Is Artificial Intelligence Fueling Hostilities Among Evangelicals?

Artificial Intelligence has been fostering cultural conflict for years. Is it naive to think they couldn't be involved in the Christian Nationalism debate?

Intelligence Analysis and Futurism have been my passion for quite some time. I’m nothing but an aged polemicist and goat farmer, but hear me out. Occasionally, I notice things.

It’s been eight years since credible accusations arose that Russia had “troll farms” in which Artificial Intelligence-powered entities known as bots allegedly posted disinformation to reek havoc in the American election process. Largely, the claims of the bots’ success in influencing the election ranged from over-stated to fictional. But what wasn’t fictional, is that such technology existed eight years ago, which in technology terms, might as well be eons.

THAT MIGHT NOT BE A HUMAN YOU’RE SPEAKING WITH

A 2017 study revealed that nearly 15% of accounts on then-Twitter were bots. But according to Business Insider, those 15% of bot accounts produced upwards of 29% of Twitter content. The Federal Bureau of Investigation hypothesized just a few years later, that upwards of 80% of accounts on Twitter were actually bots (but that figure is likely inflated by the FBI because they intended the claim hurt Musk’s stock).

Bot technology has radically and exponentially improved in the last 12-18 months, thanks to powered-up technology loaned by companies like OpenAI, ChatGTP, Anthropic, Nvidia, and other AI powerhouses. Take a look at Musk’s Grok available to X users, and consider that the least-powerful AI that private citizens can use for free. And then consider what else is out there, if somebody had serious money to spend…and not just from American companies, but by companies in North Korea, China, and Russia.

Bot technology has grown so sophisticated that it’s quickly becoming difficult - if not impossible - to spot them. They learn by mimicking human behavior, to appear as human-like as possible. Bots invent for themselves personal backgrounds, manufactured life stories, and tall tales from their fake lives that would make Kyle J. Howard’s tales of underground battle-rapping in the Crips pale by comparison. Their backgrounds actually sound believable.

Today, AI-powered bots can easily evade bot-detection systems like captcha, learn from interactions with other users and recall interactions from their memory, to actually foster “relationships” with humans, and are even capable of using AI to splice their avatar images atop real-world video to provide a multi-media presentation of their fake “real-world” life.

Bots have grown so sophisticated that both men and women have had years-long personal and romantic relationships with them, including periodic chats on the phone and an exchange of pictures. No longer can someone say, “show me a picture of you holding today’s newspaper” and expect it would thwart a bot. Quicker than you could step to the mailbox, an image could be produced of your AI paramour holding up an image of the actual local newspaper from wherever they claim to be. They are capable of learning jokes and utilizing humor, even dark humor, to mirror the sense of humor preferred by whomever they are speaking to.

I want to show you this video from the absolutely awful human being known as “Destiny.” I’d encourage you not to spend time trying to figure out whether he’s a guy you should ordinarily listen to or not; he is not. But check out this video to understand exactly how sophisticated AI bots can be in convincing people that they are real humans. It is absolutely mind-blowing. Watch to at least the 5 minute mark to see how realistic these bots truly are (that’s just when it starts to get good, and includes the creation of fake video, fake court documents, and even more incredible capabilities to deceive humans).

If you just skipped the video, don’t. Trust me.

I said during the last two or three weeks of the 2024 election that the leftist-bots were out of control. They were everywhere. Usually, bot technology is sophisticated, moving very slowly to gain followers and gradually convince people to trust their false humanity. But the Democrat bot army was given an order from whatever mothership controlled them to “not leave anything on the field,” because election day was quickly approaching. Busting out of their ordinary people-convincing algorithms, they went for broke. Showing up suddenly everywhere, no longer having any pretense to carefully craft a back story, their “botness” was obvious enough that I caught it, and so did a few others. Making the same repeated posts, using the same diction, flying in as commenters on posts that all used the same keywords, they mirrored and mimicked each other, conversing with one another like they were real, but not conversing with any apparently authentic human in a convincible fashion.

And for the record, there were a ton of Republican bots also, but they didn’t seem to spaz out as much the weeks prior to the election, and seemed to be more understanding of operational security, not so easily giving away their inhumanity. The point is, everyone with cash to burn uses them.

And by everyone, I mean even megachurch pastors. Consider this article from Protestia, just today, reporting of a megachurch pastor who made an AI version of himself, available to chat and pray with church members for the low-low price of only $49 a month. And honestly, the AI version of himself looked pretty convincing; it was also vapid and dumb.

But aside from election interference, what other reasons might foreign entities use AI-powered bot technology?

ISRAEL IS A LEADER IN AI-BOT MANIPULATION

A leader in international bot deployment is the nation of Israel, which has been on the cutting edge of this technology for a very long time. Likely sharing resources with the Central Intelligence Agency, which is little more than an international elections-interference and regime change organization, Mossad is on-the-record utilizing this technology heavily.

Lebanese researchers, Ralph Baydoun and Michael Seamann, noticed that soon after the infamous October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel, pro-Palestinian accounts were suddenly overrun with a sea of pro-Israel accounts, almost out of nowhere. The influx of Israeli sentiment seemed unnatural and possibly inorganic to many experts.

As they recall in an interview, “Almost every [pro-Palestinian] tweet is essentially bombarded and swarmed by many accounts, all of whom follow very similar patterns, all of whom seem almost human.” The journalist then adds, “But they are not human. They are bots.”

Imperva, a cyber-analytics firm contracted with the United Nations, revealed in 2023 that up to 50% of Internet traffic was bots. They divided the bots between the categories of “good” (authorized by humans for legitimate purposes) and “bad” (sinister purposes, like narrative manipulation, leaving fake product reviews, inciting arguments online, scamming consumers, etc). Bad bots accounted from roughly 2/3 of bot activity.

In other words, it’s overwhelmingly nefarious.

The development of “super-bots” (powered by sophisticated AI) has arisen only in the last few years, and is getting more imperceptible from humans every day. They target larger social media accounts with the highest engagement, “crawl” the web to find key-words (for example, “Hamas” or “Israel” or “Trump” or "Hegseth”) and then post comments to engage their social media followers.

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But as of late, when you click on the bot’s account, there’s a real photo instead of an avatar, because there’s no risk an image could be reverse-search to discover it’s be stolen from someone; it’s an image made by AI. And in these more sophisticated bots, they will have a back-story or various credentials, and if you google those credentials - as the Destiny video above demonstrates - you can often find entire websites, documents, diplomas - and even fake news articles - backing up their backstory.

Israel is a leader in this technology, and is on the record using this technology to stifle their critics in the U.S.

In June of this year, The Guardian published a report demonstrating that the Israeli government spent 8.6 million dollars targeting U.S. college students with pro-Israeli and anti-Palestinian content, using super-bots to do so. The Israelis named their campaign, “Concert,” and advocated that the United States write laws criminalizing anti-semitism.

So here we have a foreign government - which happens to be Israel - paying millions of dollars to utilize bot technology to create the appearance of a grass-roots campaign to ban speech currently protected under the First Amendment.

Also in June, the New York Times published a story demonstrating that Israel had spent millions to launch a separate super-bot campaign to convince Americans to tell their congressmen to give millions of additional dollars to the Israeli military.

Few politicians have dared anger AIPAC, the powerful Israeli lobbying organization that thwarts FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act), largely by dumping millions of dollars into American political campaigns through 17 different offices in the United States. But some, including Rep. Pocan (WI) and Rep. Blumenthal (Conn) both came out publicly, stating that Israel was committing possible crimes by their super-bot manipulation of America’s public consensus on issues related to Israel.

Wired had recently reported that Israel’s super-bot campaigns to manipulate the American public through astroturfing a faux-grassroots pro-Israeli consensus had met met with silence from congressional leaders, saying “press inquiries concerning Israel’s attempts to secretly influence US opinion on the war have been met with a stonewall.”

The Biden Administration has not denied that Israel engages in super-bot manipulation, but in fact has admitted it. Biden State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, told reporters asking about the above stories that he just sees “this differently from what Iran, Russia, and China all do.”

Apparently, when Iran, Russia, and China does this, it’s bad. But when Israel does this, it’s somehow different. As you can see here, when Russian, Iranians, or the Chinese engage in these same behaviors - trying to influence Americans by deceit - their agents are arrested and charged with violations of FARA. In fact, similar bot farms have led to the arrest of 13 Russians for their 2016 interference, and some others are still on the FBI’s Most Wanted list

AS I WAS POSTING ABOUT THIS TODAY ON X, A BOT CONVENIENTLY CAME ON SCENE

I was mentioning the possibility that at least some of the antisemitic comments you see in Christian Nationalist posting could be bot-oriented, and almost as though an introduction was first needed, a bot appeared. See below.

Notice the word “defamation” used above, in denoting the Anti-Defamation League provenly being used to spy on American politicians like a bazillion times. Now look at this.

Sammie Soens, of course, is a bot. It crawled X to find the keyword, “defamation,” and thinking in its robot brain that my post was dealing with Trump’s defamation suit against ABC, it posted a comment it errantly computed as relevant to my post.

This is an unsophisticated bot, and it’s easy to tell.

It had four followers, opened an X account on December 4, and posted exclusively Trump-related comments, using various keywords it was mimicking from the original post (just as it did mine). But can you imagine a sophisticated bot?

IS THIS HAPPENING IN THE CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM DEBATE?

Whether or not this could happen in the current evangelical skirmish on Christian Nationalism, alleging anti-semitism literally everywhere (and indeed, it does seem to be everywhere), is already answered. Yes, it could happen. But is it?

And further, would Jewish or Israeli organizations have incentive to pose as antisemites? Is there a precedent for this?

Yes, on both counts.

According to the Anti-Defamation League (which has repeatedly been an agent of Israeli spying, as congressional reports show), 30% of antisemitic comments online are left by bots. Of course, they claimed that George Soros was the victim, and any criticism of Soros was automatically antisemitic. But can the Israeli spy org, the ADL, be trusted on those stats?

Well, if we could look at the inverse, Jewish organizations claim that antisemites are posing as Jews, in order to advance their agenda. One would be hard-pressed to believe that Jews somewhere wouldn’t pose as anti-semites, if for no other reason, to impugn or discredit views that don’t advance Israel’s foreign policy goals for America. We see this literally all the time from the LGBTQ, who deface their own property and fake hate crimes to draw public sympathy.

In a quick review of posts related to Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Jeffrey Sachs in which he accurately and factually describes Israel’s influence in directing America’s foreign policy (if you don’t believe that happens, go jump into a creek; you aren’t a serious person), the bots came out in droves.

I’ve gone down some rabbit holes tonight chasing some of these bots, and their botness is pretty apparent, with all the tell-tale signs; recently created accounts, repetitive tags in the bio (#AmericaFirst # MAGA #Q), and nothing but the most inflammatory, racist, antisemitic garbage you can imagine, obviously placed on random posts based on keyword searches.

If you think to yourself, “Who would employ a bot to post this way?” Surely, no one with serious cash would employ an army of bots to sound like crack-headed mentally challenged people. Unless, that is, they’re trying to make the other side appear radicalized and insanely dangerous (and stupid).

It’s become apparent to me, in the last few months, that many of the X accounts reposted by conservatives that appear to be retarded-acting liberals, are in fact, bots funded by conservatives that serve that purpose; to provide fodder pushing the narrative that liberals are insanely stupid.

I mean, liberals are insanely stupid, but some of what you see is manufactured stupidity - on the part of bots - made for propagandic purposes. Again, both sides do this.

I cannot prove that bots are being deployed to the Christian Nationalism debate in our current evangelical conflict, but I think it would be insane to presume it’s not happening. Why? It’s happening everywhere.

IT MIGHT BE DOUG WILSON’S FAULT

I’ve taken a few respectful potshots at Doug recently, mostly for what I feel was a pretty low-blow to instigate - or at least, escalate - the Great Antisemitism Inquisition of 2024 for what he admits are political reasons. He admitted, in an interview, that the purpose of the Antioch Statement was that it might be useful in the Senate confirmation hearing of Pete Hegseth.

I consider the fidelity between Christian brothers to be held in higher regard than any political benefit. Apparently, Doug does not. Hegseth, you see, is associated with one of the CREC churches, associated with Doug, and he wisely comprehends that he’ll come up in what will certainly be Hegseth’s contentious Senate confirmation. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.

Doug has, after all, spent the last 25 years saying whatever his politically incorrect heart wanted, no matter its perceived racist or bigoted or misogynistic undertones (and I love him for it). But now, that’s going to come back to haunt him…and haunt Hegseth.

This is my question. Do the “powers that be” in the CIA and Mossad really want to scuttle Hegseth’s confirmation as Secretary of Defense so bad that they would employ antisemitic bots to impugn him or anyone associated with him?

Again, if you think that’s fanciful, you’re not being serious.

Hegseth presents the biggest possible challenge to the Industrial War Complex since Kennedy’s brains were splattered across the backseat of a Lincoln Continental. Hegseth is the biggest, most erect middle finger that could possibly be put in front of the face of the Deep State establishment…bar none.

Yes, I think it’s insanely illogical to presume that super-bots would not be employed to scuttle Hegseth - and simultaneously impugn the Christian Nationalist forces that support him - considering they’re already used for similar purposes provenly, in many different niches around the web.

I reached out to an evangelical anon-hunter, Eli McGowan, this evening, who has doxed a few anonymous accounts on X. I respect the game, because I doxed quite a few anons myself, back in the day. I asked him if he’s perceived any of the anonymous accounts he’s pursued of being bots. His answer was effectively no, but admitted to having seen likely bots engaging in antisemitic rantings elsewhere. Christian Nationalism, he thought, was too “niche.”

I’m not sure he’s right about that. Christian Nationalism has gone mainstream. It’s not just a dusty corner of the Internet any more. Liberal outlets have been making much of it for nearly four years, much like they did with Project 2025. It has become, for them, their boogeyman.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that deeply funded agitators have already, or soon will, employ super-bot technology to instigate and agitate for political purposes within the realm of Reformed evangelicalism, especially within the controversy surrounding Christian Nationalism.

I’m not blaming Mossad per se, or the Israeli government necessarily, but I think they would benefit the most from sidelining the Christian Nationalists, not only in the confirmation of Hegseth, but perhaps to prevent any similar characters obtaining positions of influence in the near future. In fact, if my conspiracy theory is correct, the American Deep State has just as much to gain as the Israeli one (if you think there’s even a difference).

BROTHER-BOT WARS

I feel genuinely bad for Doug Wilson’s followers. I know what it’s like to be turned on by your mentors for purely reputational self-defense. And I’m heartbroken, seeing Christian brothers I love on both sides of this debate attack each other relentlessly.

I’m not a Christian Nationalist, but simultaneously, I don’t like seeing what I perceive to be an uncharitable broad-brushing of those who are accused of being sinister Jew-haters (especially when I agree with them on some of the same facts or historic realities).

That said, how tragic - how absolutely tragic it would be - if even one scintilla of this escalation of hostilities was perpetrated by the robotic bastard children of computer nerds somewhere, whose offspring are nothing but the firing of sparks inside a microchip, causing Christians to be known by their hatred, one for another.

Humans are terrible enough as it is. We don’t need bots making matters even worse than they already are.

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