Staff Reports
Conservative leaders and grassroots activists ignore AI at their peril, a warning delivered bluntly by Wynton Hall at a recent conference where he urged the right to master the language and stakes of artificial intelligence. Hall insisted that understanding the emerging “AI lexicon” isn’t optional trivia but essential political armor if conservatives hope to defend freedom in the years ahead.
Hall made clear that this is not a technocrat’s lecture but a call to political arms: conservatives need a clear, shareable position on AI that can be pushed out from the movement’s base up through institutions and into policy. He argued that while the left and tech elites pursue a narrative that turns culture into compliance, conservatives must offer an alternative that protects human dignity and enterprise.
At the heart of Hall’s message is a moral and strategic insight conservatives should embrace: tech isn’t neutral, and code shapes culture. Borrowing Andrew Breitbart’s famous insight about culture and politics, Hall warned that Silicon Valley’s masters believe “code is upstream from culture,” which means control of AI is control of persuasion, markets, and ultimately civic life. Conservatives who refuse to play along risk letting our institutions be retooled by those who don’t share our values.
Hall is not merely theorizing; he’s packaged his warnings into a full-throated manifesto, Code Red, billed as the conservative plan for winning the AI age and set for release in March 2026. The book is being promoted as both a primer and a battle plan, urging conservatives to learn the technical vocabulary and to translate it into concrete public-policy stances that protect free speech, parental rights, and market dynamism. This is the practical preparation the right has largely neglected until now.
He sketched the stakes with concrete examples, pointing to industry experiments and rhetoric about guaranteed income that reveal the left’s temptation to weaponize AI into dependency. Hall highlighted past statements by tech leaders about experimenting with cash stipends and suggested these ideas could be scaled into policy narratives that erode the Protestant work ethic and replace self-reliance with state-managed leisure. Conservatives should treat such proposals as ideological threats, not inevitable progress.
Beyond economics, Hall flagged the bureaucratic dangers: invisible algorithms baked into government and corporate systems that enable surveillance, de-banking, and social scoring under the guise of efficiency and safety. Those are not abstract hypotheticals but the next front in the cultural and political contest, where technology can quietly enforce conformity and punish dissent without democratic consent. Conservatives must expose and oppose these mechanisms before they calcify into accepted practice.
His remedy is straightforward and unapologetically conservative: learn the lexicon, teach children entrepreneurship alongside classical learning, and craft policy that harnesses AI’s power while protecting liberty. Hall insists conservatives should lean into innovation rather than retreat into Luddism, but with clear red lines—no surrender of privacy, no bureaucratic automation of moral judgment, and no centralized control that mirrors China’s model. The conservative task is to offer freedom-respecting alternatives that outcompete the left’s technocratic fantasies.
This is a fight the right can and must win, but only if it organizes quickly. If conservatives fail to speak fluently about AI, the left will fill the vacuum with narratives that justify dependency, censorship, and centralized control; Hall warns that the clock is ticking and the cultural soil can be lost. Patriots who care about free speech, religious liberty, and the American work ethic should take his warning as a rallying cry to get educated, get organized, and take the debate to voters and lawmakers.
Make no mistake: AI is not merely another technology to be left to Silicon Valley and wonkish elites. It is a political instrument capable of shaping incentives, speech, and loyalties. Conservatives who want to preserve a free and flourishing America must absorb the AI lexicon, translate it into policy, and deploy it in the courtroom, the classroom, and the town hall. Hall’s blunt counsel should be our marching orders—learn fast, fight hard, and refuse to hand the future to those who would convert innovation into instruments of control.
