WASHINGTON — Former President Barack Obama, nearly a decade after his departure from the White House, has reemerged yet again as the face of the Democratic Party — this time with a focus on weaponizing rising trends in the nation skeptical of Artificial Intelligence’s arrival to help Democrats win politically and help eventually install a form of global governance to harness AI’s power and potential.
The New York Times over the weekend reported this headline: “Obama Urges Democrats to Move A.I. Oversight to the Center of Their Agenda.”
The Times’s Evan Gorelick revealed that Obama made the push at a “private fundraiser” with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — the would-be Speaker of the House should Democrats win the majority in the chamber in the midterms and then he wins a speakership election on the floor — where the former president and party leader pushed the aspiring speaker to “assemble a clear framework for a public conversation about A.I. policy.”
“Once you are speaker, I would strongly urge that the Democrats put together a framework for a very public conversation,” Obama told Jeffries, per the Times which cited Obama’s office providing a partial transcript of the former president’s comments.
“This is something that is moving very fast in private hands, and if we don’t get on top of it, I think can be dangerous,” Obama added. “If we do get on top of it, I do think it’s beneficial. I genuinely think it’s going to accelerate, for example, drug development in ways that can help us cure diseases. I do think that this can help us figure out pathways for a clean energy future.”
Obama’s comments come as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote a massive blog post last week calling for a slowdown in AI development. Under the headline, “We Must Pace the Frontier,” Amodei argues specifically for slowing the development of AI models and technology.
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote. “Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”
Interestingly, Amodei also wrote that he agreed with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser who is also overseeing much of the AI front for the current White House — who told Breitbart News at an event last week that if the United States does not win the arms race on AI with China that everything is lost.
“There is no day after tomorrow if China wins at this,” Bessent said at the Breitbart News event. “If they were to pull away from us on AI, then nothing else would matter.”
Amodei linked to a Bloomberg News story on the Breitbart News event with Bessent, writing: “I agree with Secretary Bessent that a Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world.”
“The CCP-associated projects will run the alignment risks that U.S. companies are carefully preventing, and even if they avoid those risks, they will be in a position to militarily dominate democracies (for example with AI-driven drones),” Amodei added.
Obama’s push for Democrats to weaponize fears and concerns — some real, some imagined — over the rise of AI tracks with warnings that Breitbart News’s Wynton Hall made on this front months ago when he published the bestselling book Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI.
“Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama are eager to leverage both real and imagined AI job losses to press for Universal Basic Income (UBI) or a four- or three-day workweek,” Hall wrote in Code Red. “These leftist visions are, of course, fanciful; progressives’ ‘Heaven on Earth’ promises always are. But they are dangerous nonetheless, because elites will seize even greater control over our lives because of the liberties we gave up in exchange.”
Hall’s book also points to a March 2025 speech that Obama gave at Hamilton college, encouraging readers to “pay close attention to the tenor of his remarks.”
In part, Obama said in that speech that “big disruptions” to the world like what AI is doing “require us to reorganize our societies.”
The timing of all of this happening is particularly interesting. Nationwide, resistance to the construction of data centers — key infrastructure for AI computing power — is percolating with lots of folks being upset about these facilities being constructed in their communities given the impacts they have on electricity prices, water quality, sound levels, aesthetics, and more. Protests have broken out over the summer on this front against data center construction — and combined with the rise of concerns over civil liberties that many Americans feel with the implementation simultaneously of Flock and other surveillance cameras — a strong sentiment of backlash against a government perceived as too powerful has been brewing.
Resistance to too much power in the federal government is as American as apple pie, and remains the beating heart of the fabric of this country which is currently celebrating its 250th anniversary. The very nature of what it means to be American is a rugged individualism, freedom, and controlling one’s own destiny — while being inherently skeptical of the government. It’s literally in the U.S. Constitution, which is all about dividing up the powers of the federal government into multiple branches and enshrining protections for Americans with everything from the First and Second Amendments through much of the rest of the founding document, with several God-given rights and avenues for recourse against that government through speech and with firearms.
Here’s the rub, though: While Democrats are openly trying to use that backlash and sentiment to rise to power, they do not actually intend to use the power they would gain if elected to address Americans’ concerns. In fact, Democrats intend to go the exact opposite way; instead of reining in AI companies and trying to mitigate the wide-ranging and explosive impacts that this revolutionary new technology is having on American workers, the Democrats are already tipping their hands about exactly how they intend to use this power if elected — what Democrats do best, which is push globalist elitism.
Hall’s book goes in depth about this in a section about “Effective Altruism,” or EA for short, that exposes the globalist efforts on this front. Hall writes about how the “Effective Altruism movement claims to use logic to maximize philanthropic impact on causes such as climate change and existential AI risk.”
He exposes how the EA movement uses a network of nonprofits and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to spread cash around to a variety of globalist causes from “global health to AI safety and pandemic preparedness.” These EA leaders, Hall writes, use the doom-and-gloom predictions and the fear Americans have about new and highly disruptive technologies to further their gains for power and control. Hall then quotes Trump’s former AI Czar David Sacks to further explain the broader agenda of the Effective Altruism movement within elitist globalist AI-company circles.
From Hall’s Code Red:
What does all this mean, and what is the EA movement’s overarching goal? According to President Trump’s [former] AI czar, David Sacks, Republicans should understand that “hyperbolic and unproven claims” about potential AI job losses are “not an accident” but rather “part of an influence operation.” Toward what end? “The goal,” he says, is “to further ‘Global AI Governance,’ a massive power grab by the bureaucratic state and globalist institutions.” Global AI governance is the moniker used to describe the regulatory effort by globalist organizations and leftists to control virtually every dimension of AI deployment under the banner of “AI safety” for the world. He notes that the EA organizers behind global AI governance are “billionaires with a long history of funding left-wing causes and Trump hatred.” He says that “it’s fine to be concerned about a technology as transformational as AI, but if you repeat their claims uncritically, you may be falling for an AstroTurfed campaign by the ‘AI Existential Risk Industrial Complex.’”
Hall warns that while he is not denying that AI will be disruptive — he is saying it will be — Americans need to beware of globalist elites who seek to use this technology’s emergence to grab more power.
“The point here is not that there will be zero job disruptions due to AI but rather that very powerful and highly organized leftists have built a massive echo chamber designed to amplify and stoke public fears about AI job losses, regardless of whether they are minimal or maximal,” Hall writes. “By doing so, billionaire tech elites hope the public will cede greater decision-making and regulatory authority to them and groups such as the United Nations, WEF [World Economic Forum], and others to ensure ‘AI safety’ and mitigate existential risks.”
Emil Michael, a top Pentagon official in the Trump Department of War overseeing AI implementation for the U.S. military, said at another recent Breitbart News event that the Effective Altruism movement is dangerous and wrong.
“It’s a sort of dystopian, ‘Brave New World’ view of the world, where machines that are using 1s and 0s are going to have no bias and are going to decide the perfectly rational and best thing for everyone on Earth,” he said. “It’s a strange philosophical concept, and I don’t think it’s a place any normal person wants to live in. But that is the animation of a lot of these companies. They’ve now distanced themselves from it, but the detritus of that philosophy still lives inside these companies in my view.”
What’s amazing now — from Obama’s remarks with Jeffries on down through other Democrat actions on this ahead of the midterm elections — is just how predictable the Democrats have been. It’s playing out exactly like Hall called it, with Democrats seizing on the issue to try to gain power and undercut Republicans and Trump ahead of the midterm congressional and 2028 presidential elections.
“President Obama is correct that decisive action must be taken on artificial intelligence,” Jeffries, the would-be Speaker of the House, said in a statement per the New York Times. “Republicans have abdicated their responsibility to govern on behalf of the American people.”
“We will not repeat their error,” Jeffries added.
Democrats, by the way, have demonstrated they are willing to lie about AI to gain power.
House Majority PAC, the Jeffries-aligned political group spending tens of millions of dollars to help Democrats try to take a House majority in November, released a memo this month encouraging Democrat candidates to spread “conspiratorial” theories about AI to win elections. The memo specifically encourages Democrat messaging to strike a “conspiratorial nerve” in order to defeat Republicans:
As for what Democrats would do if they got power, perhaps there is no better evidence that the exact global governance plot that Hall exposed in Code Red months ago as their true aim. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), a battleground state Democrat running for reelection in Georgia against Trump-backed Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA). Ossoff and also widely seen as a possible 2028 Democrat presidential candidate, let the cat out of the bag during remarks this weekend when he argued that a president he likes — in other words, a Democrat — should “lead the world toward an AI treaty.”
“A capable president would move swiftly to secure and reassure the American people. Rush inspectors into frontier labs, fortify the nation against bioterrorism, demand legislation from Congress, and lead the world toward an AI treaty,” Ossoff said in the rally remarks.
A bunch of social media influencers on the left loved what Ossoff said and the timing of the senator’s remarks because it clearly aligned with Obama’s and Jeffries’s national message for their party. The fact of the matter is that Ossoff actually let slip what their real goal is: A global governance structure like the United Nations or some giant multilateral trade pact.
Democrats like Obama have been trying for generations to build out multilateral globalist frameworks to win power and control not just in the United States but worldwide. They genuinely believe that these globalist institutions are better at governing than ordinary Americans are at governing themselves — and they believe, correctly, that these globalist frameworks make it easier to jam through extreme and radical agenda items that probably would not make it through the framework of government that America’s Founding Fathers left behind via the U.S. Constitution. In fact, Obama tried and failed to saddle the United States with multiple global trade frameworks during his presidency, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) among others. Former President Bill Clinton, whose wife Hillary Clinton was the failed Democrat candidate for president in 2016 when Trump won his first term in the White House, famously signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Trump has since ripped apart NAFTA, replacing it in his first term with the USMCA — U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement — and now Democrats like Obama who are advising the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney have steered that trade arrangement off a cliff. Trump has levied new tariffs on Canada, and interestingly Obama — who visited Toronto in May to meet with Carney, who is employing American Democrat staffers as top advisers — is at the center of that battle, too.
So the big question facing American voters in November is whether or not they will be bamboozled by Democrats who are seeking to use their very real, very American sentiments of distrusting globalist institutions and all-powerful governmental entities to give Democrats power with which they intend to create and build out and flourish those very same institutions that Americans rightly fear.