“WASHINGTON — Breitbart News Social Media Director and New
York Times best-selling author Wynton Hall emphasized that conservatives need a
tacit position on Artificial Intelligence (AI) that can be disseminated at the
grassroots level to compete with the left’s AI narrative.
Hall, the author of the forthcoming HarperCollins book, Code
Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI, due out March 17,
2026, dove deep into the AI narrative war during a breakout session panel on
“AI and the American Soul” at the National Conservatism Conference in
Washington, DC. He noted at the top of his remarks that the conservative
movement holds well-defined beliefs on an array of key issues among the
American electorate, but it is “less so” with AI.
“I think that when we think about artificial intelligence in
the conservative movement, the question is: What is the conservative position
on AI? I mean, when we talk about pro-life, we talk about gun control, we talk
about national security, things of that sort, taxes, we sort of know where
people are on a 90-10 scale in the conservative movement. But it’s less so, I
think, right now. Some people think that’s because we’re at a nascent state in
AI. We’re really not, obviously. Since 1956, we’ve had this term, and there’s
been an enormous trajectory more recently.”
Hall referenced Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart’s
poignant quote that “politics is downstream from culture,” adding that tech
elites take the position that “code is upstream from culture,” meaning the tech
sector influences culture.
“But I think that the most important thing that I’d like to
focus on is the narrative war over artificial intelligence,” Hall said. “I do
work at Breitbart. I wear many other hats, but Andrew obviously, famously said,
‘Politics is downstream from culture.’ I think the tech elites believe that
code is upstream from culture and therefore can control and affect the
citizenry in a very direct and powerful way.”
“AI is the most, I think, powerful political weapon. I don’t
think it is a tool. I think it is an information system that will touch
virtually every policy dimension that all of the people in here and in this
conference and beyond, work on — whether you’re talking about education,
whether you’re talking about national security, certainly in economics and
jobs,” Hall continued.
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Hall focused on three central topics in his remarks: the
stakes of the AI narrative war, agentic AI, which are AI systems that require
little human oversight to accomplish tasks, and “fractal truths” [1] that will aid
in navigating through AI development to this point and }what awaits on the horizon.
Regarding the stakes of the AI narrative war, Hall pointed
to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s social experiment as president of Y Combinator in
2016, where he sought to give low-income individuals $1,000 without strings
attached. Altman said such a model would one day be employed at a national
level, and even referenced the implications this would have on fundamental
human motivation to work that has driven society since the dawn of man.
“He was going to do this in pilot programs,” Hall said. “He
was going to do it for several years. He meant what he said; he put in $14
million of the $60 million of his own money and the reason he said he wanted to
do this, he put up on a blog post, and I’m reading directly from his blog: ‘As
technology eliminates jobs and massive new wealth gets created, we’re going to
see some version of this at a national scale.’”
“Now, all of us in here recognize this to be universal basic
income or UBI, but then, he dropped the mask a little more and let the mask
slip even beyond that. In his blog comments, he wrote, ‘I think one day it will
seem ridiculous … that fear of not eating was how we motivated people
economically.’ Now, for free market people and people that believe in sort of
the Judeo-Christian work ethic and the rest of it, that’s a pretty strident
statement, right?” Hall asked rhetorically. “You’re really snapping the hinge
of the human motivation for economic flourishing, not just in terms of your own
personal identity, your own ability to feed yourself and your family, but also
to build wealth and security for your progeny. That man’s name was Sam Altman,
and of course, today, he runs OpenAI. He has been a very strong donor for
democratic causes — up until the recent new administration, had given
exclusively to Democrats.”
This brings Hall to the crux of the implications for society
at large, as Altman’s 2016 position essentially represents the Democrat
argument in the AI narrative war.
“For centuries, America’s soul thrived on free markets
powered by this notion of striving, and this question is, now, is the mode of
AI going to mean that work is outdated, dependency is progress, and leisure is
the future? That really is the narrative war,” he said. “Whether or not that
comes to pass, that’s why we have these conversations, and I think we need to
be having these conversations.”
Hall expressed his concern among conservatives at the
grassroots level, noting there is no clear position on AI among the
conservative base.
“I personally am very concerned that at the grassroots level,
we’re really not fully as coached up on these topics and really thinking
through the five-dimensional chess that we’re going to be confronting,” Hall
told the room. “Our usual place is a default position of conservatives
defaulting to answering automation with the same refrain, right? ‘Oh, I’ve
heard this before. The robots are coming. It never happens. Jobs get created.
Jobs get destroyed. The free market will work it out.’ But of course, this
time, the AI Titans claim this will be different and we’re talking about …
Dario Amodei, obviously Sam Altman, Mustafa Suleyman at Microsoft AI.”
“Some conservatives kick back and say, ‘Well, you know,
look, LLMs [Large Language Models] are just stochastic parrots. It’s nothing
but a fancy auto-complete. Nothing to see here. Even Yann LeCun claims that an
LLM is no smarter than your average house cat. This isn’t going to be an
economic threat the way that it’s been postured.’ But of course, those who
study AI and are certainly building it have quite a rejoinder to make,” he
continued. “And that is the crux of the point, which is going to be agentic AI,
and whether or not the promises we’re hearing from, you know, just recently,
two months ago, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei saying that you’re going to see the
vaporization of 50 percent of white collar entry-level positions.”
Hall emphasized that this is a major concern for young
people and those who have children and are raising families, adding that the
left is working to sell job displacements as “imminent and inevitable.”
“If you’ve played with agentic AI, you might again feel
like, ‘Wow, it’s very nascent. We’ve still got all these problems with
hallucinations. You’re going to have all sorts of issues with permissions and
the rest of it, whether you’re talking about Perplexity’s Comet or OpenAI’s
Operator.’ But here’s the narrative plot twist for us, I think politically: It
almost doesn’t matter — that reality in the short term. The narrative war is:
Can you convince people that job displacements at scale are imminent and
inevitable?” Hall detailed. “And, you know, that this is the move the left has
made because they’re not hiding it. They’re literally saying, as Ilhan Omar
said, ‘Covid was just a dry run for UBI, right? We got people used to mailbox
money, and now that we’ve seeded that terrain, it’s time for the three-day work
week, four-day work week.’ We’re seeing Bill Gates seed that narrative as
well.”
Hall’s position is that agentic AI is not merely “marketing
hype,” adding, “I’m talking about actual autonomous end-to-end work
replacement.”
Hall concluded by offering five critical points to
conservatives, the first being that they are entering into a “Code-Red era”
equating AI to fire, which can be used in a pragmatic manner to heat a meal or
a destructive manner to bring a civilization to ruin.
“I think … we are entering a code-red era for conservatives:
Code Red as an alert flare, but also … we need a code. We need to have a
unified position,” Hall said, stressing he is not talking about narrow AI,
which nearly every member of society already uses in the form of a weather app
or Netflix account.
“We’re talking about the big stuff, but if you believe that
[AI] is like fire, then the torch bearers are going to matter, and so we should
understand that we will have wide pendulum swings based upon political shifts,”
he predicted.
Secondly, in
an increasingly AI-driven world, Hall predicts that America’s children will
need to be taught to create jobs rather than merely finding them, as has been
the societal norm, especially considering his third position that white collar
jobs are vulnerable in the long term.
“I think that, you know, kids are not going to just be able
to be taught to find jobs; they’re going to have to be taught to create them,
my personal view,” Hall said. “And shout out to the classicist over here,
Spencer [Klavan], is that the trivium is still the basis, but I think we could
have two silos on top of that, an entrepreneurial layer as well as an AI layer.
I think white collar jobs are really at risk long-term, and by that, I mean
five to ten years, probably less. The ‘Moravec’s paradox,’ this idea that
things that we find hard are easy for machines and vice versa, is true, and so
white collar jobs tend to be more at risk than the blue collar.”
Fourth, Hall says that the trajectory of AI’s most
substantial threat is government bureaucracy.
“The biggest threat, I think, for the people with the smart
brains in this room that we will want to be tracking over the next several
years with AI trajectory, is the bureaucracy,” Hall shared. “I think the danger
is invisible algorithms, AI-powered social credit, digital de-banking, cancel
culture, scan-and-ban technology like Mike Benz fights against.”
Finally, Hall said that workers who are not at the end of
their careers will face a “brutal speed efficiency” to chase.
“I think the final thing is on a personal level. If you’re
not at the end of your career, and you have great aspirations and fire in the
belly, you’re going to have a brutal speed efficiency to catch up because of
the speed with which the ground is shifting,” he said.
Hall is optimistic that conservatives can win the
AI-narrative war, but stressed that the clock is ticking.
“I think conservatives can win that narrative battle, but
we’ve got a lot of work to do because if the left wins, AI becomes dependence,
surveillance, and indoctrination, and America drained of its soul,” Hall
stated. “I think that we, on the other hand, can fight against those pixelated
prisons and keep the ideas flowing freely.”
“People often say, if you had to put it in a word, picture
sort of where are we right now. We saw the Trump AI action policy, very
pro-innovation, very first word past the introduction is acceleration, so I
think we clearly have a guidelight there of where policy will be shifting,” he
concluded. “But I would say that right now, the everyday person sort of sees
the right foot of America in the roses, the potential, if you will,
metaphorically, and then the left foot hovering over that potential landmine,
existential or political. I think, together, hopefully with the bright minds
here and in this movement, we can plant both of America’s feet on virtuous soil
and preserve freedom and protect our soul.””
1. "Fractal truths" is a philosophical and spiritual concept suggesting that the universe is composed of self-similar patterns across all scales, leading to interconnectedness and a shared underlying "Source" or reality from which all separate phenomena emerge. This perspective emphasizes unity over division, views reality as a complex, ever-expanding fractal, and implies that recognizing these patterns can lead to a deeper understanding of existence and our place within it.
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