Conservative leaders and grassroots activists ignore artificial intelligence at their peril — that was the blunt warning delivered by Wynton Hall, who urged conservatives to get fluent in the new “AI lexicon” so they can fight the policy battles that will decide our freedoms. Hall made clear that AI is not an abstract tech problem but an all-encompassing force that will shape education, jobs, culture, and national security, and conservatives must stop pretending it is someone else’s fight.
Hall has put his money where his mouth is, distilling his case into a forthcoming book, Code Red, that frames AI as a battle for the soul of America and a geopolitical race with China. The book, which HarperCollins is releasing, warns that if conservatives cede the narrative and the policy levers to technocratic elites and left-leaning institutions, we will wake up in a country run by algorithms that reward dependency and silence dissent.
This isn’t academic hand-wringing — Hall told conservative audiences that the left already treats AI as an upstream cultural force that can be engineered to shape beliefs and behavior, and conservatives are dangerously behind in translating complex technical terms into a persuasive political language. If we can’t explain what these systems do in plain English, the other side will define the terms of the debate and lock in policies that favor surveillance, censorship, and centralized control.
Practical politics requires a playbook, and Hall called for a common, coherent conservative position that can be taught at the grassroots level. Voters don’t care about abstruse model architectures, but they do care about whether children are indoctrinated at school, whether small businesses get crushed by monopolies, and whether parents can trust the apps their kids use — that’s where conservatives can make AI a winning issue by translating technical risk into everyday stakes.
Make no mistake: the stakes are geopolitical as well as cultural. Hall and other conservative strategists rightly point out that China’s state-directed approach to AI and the left’s affinity for top-down regulation could combine to export a model of digital authoritarianism unless the free world offers a clear alternative. Conservatives must frame an agenda that protects innovation and competition while defending privacy, free speech, and local control over education and family life.
Policy must follow principle: embrace pro-innovation policies that empower Americans, not edicts from coastal elites who prefer dependency to responsibility. Hall has applauded certain Republican initiatives that aim to accelerate American leadership in AI while insisting on safeguards — conservatives should support measured policies that preserve liberty, not ham-fisted bureaucratic controls that hand power to unaccountable institutions.
The moment for complacency is over. Conservatives who love freedom must learn the language of this fight, train the next generation for jobs that AI will create and reshape, and build a political narrative that casts AI as a tool for human flourishing — not a vehicle for woke control or foreign domination. Stand up, study up, and organize: the patriots who master the lexicon and the policy will be the ones to save our liberties for the next generation.
