Wynton Hall, whose New York Times bestselling book Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI has established him as a leading expert on AI in the conservative movement, closed Breitbart’s latest Founders’ Roundtable with a charge to the audience: Stop assuming AI is over your head, and start fighting for it. Hall laid out five steps he believes every conservative needs take right now.
Sunday’s Breitbart Founders’ Roundtable titled, “The Invisible War – AI, China, and the Battle for Global Control,” brought together China experts including Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer and Martel, as well as AI expert and Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall, hosted by Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow.
Hall’s suggestions flow from CODE RED‘s central claim that “AI is not just a tool” Hall told the panel, “We hear that all the time. ‘It’s just a tool.’ It is a tool, but it’s not just a tool. It’s also political power.” That, he argued, is why no one can afford to sit the AI fight out, and why the country must “beat China without becoming China” rather than slide into what he called a “totalitarian techno authoritarian surveillance state.”
Here are Hall’s action items for the Founders’ Roundtable audience:
- Learn the basics. “Do not think that you cannot understand AI.”
- Go on offense, not defense. Use AI’s “mass pattern recognition to find and root out waste, fraud, and abuse in federal government contracts.”
- Get the kids ready. Teach them “not just find jobs, but how to create jobs.”
- Guard your faith. Watch for “the existential coming crisis of meaning.”
- Know the players. Learn who is funding and steering AI, from Anthropic to the “effective altruist movement.”
The first thing, Hall said, is confidence. “Do not think that you cannot understand AI,” he urged, describing CODE RED as an effort to “get simple without being simplistic,” a book carrying “over 800 end notes” and built to teach readers “the lexicon” and “the arguments.” Hall noted that 99 percent of Americans already use AI, “even though 64% of people don’t realize when they’re using AI.”
Secondly, conservatives should stop reacting and start building, an idea from Code Red about turning the technology back on the bureaucracy: “Let’s get creative as conservatives. Let’s go on offense, not defense, right? The, the, the solution isn’t to panic, it’s to, to lead. And so for example, I have a whole chapter on what if we could use AI’s mass pattern recognition to find and root out waste, fraud, and abuse in federal government contracts.”
Third was preparing the next generation. Hall said schools should teach children “not just find jobs, but how to create jobs,” “redoubling our efforts in entrepreneurship,” and he called for conservatives to build AI tutors “that are not woke, pedagogically sound, that are Socratic method.” He cited NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang, “AI’s not going to take your job, but somebody who knows how to use AI will take your job,” and pointed to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s warning that half of white-collar, entry-level jobs could be wiped out within one to five years.
Fourth, Hall turned to faith. “I have a whole chapter on God and AI and the existential coming crisis of meaning,” he said, warning people of faith to guard their hearts. He pointed to “Jesus avatars used in confessional booths, people confessing to an AI Jesus” as “absolute blasphemy,” and to “churches that are built to deify and worship AI as a god.”
Fifth, Hall said, know the players. “You got to learn who these people are,” he told the audience, asking “why has Anthropic given $200 million to Democrats and almost nothing to conservative Republicans?” and telling the audience to get familiar with “the effective altruist movement” and the “billionaire leftist globalists pushing this so-called AI global governance scheme.” He closed with a warning: get informed “before the bullet train does get too far advanced so that we can lead, not follow.”
Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute and a Breitbart senior contributor, told the panel that reading Hall’s book moved him “from being somebody who is kind of glum about it to someone who is slightly optimistic,” and warned the audience, “Don’t retreat in your shell.” China, he added, aims to dominate AI by 2030, a goal Hall traced to the Chinese Communist Party’s 2017 development plan.
This is was the latest in the regular series of the “Founders’ Roundtable,” which is held for “Middleweight” and above members of the Breitbart Fight Club. The roundtables offer subscribers an opportunity to participate in the Breitbart community, engage with experts, leading political figures, administration officials, and ask questions.
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Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.