Vice President J.D. Vance has been sounding the alarm on artificial intelligence, and he’s right to do so. Speaking internationally, he framed AI as the dawn of a new industrial revolution that demands American leadership and common-sense policy rather than panicked bans that punish innovators.
Vance didn’t sugarcoat the threats: hostile regimes and bad actors are already weaponizing AI to rewrite history, surveil citizens, and choke off free speech. Those are not abstract hypotheticals for coastal pundits to argue about over cocktails — they are real national security risks that conservative policymakers must confront with muscle, not moralizing technocrats.
At the Paris AI summit, he also took aim at the European model of heavy-handed regulation, warning that suffocating rules will cede the field to China and bureaucrats while crushing American workers and entrepreneurs. The Trump administration’s stance is clear: encourage growth, protect innovation, and avoid handing dominance to regimes that use AI for repression.
When Vance sat down on the Record with Greta Van Susteren he balanced caution with optimism — acknowledging surveillance, manipulation, and scams powered by AI while insisting on policies that preserve free speech and job creation. That is the pragmatic conservatism America needs: defend liberty while harnessing technology to lift working families, not to enrich a global elite or foreign autocrats.
Conservatives should welcome his insistence that AI be free from ideological bias and not turned into a tool for censorship or political control. We should also demand accountability from Big Tech — enforce the law, stop the data hoarding, and break up the cozy arrangements that let platforms pick winners and silence dissent.
Make no mistake: the left’s reflex is to reach for regulators and commissars the moment a complex new technology threatens their narrative control. That approach will cost jobs, concentrate power in unaccountable institutions, and hand strategic advantage to hostile states. Real patriotism means protecting Americans’ prosperity and privacy without surrendering our freedoms to unelected technocrats.
Patriots should back Vance’s call for American-first AI policy: encourage innovation, secure our data and infrastructure, and prosecute bad actors who weaponize technology against our people. If conservatives build sensible guardrails while keeping markets open, we will secure both liberty and leadership for the next century — and send a clear message to the world that America will not be bullied into retreat by fear or taken advantage of by foreign adversaries.
