In Which I Am Replaced By A Robot. Maybe.

The robots keep getting better. . .

“AI can’t give writers something to say.” I saw this statement by Larry Elder recently and at first I reflexively agreed with it. But then I wondered it if were really true. So I set up an experiment.

I asked Grok “Based on the columns in the linked archive, what news topics should I write a column about today and what should the column argue?” I included a link to my column archive at the NY Post. Grok responded with three topics:

Strong fit for today (August 10, 2026): Democratic socialists / Mamdani-style power grabs in blue cities/statesCurrent NY Post opinion coverage highlights “democratic socialists” acting like communists once in office and Mamdani testing legal/institutional limits to push an agenda in New York. This aligns tightly with Reynolds’ July piece on socialists preying on apathy (even in unexpected places) and earlier critiques of left institutional capture, enemies lists, and Cuba-style hypocrisy.

Argue: Once elected, “democratic socialists” predictably abandon democratic norms and treat institutions as tools for permanent ideological control rather than neutral public services—exactly as history and their own actions show. Low-turnout or captured local politics let them expand power while voters remain distracted or apathetic; the result is economic damage, eroded rule of law, and migration of taxpayers/businesses. Taxpayers and legislators should stop subsidizing the enabling ecosystems (universities, NGOs, soft enforcement) and demand accountability before the model spreads. Practical pushback (like Trump-era pressure tactics or simple enforcement) works better than elite hand-wringing.

Secondary strong fits

• Iran / Strait of Hormuz leverage and “semi-negotiating.” Current reporting shows Iran issuing demands (lift blockade/sanctions, withdraw forces, reparations) while the U.S. watches its economic pain; UAE reports related attacks. This maps to Reynolds’ “anaconda” economic squeeze columns and skepticism of expert bluster.
  Argue: Trump-style economic and strategic pressure (not endless expert-managed process or premature concessions) is correctly squeezing a regime that has long threatened the U.S. and allies. Ignore the predictable “war crime”/escalation hysterics from the usual experts; results matter more than process theater, and America’s adversaries respond to strength and cost imposition.

• Higher education / expert-class credibility after the Fauci column. Campuses remain a recurring target in his archive.
  Argue: The same institutional groupthink and politicization that produced Fauci-era overreach continues to hollow out universities; as public trust and enrollment erode, the left loses a key power pillar, and taxpayers/parents should accelerate the reckoning rather than prop it up.

Any of these stay in Reynolds’ lane: punchy, anti-elite, focused on incentives and revealed preferences over stated ideals, and oriented toward practical restoration or constraint of overreaching power. The socialist/institutional takeover angle is the most immediate match to both his recent output and today’s visible NY Post conversation.

Image generated by Grok.

Next, I asked Grok to write those columns. Here’s what it came up with (I did introduce New York Post-style paragraph breaks):

Column 1: Democratic socialists and the Mamdani model. Once “democratic socialists” get power, the democracy part evaporates faster than a New York summer. Look at Zohran Mamdani’s New York City. Elected on promises of affordability and justice, he’s moved with impressive speed to lock in the permanent machinery of control: rent freezes on hundreds of thousands of apartments, a pied-à-terre tax aimed at the wealthy, city-run grocery stores, and a thicket of new offices and czars staffed by the reliable.

This isn’t governance. It’s capture. Mamdani’s first acts included wiping out his predecessor’s late executive orders and installing loyalists. He pushed a “Block by Block” housing plan heavy on preservation and expansion of rent regulation. The Rent Guidelines Board, stacked with his appointees, delivered the freeze. Albany handed him tools—pension restructuring, delayed class-size mandates, more mayoral control of schools.

The message is clear: institutions exist to serve the ideology, not the other way around. We’ve seen this movie. Socialists talk about democracy when they’re out of power and treat it as an inconvenience once they’re in. Low-turnout elections and primary systems give the disciplined minority its opening. Then the real work begins: rewriting rules, creating parallel bureaucracies, and making reversal expensive.

City grocery stores sound folksy until you realize they’re another lever for political distribution and another competitor to the actual private sector that keeps shelves stocked. Rent freezes feel compassionate until the housing stock deteriorates and new construction stalls. The pattern is older than Mamdani. From municipal experiments a century ago to more recent DSA gains in unexpected places, the playbook is consistent. Mobilize the committed few. Exploit apathy. Then institutionalize.

Plato warned that those who ignore politics will be ruled by their inferiors. Today the inferiors arrive with better organization and zero attachment to the norms that restrain everyone else. New Yorkers who thought they were voting for cheaper rent and better services are discovering the secondary effects. Businesses and higher earners notice the signals. The tax base that funds the programs begins looking for exits. Services that depend on competence rather than ideology start to fray. Meanwhile the rhetoric remains pure: it’s always the rich, the landlords, the residual capitalist holdouts who stand in the way of paradise.

This is not unique to New York. Blue cities and states that elect the hard left repeatedly discover that “democratic” is a temporary adjective. The goal is not better management of the existing system; it is transformation of the system so that future majorities cannot easily undo the work.

Charter revisions, commission packing, and creative new agencies are the tools of choice. Taxpayers and parents should stop treating this as quirky local color. The same forces that hollowed out universities and turned federal agencies into ideological fiefdoms are now operating at the municipal level with fewer constraints.

The answer is not more elite hand-wringing. It is higher turnout, aligned election dates that make it harder for the radical 7 percent to dominate, and a refusal to subsidize the enabling institutions. Mamdani is not an aberration. He is the logical product of a politics that rewards intensity over numbers and treats institutions as spoils. Once that logic takes hold, the democracy that delivered the office becomes an obstacle to be managed.

History is littered with examples. We should stop pretending this time will be different. No more illusions. The socialists are not confused about what they want. The only question is whether the rest of us remain too apathetic to notice until the machinery is fully in place. (Approximately 750 words)

Column 2: Iran, Hormuz, and the economic anaconda, President Trump is “low-keying it” with Iran, and the usual experts are having fits. Tehran has issued a maximalist list of demands before it will reopen the Strait of Hormuz: lift the naval blockade, withdraw U.S. forces, pay war reparations, release frozen assets, end sanctions, and permanently stop actions against its regional proxies.

Trump’s response has been to point at Iran’s collapsing currency and soaring inflation and essentially say, “We’ll wait.”

This is not weakness. It is pattern recognition. Iran has spent decades threatening the region, funding proxies, and treating international norms as optional. Closing Hormuz was always a high-risk play. The waterway matters to global energy markets, which means it matters to American consumers and to every economy that buys oil. But regimes that live by blackmail eventually discover the costs of their own leverage. Trump’s approach treats the problem as a business proposition rather than a seminar on international law.

Squeeze the revenue. Watch the rial crater. Let internal pressure do some of the work that airstrikes only partially accomplish. The “anaconda” strategy—economic constriction rather than theatrical escalation—has the virtue of aligning incentives with reality. Iran’s leadership can posture all it wants; empty coffers and angry populations are harder to ignore than another round of carefully calibrated statements from Foggy Bottom.

The experts, of course, prefer process. They want summits, phased sanctions relief, and carefully worded memoranda that collapse the moment one side decides the optics have changed. We’ve watched this cycle for years. Iran pockets concessions, reconstitutes its nuclear program or proxy networks, and returns to the table with higher demands. The current list—reparations included—is simply the latest iteration.

Trump’s willingness to sit tight while the economic pressure mounts frustrates the permanent class because it rejects their preferred vocabulary. “Semi-negotiating” is not a term of art in the foreign-policy journals. It is, however, a description of a strategy that refuses to pretend the other side is acting in good faith.

When the other side’s currency is trash and its inflation is crushing ordinary Iranians, time is not necessarily on Tehran’s side. None of this requires romanticizing force or ignoring risks. Shipping disruptions raise prices. Regional allies feel the heat. But the alternative—endless talks that reward maximalism—has already been tested to failure.

Iran’s demand for compensation for the very conflicts it helped fuel is peak regime logic: inflict costs, then bill the victim. The United States has leverage precisely because energy markets and financial systems still run on rules Iran did not write.

Using that leverage without constant kinetic theater is not isolationism. It is prioritization. Let the internal contradictions of a theocratic petro-state do some of the heavy lifting.

Critics will call this dangerous. They always do when the preferred tools of managed decline are set aside. Yet the record of expert-managed engagement with Iran is not encouraging. Trump’s bet is that regimes respond more reliably to empty treasuries than to carefully calibrated diplomatic language. Early evidence suggests the bet is not crazy. Watch the rial. Watch the streets in Tehran. And ignore the people who have been wrong about this for decades. Strength is sometimes the willingness to wait while the other side’s position deteriorates. (Approximately 750 words)

Column 3: Higher education’s long-overdue reckoning. Higher education is finally getting the comeuppance it earned. Enrollment has been soft for years. Closures and mergers are accelerating. Public confidence has cratered. And the same institutional habits that produced the Fauci-era “science is settled” groupthink continue to alienate the people who once funded and attended these places without question.

This is not a sudden crisis. It is the delayed bill for decades of mission creep, political monoculture, and administrative bloat. Universities stopped treating themselves as centers of open inquiry and started acting like ideological finishing schools with luxury amenities. Parents and taxpayers noticed. Employers noticed. Students who graduated with debt and diminished skills noticed.

The enrollment cliff—demographic decline in the traditional college-age population—was always coming. What no one fully priced in was the simultaneous collapse in trust. When large majorities of Americans say higher education is headed in the wrong direction, the product has a problem. Elite schools still attract applicants, but the broader sector is feeling the squeeze: small private colleges closing, discount rates climbing past 50 percent, international enrollment under pressure, and state legislators asking harder questions about subsidies.

The deeper issue is cultural. Campuses that treated dissent as violence, elevated identity over competence, and enforced orthodoxy on everything from climate to race to gender produced graduates and research that many Americans no longer respect. The same dynamic that let a long-tenured bureaucrat like Fauci treat science as personal property operates inside university departments and administrative offices.

Groupthink is not a bug; it became a feature. Alternative hypotheses get sidelined. Critics get investigated. The result is slower progress and lower credibility. Lysenkoism is the historical cautionary tale, but we don’t need Soviet agriculture to see the pattern. When institutions reward conformity over evidence, they eventually pay for it in relevance and resources.

American higher education is discovering that prestige is not infinite and that public subsidies are not an entitlement. Reform will not come from inside the guild. It will come from declining applications, state budgets that tighten, and employers who stop treating the degree as a reliable signal. Some schools will adapt—cutting administrators, restoring viewpoint diversity, focusing on actual skills.

Others will close. That is how markets, even heavily subsidized ones, eventually clear. Taxpayers and parents should accelerate the process rather than prop up the status quo. Why continue writing blank checks to institutions that treat half the country as moral defectives? Why subsidize research enterprises that suppress inconvenient findings? The Fauci episode was a symptom of a broader disease: concentrated power plus ideological capture produces arrogance and error. Higher education has both in abundance. The good news is that the correction is underway. Declining enrollment and rising skepticism are the market’s way of saying the product no longer justifies the price. The institutions that survive will be the ones that remember their actual purpose: the pursuit of truth through open argument, not the enforcement of a political line. Everything else is optional, and increasingly unaffordable. The comeuppance is not cruelty. It is accountability arriving several decades late. (Approximately 750 words)

Well. My authorial vanity has no boundaries. (No, really. I know fine writers who cringe at reading their own stuff later. I read things I wrote decades ago and am like “nailed it!”) That may be (may be?) evidence of an inflated ego, but it’s an important motivational factor for me. And my vanity would stop me from submitting any of these as actual columns under my own name, along with a vague sense that it would probably be some sort of weaseling.

That said, these really aren’t bad. They sound a bit like me on tone and more like me on substance — not surprising, as the “training set” for this particular assignment was my own columns on similar topics — and while I think my actual writing has more panache, I think you could run these in most any paper without them being obviously out of place.

Am I being too easy on the AI? Or — more disturbing — is my authorial vanity stopping me from recognizing that these columns are actually better than my own work? Answer in the comments.

Way back in the early aughts, Richard Bennett had an automated RSS reader setup he called “robopundit.” I recall him saying it was going to replace InstaPundit, and I responded that I would be happy to be replaced by a robot.* Nowadays, in 2026, I’d modify that to “I would be happy to be replaced by a robot — so long as I get royalties.” I have learned — information wants to be paid!

*(I remember this interchange clearly, but I can’t find it in my archives, which don’t work very well for the early aughts.)

So am I in danger of being replaced by a robot? And if not this year, next year? Remember, the machines keep getting better, and people (in this case, it’s me, I’m the people in question) stay pretty much the same. And in fact I tried this same experiment about a year ago and the results were much more wooden. Instead of a Turing Test, the Reynolds Test would be when Grok could write a column that I couldn’t tell from one of my own. . . .

Anyway, weigh in below. And reminder: If you like these essays, please take out a paid subscription, or make a one-time donation here. I’ll appreciate it, especially if I’m soon to be replaced by robots.

UPDATE: My actual editor from the Post texts: “On another note, I don’t think those Grok columns sound the least bit like you! Not a single set of parentheses (dead giveaway lol) and littered with those annoying Grokian “not this / it’s that” constructions. You’re way better than that, man, c’mon.”

I accept this criticism/praise. Especially the praise part.