The New Republic Says I’m an AI Zealot

Imagine if thirty years ago, an early internet supporter was considered an internet zealot.

Yours truly made an appearance in The New Republic, courtesy of Virginia Heffernan, a longtime columnist for The New York Times, LA Times, among others.

Heffernan wrote a column celebrating the supposed arrival of MAGA into the anti-data center movement. Of course, for those who have followed our reporting, that’s not at all what is happening, but let’s put that aside for a moment.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I turn up as “an AI zealot,” which is an interesting label. Imagine if thirty years ago, an early internet supporter was considered an internet zealot. Yeah, it just seems a bit much.

Credit where it’s due: she linked to The Dossier. That’s more journalistic courtesy than I get from most outlets, some of which prefer to just rip off my work and claim it as their own. I think that’s because they’re somewhat embarrassed to acknowledge that my reporting is better sourced and more influential than their well funded but unimpactful and dull establishment publications.

But here’s the part worth your attention, because I don’t really care about labels from the media.

She concedes that our narrative is factually accurate.

The piece she’s responding to is our March investigation into Humans First, the “America First” outfit that just staged a national day of protest against data centers. My reporting found that the group was conceived, funded, and stood up by a small network of leftist Effective Altruism operatives in San Francisco, who then installed conservative frontmen, but still maintain operational control over the organization.

Heffernan does not dispute a single fact, but she does claim that EAs are not lefties, which is inaccurate. They very much are lefties. Additionally, she doesn’t argue that I made any misteps about the facts, the funding, or the people. Her rebuttal, in full, is that EA activists fostered the group to engage conservatives, then handed it off to them, and that this is wholesome coalition-building rather than deceit. Sure, Virginia. Sure.

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An entity can only be handed off if somebody else built it first. You cannot describe an organic uprising of heartland conservatives as having been “fostered” and then transferred. A grassroots movement, by design cannot be handed off to anyone. Basically, Heffernan is saying that an astroturf allegation is not important because the astroturf was laid with good intentions by her fellow liberals who sincerely believe that AI is bad for humanity.

So we agree on the facts and disagree on the intentions of the people who founded the outfit. That’s fine. I’m content to let sober minded readers sort that out for themselves.

A zealot is a person of fanatical and uncritical devotion. What, precisely, was my act of fanaticism? I broke the story on who is paying for a hyper political astroturf campaign that has major implifications for the future of the United States. Okay, guilty as charged.

In the 90s, was the reporter who thought the internet would be good for ordinary people, and who noticed that some of the loudest opposition was underwritten by interested parties, an internet zealot? Was there an electricity zealot beat back in the day? I am not a zealot to notice an emerging technology working and declining to panic about it in public.

One thing I’ll happily reaffirm is that plenty of conservative AI skepticism is entirely genuine, rooted in years of real concerns about transhumanism and civilizational risk. My reporting was never about whether people have sincere concerns, though I think it’s important to deal only in facts and not in narratives that people got psyopped into promoting. It was about who built the organization and who decided the messengers should wear red MAGA hats.