We've all seen bizarre political theater, but few things compete with Glenn Beck interviewing a gym-toned, T-shirted AI version of George Washington. The cringy presentation was covered here on Not the Bee. Twitter roasted it. Commentators called it "Mount Vernon meets Men's Health," "historical ventriloquism," and "a founding father held hostage by ChatGPT."
See for yourself:
Fair enough. It's weird.
But here's what is so much more important:
AI Washington's message — stripped from the awkward medium — was not only historically accurate, but almost word-for-word what the real George Washington actually said.
And that's the part that matters.
This wasn't AI invention. It was Washingtonian doctrine.
Take the AI Washington's central claim: America's biggest crisis isn't political or economic — it's moral. That line raised eyebrows online, yet it's indistinguishable from Washington's own Farewell Address, where he insisted that religion and morality are "indispensable supports" of political prosperity. He didn't call them helpful accessories. He called them indispensable — the one thing a republic cannot abandon and hope to survive.
The digital Washington also argued that liberty requires virtue, discipline, and character:
To be free, you have to have discipline… you have to have character.
That's not AI moralizing; that's Washington's worldview. In 1775, he warned the Massachusetts Legislature that government, deprived of a virtuous citizenry, becomes either weak or oppressive. Self-restraint in the people is what keeps the state a servant instead of a master.
Then came the line critics mocked most:
Laws can't stop anything. They mean little (without moral citizens).
But Washington said as much — almost word for word. In the Farewell Address, he warned that national morality cannot "prevail in exclusion of religious principle." Reason and experience, he said, forbid us to expect otherwise. Not suggest. Forbid. For Washington, the character of the people mattered more than the complexity of their legal code.
When AI Washington declared that public virtue "matters more than public opinion," it echoed yet another direct line out of Washington's papers. In his 1783 Circular to the States, he wrote that virtue is a "necessary spring" of popular government and that "without virtue, there can be no liberty." Those are not vague sentiments — they are the philosophical foundation of the American experiment. AI Washington didn't invent the hierarchy. It simply restated it.
Even the closing admonition — that America won't be fixed in Washington, D.C., but in "every home, every school, every heart" — follows Washington's own emphasis on private character. "A good moral character is the first essential," he wrote to Lafayette in 1788. The "sacred fire of liberty," he insisted, rests not on politicians but on the virtue of ordinary citizens. Fix the people and you fix the country — or, as AI Washington put it, "You keep electing these people expecting things to change, but you haven't changed."
That's why I contend that even if the aesthetic overshadowed the message, and even if some of the reactions were justified, the real story of this "interview" isn't the weirdness. It's the accuracy.
Primary source documents reveal what may be an uncomfortable truth for some:
The AI version of Washington wasn't preaching Glenn Beck's ideology.
It was preaching George Washington's.
A republic cannot survive without morality.
Morality cannot survive without religious principle.
A free people must first be a self-governing people.
Renewal begins not in Washington, D.C., but in the citizen's heart.
Maybe the strangest part of all is not that an AI version of George Washington said all these things…
It's that we needed an AI version of George Washington to remind us.
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Not the Bee or any of its affiliates.
