It is with no small feeling of regret that we observe how completely the civic traditions of our early Republic have been discarded. Gone are so many patriotic songs, like the balladic “Liberty Song” and William Billings’ anthemic “Chester,” although for whatever reason, “Yankee Doodle” has managed to find a place in the popular consciousness. Gone are the liberty poles and liberty caps, the cockades, the effigies, the boisterous mock funerals, the vivid illuminations marking moments of communal affirmation. And gone are the public toasting rituals that once honored people and political principles, usually numbering 13, one for each of the original states.
Perhaps the most famous toast of that variety came on the evening of Evacuation Day, November 25, 1783, when the last of the British army, accompanied by thousands of Loyalists, finally abandoned New York City pursuant to the terms of the Treaty of Paris. As the British vessels sailed away at noontime, the Continental Army traversed the Hudson, tramped down the island of Manhattan, and raised the Union Flag atop Fort George on the Battery, though not entirely without incident — the proprietress of a boarding house got in a dust-up with a British officer when she displayed the American flag prematurely, and then it was discovered that the British had, as a final act of defiance, greased the flagpole at Fort George. It took considerable effort for a certain John Van Arsdale to shimmy his way up and replace the British standard with an American one. At evenfall, Governor George Clinton presided over a sumptuous celebratory dinner at Fraunces Tavern in lower Manhattan, attended by General George Washington and other high-ranking officers of the Continental Army. The following toasts were drank by the assembled company:
- The United States of America.
- His most Christian Majesty.
- The United Netherlands.
- The king of Sweden.
- The American Army.
- The Fleet and Armies of France, which have served in America.
- The Memory of those Heroes who have fallen for our Freedom.
- May our Country be grateful to her military children.
- May Justice support what Courage has gained.
- The Vindicators of the Rights of Mankind in every Quarter of the Globe.
- May America be an Asylum to the persecuted of the Earth.
- May a close Union of the States guard the Temple they have erected to Liberty.
- May the Remembrance of this day be a Lesson to Princes.
These 13 inspiriting toasts were recorded in Rivington’s Gazette, and ever since, the Sons of the Revolution patriotic society have gathered in Fraunces Tavern on Evacuation Day to give the toasts anew. What a shame it is that this holiday is no longer commemorated as it was in former days, when the toasts were recalled, dress reviews and feux-de-joie were performed, and greasy poll climbing contests were held, while children chanted
It’s Evacuation Day, when the British ran away,
Please, dear Master, give us holiday!
A portion of lower Manhattan’s Bowling Green was renamed Evacuation Day Plaza back in 2016, but otherwise the holiday has been largely forgotten, and more’s the pity, as we would all do well to meditate upon the Fraunces Tavern toasts from time to time.
I mention all of this not just because yet another Evacuation Day has come and gone with precious little mention, but also because it was the 11th of these renowned toasts that was cited by Sarah Stillman in her article “Disappeared to a Foreign Prison,” published in a recent issue of The New Yorker:
Back in May, Miriam [a young Togolese woman] told me, she’d been elated to receive protection from a U.S. immigration judge. She thought that this offer of refuge was what defined the United States. It was true, I told her. After the last British ship left New York Harbor in 1783, George Washington and his officers famously made a toast: “May America be an Asylum to the persecuted of the earth!”
Enter Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, the neo-reactionary blogger cited and admired by such figures as Steve Bannon, Michael Anton, and JD Vance. Yarvin, having come across Stillman’s reference to the Fraunces Tavern toast, smelled a rat. “New Yorker printing fake communist history like it’s going out of style,” he tweeted, adding that “The capitalized ‘A’ in ‘Asylum’ absolutely slays. This is high effort forgery. A+.” This charge of historical falsification was accompanied by evidence in the form of a screenshotted image of his conversation with the AI chatbot Claude, which found that it “cannot find historical evidence that George Washington made this specific toast in 1783.” Claude, ever-helpful, did follow up with Yarvin: “Do you know where you encountered this quote? That might help trace its origins.” To which Yarvin, evidently a bit worked up, answered: “The New Yorker. Do they always make up s— like this?” Claude’s diplomatic answer was that the magazine was “generally reputable,” but still considered it “concerning” that the anecdote was “presented as verified historical fact.” Which, in this case, it actually was.
It did not take long for a community note to appear on Yarvin’s post, directing X users to the source of the quotation, readily available on Project Gutenberg, something which the simplest of Google searches would have revealed. Yarvin was obliged to admit defeat. “Nope, commenters are right, this is a legit Fraunces Tavern toast — Claude missed it.” Doubtless, Yarvin was looking for some payback after The New Yorker ran a rather unflattering profile of the reactionary thinker last summer, but this episode did not redound to Yarvin’s credit. Now the point here is not really to pick on Yarvin, who has been known to be occasionally interesting, in an autodidact-with-a-hyperactivity disorder sort of way, although his whole neo-feudalist gimmick not infrequently wears thin, as when he argues that “every legal and political argument for our revolution was a bald-faced lie. A congenital cancer.” During his COVID-era panic, he notoriously advocated for a “temporary dictator” — “Sorry. Are you going to let a word stop you? Come with us if you want to live” — while demanding that President Trump “should do the decent thing and resign.” This all seems a bit unstable, but at other times he has proven genuinely morally repugnant, as was the case with his 2022 blog entry “A new foreign policy for Europe: ‘Give Russia a free hand on the Continent,’” possibly the worst analysis of that (or any other) conflict, a laughably error-ridden piece of rubbish saturated in what even he later admitted was “hyperbolic contempt” for the “invented country of Ukraine [sic],” the sort of thing even a hardened Aleksandr Dugin-style Russo-fascist propagandist would be loathe to put his name to.
And as everyone should be aware of by now, these chatbots are not omniscient. They habitually hallucinate facts…
For all that, we can still be thankful for Yarvin’s transparency in the present case, so let us concentrate on the curious assertion that it was Claude who “missed it.” On some level, yes, Claude did indeed miss “it” initially, “it” being a basic historical fact, though in its defense, the chatbot was self-aware enough to plead for additional context, which might have aided it in arriving at the right answer. Anyone who has tinkered with these things knows that they need some hand-holding at times. And as everyone should be aware of by now, these chatbots are not omniscient. They habitually hallucinate facts, a failing many lawyers have discovered after submitting briefs citing AI-invented court cases, to their dismay and possible disbarment. And they can be surprisingly oblivious. Recently, Google’s AI Overview, often the first result of a Google search, informed yours truly that Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary most assuredly did not feature an ironic definition of the word “compulsion,” although the word could, I was reliably informed, be found in most other dictionaries. (Thank you.) It is hard to see how this could happen when The Devil’s Dictionary, with its very real entry concerning “compulsion,” is solidly within the public domain, but if Google could whiff on something as straightforward as this, then Claude could easily miss the 11th toast given on the first Evacuation Day. (RELATED: Timeless Education in an AI World)
None of which excuses Yarvin’s gaffe. After all, Anthropic’s Consumer Terms of Service make it abundantly clear that Claude’s Outputs “may not always be accurate and may contain material inaccuracies even if they appear accurate because of their level of detail or specificity,” its Actions “may not be error free,” that you “should not rely on any Outputs or Actions without independently confirming their accuracy,” and that the “Services and any Outputs may not reflect correct, current, or complete information.” What we have here is a cautionary tale, a warning to those tempted to rely on chatbots while foregoing basic research or reasoning of their own, the sort of people who fill the replies of every X interaction with appeals to Grok — argumentum ad Grokum, one might say. Outsourcing independent thought and basic research to chatbots is becoming increasingly prevalent, a development which bodes very ill for our popular discourse, and must be pushed back against whenever possible. (RELATED: Brain Rot and the Crisis of Digital Late Modernity)
Ultimately, however, it is not a matter of great concern that an overly online commenter thought that the sentiment “May America be an Asylum to the persecuted of the Earth” was communist propaganda, and that capitalized nouns in an 18th-century context amounted to evidence of a modern forgery. What is far more disquieting is our over-reliance on AI chatbots, a dependence that can backfire in unexpected ways. Recently, I had occasion to look up a poem by Ezra Pound, “Brennbaum,” while reading N. John Hall’s monograph on the caricatures of Max Beerbohm. Hall mentions a 1955 visit paid by Samuel Behrman to his friend Max, during which it was brought to the host’s attention that Pound had written an antisemitic poem, the aforementioned “Brennbaum,” on the subject of Beerbohm. “I am not Jewish,” Beerbohm responded, “I cannot claim that. But then, you know, he was crazy. He greatly admired Mussolini. All that Fascist business!”
You can find the text of “Brennbaum” on AllPoetry.com (the “world’s largest poetry site”), and read of how the “heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai and the forty years” lay “across the face / Of Brennbaum ‘The Impeccable,’” and so on. What is curious to me is that AllPoetry includes an AI-generated analysis of the poem, which informs the reader that
This poem presents a vivid portrayal of an individual named Brennbaum through imagery of physical appearance and religious symbolism … The poem’s historical context, with references to ‘Horeb, Sinai and the forty years,’ suggests the speaker’s religious contemplation … Compared to Ezra Pound’s other works, this poem displays a more restrained and personal tone, focusing on a specific individual rather than broader historical or societal themes … Within the context of the early 20th century, the poem reflects the growing skepticism and disillusionment with traditional values and institutions. It questions the surface perfection of an individual, suggesting a deeper and more nuanced reality beneath the outward facade.
Unmentioned, of course, is the virulent antisemitism of the poet himself, and the bizarre allegation in “Brennbaum” that Beerbohm was repudiating his (non-existent, as it happened) Jewish heritage in a bid for conformity. These are the sorts of things a human literary critic with basic cultural awareness might have noted and made much of, but what we get instead is a sloshing bucket of auto-generated slop.
This is all fairly irritating, but there is a decidedly sinister side to AI slop. Back in March, the Russian dissident journal Meduza reported that a “‘well-funded’ online Russian disinformation network called Pravda put out 3.6 million articles last year, many of which were processed by popular chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o, Claude (Anthropic), Meta AI, Gemini (Google), and Copilot (Microsoft),” publishing content targeting Ukraine, European domestic politics, and other topics, laundered through made-up sites like News-Kiev.ru, Kherson-News.ru, and Donetsk-News.ru. “The more false narratives circulate in online media,” it was noted, “the greater the likelihood that language models will begin to treat them as credible and incorporate them into their responses.” And that indeed appears to be the case. Anna Andreyeva, writing for another dissident Russian publication, Riddle, elaborated on the phenomenon of “LLM grooming.” Conducting an experiment in which ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, and Gemini were asked to “assess the credibility of a fresh article from the Portal Kombat/Pravda network,” Andreyeva found that “Perplexity, which aggregates answers from multiple models, unequivocally «confirmed» the fabricated story, citing Ridus, Tsargrad, and sites belonging to the Portal Kombat/Pravda network,” while other chatbots reacted with varying levels of skepticism. Since “LLM manipulation techniques will also keep constantly evolving and adapting,” she exhorted her readers to realize that “It’s crucial for everyone using chatbots professionally or in everyday life to treat their responses with caution and plenty of skepticism” — something certain “post-liberal” commentators would do well to remember going forward.
AI is not going anywhere. If anything, it appears to be undergirding the entire economy. We will see more jobs replaced by chatbots, more auto-generated content, more slop, more AI-authored books cropping up on Amazon, more AI-generated songs topping niche Billboard charts. You do not need to be an acolyte of Eliezer Yudkowsky, author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All (2025), to find this highly concerning. It was Samuel Butler, in his 1863 essay “Darwin Among the Machines,” who predicted the gradual degradation of humanity in the face of rapid technological advancements. While first acknowledging “the wonderful improvements which are daily taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances,” Butler wondered whether our species might “become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man. He will continue to exist, nay even to improve, and will be probably better off in his state of domestication under the beneficent rule of he machines than he is in his present wild state.” (RELATED: While Humans Were Tuning Their Guitars — AI Created America’s No. 1 Country Song)
Notwithstanding the “innumerable benefits” on display, Butler concluded that
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life … Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy, and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage.
Samuel Butler was being ironic, of course. Luddites are doomed to defeat in what the late anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott called the “thick Anthropocene,” with its industrialization, explosive growth, and cult of technology. Still, we must guard against becoming “absolutely acquiescent in our bondage” to generative artificial intelligence systems. Much of the mischief may already have been done, but let us at least endeavor to preserve and encourage the potential and the glory of human creativity, and the value of independent thought and careful research. And may the remembrance of Yarvin’s gaffe, and other blunders like it, be a lesson to public intellectuals and private citizens everywhere.
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