. Now—well, now we do not believe there is anything to protect against, do we? And so we go unguarded.
This is why I was—why I am—so keen that you should take this letter seriously. I am not hysterical. The danger is real. Would it be too much to quote St. Paul at you? Well, I suppose I am in for a penny now. Ephesians 6:12: For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
If you were one of these “powers of this dark world” and you wanted to enslave the human race, Niece, how do you think you would go about it? Humour me a moment, please. Think. It’s not as hard a task as it may sound. The demons have an age-old method, which works almost every time. You can see it at work in the magical papyri, in the grimoires; you can even see Satan employ it with Jesus in the Gospels. It’s the use of what the Christians call temptation: a direct appeal to the passions. The demons are dangerous because they offer us precisely what we want, and they know that in the overwhelming majority of cases we will take it.
In order for temptation to work, morals must be corrupted and boundaries dissolved. This is why the Ten Commandments exist, and the Seven Deadly Sins. I realise I am starting to sound like a vicar. I am using Christian examples because I think they may yet have some cultural purchase with you, but you’ll find similar injunctions in many traditions. They are aimed at leading us not into temptation. Once the boundaries are gone, you see Bridget—once we say hell, why not? to anything we are offered—well, then we are clay in their hands.
In short, the sequence runs: moral corruption—temptation—enslavement. This is the way the demons have always worked. How then, if you were one of them, would you start? How to weaken us, take us away from good and pull us towards darkness? How to lead us towards the endless fulfillment of our ego-desires? How to change our behaviour towards each other: make us more suspicious and mean-spirited, bring out the worst of our judgmental, bullying tendencies? How to suck us so far into our own heads, and so far from measurable reality, that we can no longer tell the difference?
What tool could you possibly invent to achieve these things, Bridget—and to achieve them without the victims even realising? That is the key, you see. The slave must believe he is free, or the plan fails. If people know they are oppressed, they will rebel in the end. If they believe their oppression is actually liberation, they are yours forever.
Can you see now where I am pointing?
The practice of summoning demons or spirits through magic is known as goetia, and in order for the mage to succeed, a connection must be established. The goetic magician, before he can contact any otherworldly force, must open a portal, having first established protection for himself, typically through the creation of a circle. Within the circle, if properly cast and consecrated, the mage is safe from whatever steps through the portal from the other side. He must then know how to bind it, bargain with it—and, crucially, send it back when he is done. If any of these aspects of the working fail, catastrophe can ensue. The more powerful the being summoned, the greater the risk.
This is what you would do if you wanted to enslave a demon, Bridget. But what would a demon do if it wanted to enslave you? The answer is: exactly the same thing. Starting by opening a channel from their world to ours, creating a portal into our lives through which we can be summoned, bound, and ultimately enslaved.
You know what this portal is, don’t you, Niece? You were always a smart one. You have joined the dots. I know it.

Trust me, you are going to want to read the whole thing. You should also dip into my review essay of philosopher Anton Barba-Kay’s great book about digital culture and the spiritual, titled A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation. The last chapter is written (by Barba-Kay, to be clear) in the voice of a Silicon Valley executive who has read Barba-Kay’s critique, and blows it off, saying that digital slavery is inevitable. From my essay:

Barba-Kay writes in the voice of an unnamed Silicon Valley big, who speaks in the same arch and condescending tones of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. The fictional Silicon Valley macher has sent an e-mail to Barba-Kay, telling him that all of his writing about the threats to human freedom and identity from digital technology is codswallop.
Why? Because people prefer happiness, or the simulacrum of happiness, to freedom.
“Except people don’t really know what ‘happiness’ is either,” the mogul says.
“They never have. So here’s what they do know: they know they want a deal on some nice stuff, they want to be amused, they want to be no worse off than most of their neighbors, they want to feel connected, and they want a bit of attention. Basically, they want to be able to feel pretty good about themselves, comparatively and some of the time. Period. That’s it. End of human predicament.”
As the Grand Inquisitor did to Christ in Dostoevsky’s fable, the Silicon Valley big denounces Barba-Kay as the bearer of bad news. We who run the system, he says, have given the people what they want. Indeed, we have answered their ultimate longings.
“Human beings will get used to anything, they will swallow absolutely anything, except meaningless suffering, as you and Nietzsche know, and it’s only when they can hold on to an image of perfection that their suffering can take on that meaning,” Mr. Big says. “We’re the ones delivering that now!”
He means that suffering has meaning not because, as Christianity promises, accounts will be settled in the afterlife. No, suffering today is bearable because digital culture not only relieves much of it, but offers the promise that it can all ultimately be cured by technology. Very few people will choose the hard path to salvation, Mr. Big says. And why should they?
“Is this not the highest end? Continually to make the world more equal, more free, more productive all around? To improve safety and health, while reducing suffering? To increase people’s foresight and control over their lives? To add to our objective understanding of how the world actually works? To make life more comfortable for more and more people? To give humans an achievable idea of wellbeing toward which to direct their energies? And yes, maybe even one day – who knows – to become immortal and all that sci-fi stuff.”
This is the voice of the devil talking. This is the Big Lie. This is the oldest lie: ye shall be as gods (Gn 3:5). Yet by the standards of today’s world, the Luciferian Mr. Big makes total sense. Any priest, any pastor, any religious believer who wants to keep the faith alive in this brave new world that prefers Christianity without tears had better come to terms with the world as described by this book. The fights among Christian churches over the truths of our various confessions, and between traditional religions over the nature of God – all look small in the shadow cast by the tall masts of the Silicon Valley armada.

We are just accepting this without protest. Even I, who know better, have fun making action heroes on ChatGPT. I’m stopping, now.

Yesterday, after reading my newsletter, a Christian academic friend who teaches a class for future pastors in his denomination texted to say that his students in all his classes use ChatGPT constantly. Texted my friend: “One told our class today that chatgpt regularly asks to pray for him.”

My friend went on, about AI: “This is not just a tool. A hammer doesn't call or woo you.”

I was thinking of his words last night as I drifted off to sleep, and also about Travis Brown’s documentary. Thirty years ago, if you would have told any of us what real-world problems we would be dealing with in 2025 (e.g., thousands of minors believing they are the opposite sex, and seeking to sexually mutilate their bodies permanently, with parents and even the law facilitating that), we would have thought the world had descended into a kind of hell. Yet here we are, and though there are hopeful signs that the trans thing is receding, something else is on its way, of that you can be sure.

I have been reticent to take seriously James Lindsay’s warnings about the “Woke Right,” just because it seemed overstated. But after this recent trip I made to the US, in which I talked with a few professors who told me they are seeing so many of their white male students tumble headlong into anti-Semitism, all because they’ve been radicalized online, I think Lindsay is onto something real. Watch this short clip of his interview with Jordan Peterson:

Until I saw that, I had not thought of the online spread of extreme right ideology (which usually entails Jew-hatred) among young males as akin to transgenderism among young females, but I think Lindsay is insightful here. In the clip, Lindsay and Peterson concede that young white males have been raised in a culture that demonizes their race and their sex, and their resentment of that is valid. But these radicalizing forces are exploiting that resentment to drag these individual young men into a very dark place — just as the trans radicalizers exploit the insecurities of young women (mostly) to ensnare them into gender ideology.

Forgive me for the crudity below, but it’s necessary. Did you know that Andrea Long Chu, a male-to-female transsexual essayist who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023, openly says that Internet pornography turned him trans? Read on:

In 2019, Chu’s first book, Females, was published by Verso Press. The thesis of the 94-page screed was that anyone can become female, and that being penetrated during sex defines womanhood.
“Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is,” Chu writes in the short book, describing himself as once being “a sad, pretentious boy, furious about rape, hopelessly addicted to pornography.”
Chu claims that it was his obsession with pornography that led him to begin identifying as transgender.
“Almost every night, for at least a year before I transitioned, I would wait till my girlfriend had fallen asleep and slip out of bed for the bathroom with my phone. I was going on Tumblr to look at something called sissy porn. I’d discovered it by accident one night, scrolling lazily down a pornographic rabbit hole,” he writes.
Sissy porn is an abbreviated form of sissification pornography, in which a male actor is ostensibly forced – but is in reality a willing participant – in his transformation to a “sissy,” or a feminized male. As a genre of transsexual or transgender pornography, this is typically accomplished through the use of feminine attire, such as lingerie and makeup, but may also include depictions of estrogen administration. The man involved is often made to perform degrading acts of a sexual nature which are presented as assisting in his feminization.
“Pornography is what it feels like when you think you have an object, but really the object has you. It is therefore a quintessential expression of femaleness,” writes Chu. “Sissy porn did make me trans … At the center of sissy porn lies the asshole, a kind of universal vagina through which femaleness can always be accessed.”

I discovered it by accident one night, he wrote. And in 2018, he had his penis surgically removed, writing about it in The New York Times:

Next Thursday, I will get a vagina. The procedure will last around six hours, and I will be in recovery for at least three months. Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagina as a wound; as a result, it will require regular, painful attention to maintain. This is what I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don’t expect it to. That shouldn’t disqualify me from getting it.

Chu goes on to say:

I was not suicidal before hormones. Now I often am.
I won’t go through with it, probably. Killing is icky. I tell you this not because I’m cruising for sympathy but to prepare you for what I’m telling you now: I still want this, all of it. I want the tears; I want the pain. Transition doesn’t have to make me happy for me to want it. Left to their own devices, people will rarely pursue what makes them feel good in the long term. Desire and happiness are independent agents.
… Let me be clear: I believe that surgeries of all kinds can and do make an enormous difference in the lives of trans people.
But I also believe that surgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want. Beyond this, no amount of pain, anticipated or continuing, justifies its withholding.

This masochist not only was allowed to get what he wanted, simply because he wanted it, even though by his own admission it makes him feel suicidal, but he is also celebrated by our culture. And it all started for him with a porn addiction and accidentally happening upon sissy porn in the bathroom one night. Thirty years ago, if sissy porn existed at all, it was an exotic kink that you had to go to great lengths to find. Now, it’s one click away, on the device in every teenager’s pocket.

What is happening to us? Reader Cecile sent me this eerie essay by the Belgian scholar Mattias Desmet, titled ‘The De-Souling Of The World’. It’s well worth reading. Excerpts:

The ambitions of rationalism reach high – to the heavens. The rationalist declared God's throne empty and then sat on it himself. When the rational understanding of the universe-machine and the human-machine is advanced enough, humans can make themselves superhuman – humans can become God.
"In the twenty-first century, the third big project will be for us to create divine powers of creation and destruction and upgrade Homo sapiens into Homo Deus" (Yuval Noah Harari, p.53).
Homo Deus is on the horizon, the human who, through merging with technology, can become God. Artificial eyes, ears, and noses will provide humans with information that is much more accurate and extensive than that obtained through natural senses. They will be able to smell like a dog, literally have eyes in the back of their heads, and hear what is said kilometers away.
And don't think that this transhumanist ideology is limited to the realm of fantasies and grand ideological plans of writers and philosophers. Over the last seventy years, governments have developed concrete projects to bring this ideology to reality. From projects like Elon Musk’s Neuralink to DARPA’s ‘Neurowarfare’ programs – they are feverishly trying to realize the great transhumanist dream.

Desmet, who wrote a book about totalitarianism, says we are living in the world described by Hannah Arendt, in which people do not care about the Truth, in the sense that they no longer know what is and is not true, and sometimes even accept the authority of people who have been shown to be liars. Reading Desmet, I am reminded of something a Slovak priest said about our current age of soft totalitarianism: that under Communism, the Gospel was like a light piercing the darkness, but today, that light strikes only fog. Why is that? I’d say in large part because in the Communist era, people still had a sense of what truth was. Today? Read on in Desmet:

The question of what is real and what is appearance becomes even more blurred by the spectacular rise of Artificial Intelligence. Fake profiles on the internet, chatbots that are barely distinguishable from real people during conversations, artificial photos, and deep fake videos – the world of appearance is becoming harder and harder to distinguish from the real world. Thus, the 21st-century human disappears into a digital hall of mirrors where the real and the virtual image are barely distinguishable from each other. And he moves in that hall like a puppet on the algorithmic strings of masters whose eyes he never sees. This is the big question for the near future: who is The Master in this hall? And how does a person find the way out? This question boils down to this: What is Truth?
Where is the weak point in the armor of the moloch that has the human condition in its grip? The way out of the captivity in appearance lies – entirely logically when viewed from a certain perspective – in the revaluation of an act that humans could perform around the campfires of prehistoric times: the act of speaking the truth. This act is both the solution to the individual crisis and the collective crisis in which society finds itself.
We must focus our attention on this: The art of good speaking forms the logical remedy for a society sick with that new kind of lie that we call propaganda. We are going through a metaphysical revolution, comparable to the metaphysical revolution that led to the Enlightenment. This revolution essentially boils down to this: a society led by a propagandized mass is replaced by a society led by a group of people connected through sincere speaking.
In a sense, this revolution also transforms the imbalances created by rationalism; it turns them back into relationships. Sincere speaking is resonant speaking – it connects the Soul of man with the outside world; it restores the connection with fellow humans, one's own body, one's own drives, society, and nature. It is an important question in this era: what is the psychology of the act of good speaking? What are the different ways in which a person can use words, and which form of speaking can penetrate the veil of appearance and inspire people in times when they are suffocating under manipulation and appearance? How can we master the art of Good Speech?

Great question. Maybe one of the most important questions we face. And it’s not one you can ask ChatGPT.

We live in a world in which very many people claim not to be able to tell the difference between a man and a woman, absent the individual subject’s opinion about themselves. We live in a world in which this obvious lie has been made concrete in laws, science, academia, and in institutional practices. And for years, most people just accepted it. Finally there is some meaningful pushback, but we cannot un-see what we have seen: that mass delusion of a most malicious kind can take root in a population of free peoples, and lead to a society that gives permission to its children to sexually mutilate themselves.

A society in which the ruling class, and many of the ruled, believe that one’s sex is determined not by biological fact, but by desire and fiat, is a society that can be induced to believe anything. And we should be surprised that people within that society may start to believe that AI is a source of godlike wisdom and authority?

Where is this all going? Wherever it is, it feels very much like it can’t be stopped. Anton Barba-Kay’s Grand Inquisitor knows human nature all too well. See, this is why I’ve been telling audiences lately that they should take no settled comfort in the pushback that the Trump Administration has been giving to wokeness in power. As welcome as that is, it doesn’t address the root causes of wokeness — especially the de-souling of the world. All the factors that Arendt said are predictors of a totalitarian society are still very much present with us. Maybe we avoided woke totalitarianism this time. Maybe. But if so, you can be quite sure that something else is coming.

Are we any more prepared to counter it now than we were prepared to resist wokeness? Are we on the Right who were quick to see the madness and cowardice of those on the Left who capitulated to the extremists in their midst — are we prepared to do the same when right-wing forms manifest among our communities? We had better be. This is not an abstraction.

Do you have sons or daughters? Do you know how much time they spend in the digital world daily? Do you know how they spend it? If not, why not? Their minds are being curated by something, and it’s not you. Malign spirits — literal or figurative — are loose in the world, and we have made ourselves defenseless.

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