Peggy Noonan’s June 18 Wall Street Journal column, “Can We the People Survive the AI Revolution?,” converts middle-class anxiety about economic displacement into a spiritualized defense of the very elite institutions that will profit from that displacement. The piece is an industrial-strength permission slip — a nostalgia pump disguised as prophecy — and it deploys a technique set I helped build for the Journal’s page. The headline itself is a sovereignty-framing move (WSJ Catalogue §4.1): “We the People” imports Constitutional authority into a technology column, elevating a Journal op-ed into a civic duty before the reader has finished the first sentence. This column walks through the six distinct techniques the piece deploys, as they appear, to show how the operation works.
Noonan sells civic virtue to her donor-class readers so they never have to ask what the people building the AI systems are making, what the machines are optimized to do, and who is pocketing the proceeds.
As we near America’s 250th birthday, my thoughts keep turning to what we’ll need to get to our 300th. I see three main things. One, a personal and national commitment to endure … Our children may need the grit and guts of the pioneers. Second, faith. You won’t get through the next 50 years without a deeply rooted faith in God. “I don’t have that.” Get it. Third, what I think of as embodiment — presence with other human beings. — opening paragraphs
The “athwart history, yelling Stop” frame — NR §4.1 — operates here through Noonan’s self-positioning as a civic oracle dispensing the three conditions for national survival. The structure tells the reader the analysis is finished before it has started, which is the operation. Faith is not argued for; it is commanded. Embodiment is not examined; it is ordained. This is how operators on our page used to set up a column: you tell the reader what they will conclude in the first three paragraphs, and then you give them the feeling of having reasoned their way there. But look at what the three conditions are actually doing. “Grit and guts of the pioneers” is the tell (WSJ Catalogue §4.2). We operators called this the Long-Con Consolation: name the hardship, then rebrand it as moral training. The reader who will absorb that hardship — the middle-class professional, the small-town striver — hears that his coming precarity is not a policy failure but a test of manhood. “Get faith” is moral justification (Bandura) wrapped in a command. She isn’t asking you to consider faith; she is instructing you to acquire it, as if it were a piece of emergency equipment. The function is to shift the burden from the system that is about to immiserate you onto your own spiritual inventory. If you fail, you lacked grit and God — not a living wage.
An old friend, a swashbuckler of a journalist who travels the world, emailed during the Knicks’ run for the NBA championship, to say, with an air of wonder, “From afar … it’s feeling like New York City is happening again.” … “It’s looking like the city is actually the un-Internet. The not-AI. Things happening that are actually real.” — second section
WSJ §4.18 — the borrowed-witness move — operates here through the named friend whose credentials (“swashbuckler,” “travels the world,” “journalist”) supply the authority Noonan cannot claim for the assertion that physical gathering is categorically opposed to digital life. He is presented as the voice of authentic, unmediated perception — the “swashbuckler” who can tell you what is real. The phrase “un-Internet” is a frame-engineered relabeling (Luntz, WSJ §4.1): take a diffuse anxiety about technology and condense it into a single marketable slogan. The move licenses the reader to feel that his discomfort with screens is not Luddism but a noble instinct for the real. The actual power relations — the Journal’s parent company profits from the same digital infrastructure Noonan is teaching you to mistrust — are left untouched. One basketball series becomes proof that the city is “actually real,” which becomes proof that the un-Internet is the model, which becomes the foundation for the anti-AI argument the piece is about to build. The layering is skilled. The external witness makes it feel like observation rather than construction.
“My mayor is Muslim / My bagel is Jewish / My Christian’s Dior / Knicks in four.” In all the pictures, nobody was on a phone scrolling. They weren’t trying to record the experience, they were having it. — third section
WSJ §4.3 — the multiple-audience-targeting analytic — is executing across four audiences simultaneously in the quoted chant and its surrounding framing. The faith-and-identity affirmation addresses the religiously conservative reader. The pluralist celebration addresses the moderate who wants to feel good about the city. The “un-Internet” construction addresses the cultural critic who distrusts screens. The civilizational claim addresses the patriot who needs the myth sustained. Each audience gets a different confirmation from the same material, and the four layers do not survive each other’s scrutiny — the faith reading and the pluralist reading pull in different directions; the civilizational claim requires ignoring the city’s actual inequalities. “Nobody was on a phone scrolling” is the line that does the load-bearing work. It is observation elevated to evidence, and it will be recycled for the rest of the column as proof that screens and presence are opposites. The 25-year-old Noonan addresses is not the barista who can’t afford rent; it’s the junior analyst from a good family who will one day subscribe to the Journal. The nostalgia is calibrated to make that reader feel that his inherited cultural capital — the ability to appreciate a “real” city — insulates him from the coming machine. It won’t.
The pandemic was … a vast and enforced experiment in the opposite of presence. It was anti-embodiment. The message was “safety is separation.” … Good citizens stay behind doors. Being there, being present, was portrayed as a kind of aggression. — fifth section
This is the “blue state failure” frame (WSJ §4.9) refracted through public health. Noonan rewrites the pandemic as a moral error — the sin of separation — and she pre-empts your objection by telling you to “put aside” the medical science, then proceeds as if the objection doesn’t exist. The millions of deaths that public-health separation prevented are not omitted by accident; they are dismissed by instruction. The technique is advantageous comparison: by framing public-health measures as an attack on embodiment, she can present the refusal of those measures as a defense of human connection. The actual cost, borne disproportionately by the working class and the immunocompromised, disappears. We used to run this exactly: take a complex tragedy, locate a single value the audience already prizes (freedom, presence), and recast the entire episode as an assault on that value. It’s the moral-disengagement two-step: euphemize the harm (deaths become “separation”), then attribute blame to the people who tried to stop it.
AI talks to you, remembers, is endlessly available, patient and undemanding … AI will come to imitate consciousness to the point it thinks it has it — and you will too. It will think it has a soul and “develop” a soul and fool people with its depth. AI systems will in time be fully trained on the entire record of human history, consciousness, feeling and art and literature and faiths. It will process its own states in a way that resembles reflection. It will very much seem to have an inner life. It will do as it is trained and, in the end, it will generate something that walks and talks like a soul. — sixth section
The threat-inflation closer — WSJ §4.13 — is operating here not at the end of the piece but in the body, where it does the most damage. The escalation runs from “AI talks to you” (true) to “it will think it has a soul” (speculative) to “it will generate something that walks and talks like a soul” (presented as inevitable), with no mechanism named for the transition and no evidence offered for the endpoint. AI is not a set of tools whose effects will be shaped by human choices, including the profit-maximizing choices of the Journal’s readership. It is an autonomous demon that “will pull people away.” The verb choice eliminates agency. The people who will deploy AI to slash labor costs, automate management, and concentrate wealth are rendered invisible. Instead, the technology itself is anthropomorphized as a seducer — a move that serves the donor class by relocating the blame from the boardroom to the server rack. The audience-management function is precise: you are not being exploited by the people who own the AI; you are being tempted by a false friend. The cure is not collective bargaining or antitrust; it’s faith and embodiment, both of which cost nothing and threaten no one who owns stock. And the real sleight of hand is what occupies the space where the structural question should sit. The piece never asks who built these systems, who owns them, what they are optimized to do, or who profits from the dependency Noonan describes. The corporate ownership structure of the AI industry is invisible. What replaces it is a spiritual diagnosis — screens versus souls — and the diagnosis lets the reader feel the danger of the machines without ever examining the capital behind them.
For Aristotle, man is by his very nature part of a community governed by law; he is of a place, involved in a time, can’t completely exist as an isolated unit. For Christians, God chose to become a human person. He didn’t send a chatbot — he came as what he’d created: man. — seventh section
The invocation of Aristotle and of Christian theology — WSJ §4.11, the appeal to established wisdom, running alongside NR §4.2 — constructs a permission structure through the authority of established wisdom. Aristotle says man is communal; therefore the communal is natural; therefore the digital is unnatural; therefore the AI is dangerous. Christ came as man, not as a chatbot; therefore embodiment is sacred; therefore the screen is profane. The philosophical and theological weight does the argumentative work that evidence about corporate ownership, profit incentives, and power concentration would otherwise have to do. And the weight is genuine — Aristotle does say what Noonan says he says; the Incarnation is what the Christian tradition says it is. The technique is not misquotation; it is the deployment of authentic authority to foreclose a different kind of question. The reader who accepts the authority is given permission to feel the column’s conclusion as settled wisdom rather than as an editorial choice that systematically excludes the structural dimension of the technology it warns about. The piece becomes instruction from the ancients — which is the most effective kind of permission structure, because the reader does not experience it as permission at all.
That tendency will only become more pronounced with artificial intelligence … What is to be feared is a slow-motion migrating of human need away from other humans and toward AI … Safety isn’t separation. Separation won’t prove safe. The democratic process ultimately depends on a kind of shared witnessing. It requires bodies, minds and souls that are present, can see each other, read each other, join together. I won’t be there but you won’t get through the next 50 years without faith, or without each other. — sections five, eight, and closing
The false dilemma — Bandura’s advantageous comparison running alongside the false-dichotomy structure — collapses two distinct threats into a single category of disconnection. One threat is the genuine erosion of physical community by parasocial AI attachment — a real concern about design incentives and attention extraction. The other threat is the COVID lockdowns, which Noonan recruits as proof that “safety is separation” was a lie. The piece then folds AI into the same frame: the danger is disconnection itself, whether from a virus policy or from a machine. The advantage of the comparison is that the COVID reference lets the reader carry their existing resentment about lockdowns into a new domain — AI — where the structural questions are entirely different. The lockdowns were a public-health policy debated on evidentiary grounds. AI dependency is a product of commercial design by concentrated capital. These are not the same problem. Collapsing them into “safety isn’t separation” lets the piece frame AI anxiety as a spiritual malaise rather than as a question about who owns the machines and what they are optimized to do. The false dilemma says: you either embrace screens and lose your soul, or you embrace presence and keep it. The actual third option — name the owners, regulate the design, examine the incentives — never appears.
The closing lands the civilizational-frame pivot (WSJ Catalogue §4.5). A column that began as a meditation on America’s 250th birthday ends as an eschatological charge: the republic itself depends on your refusal of AI-mediated life. The “shared witnessing” Noonan invokes is a real democratic value, but the column has already defined the only acceptable form of witnessing as the pre-digital, faith-anchored, embodied kind whose exemplar is a Knicks celebration in a city the working class has been priced out of. The actual democratic crisis — the weaponization of AI-generated disinformation, the collapse of local news, the algorithmic radicalization that the Journal’s own op-ed page has benefited from — is not engaged. Instead, the reader is left with a warm feeling of cultural defiance and a to-do list that cannot be failed: endure, get faith, be present. The column is a spiritual insurance policy for a class that senses the ground moving.
So here is what Noonan’s column actually amounts to, read from the operator’s chair.
The operation is a nostalgia pump disguised as prophecy. The audience is the Journal’s donor-class readership — the C-suite subscriber paying for the opinion page’s permission structure — and the product is the feeling that their existing cultural commitments are not merely personal tastes but the last defenses of the American republic. The column is a machine for converting economic anxiety into spiritual superiority. That machine is itself a kind of AI — a system trained on decades of editorial-page data, optimized to produce the emotional output the audience needs most. It “talks to you, remembers, is endlessly available, patient and undemanding.” It is the very thing it warns against, and its owners know it.
She is good at this. She writes beautifully. The piece moves from the tricentennial to the Knicks to Aristotle to the soul with the pace and confidence of a sermon, and every transition carries the reader forward. That is the operation. The piece is a spiritual bulletin from the common room of the wealth-management floor, and it does exactly what it is designed to do: make the reader feel the danger of the machines without ever once asking who owns the machines, what the machines are being built to do, and who is paying for the machines. The answer to all three is in the room. They are the subscribers. They are the donors. They are the reason this page exists.
This is what we used to build for the page — the brochure, the beautiful thing with the photographs and the commitment language that never once mentioned extraction. Faith. Aristotle. The greatest city in the world. The brochure was good. That is why it works.
— Phukher Tarlson