Staff Reports
Wynton Hall made a simple, sharp pitch in a recent Breitbart News Daily exclusive: the United States must win the race for artificial intelligence, but we must not turn into a surveillance state to do it. That line — “We want to beat China without becoming China” — is the rallying cry Hall repeats from his book Code Red and his media tour, and it should be front and center in any smart conservative view of AI policy.
Beat China — But Not by Copying Its Methods
On the Breitbart program, Hall, who is identified as Breitbart News Social Media Director and author of the New York Times–listed bestseller Code Red, argued that the U.S. needs vastly more compute power to compete. He told the show there are “already 4,000 data centers across the country” and suggested we should add roughly 3,000 more — a claim he offered as part of his plan to outcompete China. That’s an aggressive pitch for an “AI arms race,” and conservatives should like the urgency. But his raw numbers are his to own until industry reports confirm them.
Corporate Messaging Is Failing — And That Matters
Hall didn’t just call for more capacity. He slammed the tech titans’ public messaging as muddled and panic-inducing, warning that confused statements from big companies only add to public fear. He warned parents and citizens about how normal consumer behavior — uploading photos, tagging friends, and filling out profiles — has created an enormous data pool. That’s not conspiracy talk; it’s surveillance capitalism, plain and simple. Hall’s vivid example of AI-enabled smart glasses identifying strangers on the street sounds like sci-fi, until you remember how quickly sci-fi becomes policy reality when left unchecked.
Flock Cameras and the Real-World Backlash
Hall used Flock-style cameras as shorthand for how commercial tools can be weaponized. That wasn’t hyperbole. Across the country, communities have pushed back against license-plate readers and street cameras — canceling contracts, voting to pause deployments, and even tearing down hardware in frustration. Those local fights show citizens aren’t willing to accept a mass surveillance future quietly, and they underline Hall’s point: technology that looks useful in one context becomes dangerous in another if there’s no guardrail.
How to Win: Build Compute, Protect Liberty
Conservatives should embrace a two-track policy: accelerate capacity and innovation, but lock in strong privacy and civil-liberty protections. That means clear rules on facial recognition and warrant standards, transparent audits of commercial surveillance tools, and local control over where cameras and data systems operate. It also means demanding better corporate communication so companies don’t inflame fear while they lobby for favorable policy. We can push for more data centers and more chips without giving up the freedoms that separate our system from the CCP model Hall warns against.
The debate Hall amplifies is useful because it refuses false choices. Winning the AI competition isn’t an excuse to hand over citizens’ privacy to faceless platforms or authoritarian modes of surveillance. If conservatives want to lead, we should push for smart, muscular policies that fund competitiveness while enshrining liberty. That’s the conservative answer: beat China, yes — but do it in a country that still values freedom over total control.
