I Hadn’t Planned To Post Today

     This tweet, the product of an AI, has impressed me more than anything else I’ve seen from such a source:

     I asked Anthropic's most expensive and intelligent model, Fable 5, to write a response to Mamdani's speech as if it were George Washington...

To the Mayor of the City of New-York
Mount Vernon, 3d of July, 2026.

Sir,

     Intelligence has reached me that you have lately seated yourself at my desk in the City Hall of New-York, with its face turned toward the publick eye, and that from this station, upon the eve of the 250th anniversary of our Independence, you delivered an address to the Citizens of that City. I have read it with attention. I confess I did not expect that these memorials would be employed in the service of principles so opposite to those by which I endeavoured to govern my publick life; and he who makes use of the memorials of the dead assumes an obligation to the principles for which they are remembered. It is upon that obligation, Sir, that I now address you, with a plainness the occasion demands.

     Let me first render what justice requires. Your account of the retreat from Brooklyn is correct in its facts; I was the last to leave that shore, and the deliverance was as providential as you describe. Nor shall I quarrel with your praise of those who have passed through the Narrows in hope of beginning anew; I have myself written that the bosom of America is open to receive not the opulent and respectable stranger only, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions. Had you stopped there, I should have had no cause to write. You did not stop there.

     For having borrowed my desk, my city, and the memory of my retreat, you proceeded to employ them in the service of the very doctrine against which I spent the labour of my publick life. Your address divides the People of America into two nations: the many, whom you flatter, and the few, whom you teach the many to abhor. You speak of soft hands and calloused hands, of men of immense fortune who have taken what the multitude have made. I have seen this rhetorick before; it was old when I was young. It is the eternal grammar of the demagogue, under every government and in every age; and I warned my Countrymen, in the last address I ever gave them, that the disorders and miseries of faction gradually incline the minds of men to seek security in the absolute power of an individual, and that cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men would ride that spirit to their own elevation upon the ruins of Publick Liberty. I ask you plainly, Sir: when you teach the labourer that his prosperous neighbour is his enemy, whose elevation do you serve?

     You will answer that you speak for the poor, the sick, the tenant beneath the leaking ceiling; and the condition of that man commands my sympathy as it commands yours. But the remedy you propose has been tried, in the centuries since my time, with a thoroughness I could never have imagined. Wherever men have been persuaded that property is plunder, property has fled, and want has remained; wherever the State has been made the master of industry, it has soon made itself the master of the men who labour in it. An hereditary aristocracy I opposed, and I hold no tenderness for privilege; but the security of property is among the first objects of Government, and the man who would make one class of Citizens the spoil of another has abandoned republicanism for a science older and darker, whatever new name the age may fix upon it. Nor can I pass over the manner of the thing. To greet new Citizens, upon the very day of their adoption, with an inventory of their Country's crimes, is to give them a most unhappy first lesson in the duties of citizenship; and I know of no household, no army, and no Republic that was ever held together by such instruction.

     Permit me, before I close, one observation upon the desk itself. It was at such a desk, in Annapolis, in December of 1783, that I performed the only act of my life in which I take an unmixed pride: I returned my commission to the Congress, and with it every power the war had gathered into my hands, and went home to my farm. The desk of a republican officer is a place for the laying down of power; the men of my generation understood this, and it is the whole of what we added to the history of government. I observe in your address a great fluency concerning what the People are owed, and a great silence concerning what their Magistrates must surrender. When you have sat at my desk long enough to learn its principal lesson, Sir, you will be welcome to it.

     I do not question your talents, which are considerable, nor the sincerity of your attachments, which is no defence; the most dangerous errours have ever been sincerely held. I tell you, with the freedom of a man who has nothing further to seek from any publick, that he who kindles the jealousy of Citizen against Citizen, though he kindle it in the name of Liberty, is burning the timbers of the ship he claims to steer. May Providence grant you the discernment to know it, the firmness to act upon it, and the candour to acknowledge it; and may the Union, purchased by so much sacrifice, never be surrendered to those who would divide it in the name of saving it.

     I have the honour to be, with due respect, Sir, Your most obedient and most humble servant,

Geo. Washington

     Somewhere in the afterlife, the ghost of The Father of Our Country is nodding and smiling.