Why are so many Democrats donning sandwich boards and shrieking about an AI apocalypse all of a sudden?
I’ll give you a hint: It isn’t because any of them fear an AI apocalypse.
No, what the Democrats fear is failing to retake the House on November 3. That’s why they’ve gone from sneering about Republican Luddites to railing about the AI End Times faster than Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed deflects questions about his bromance with Hasan Piker.
Think about it: Why is it only now, right before the crucial midterm elections, that they think superintelligence poses an existential threat to humanity? I mean, it seems like only yesterday when their standard-bearer, Kamala Harris, was saying, “It is imperative that the United States remain the global leader on AI.”
The global leader, eh? That was so 2025. Now she’s saying just the opposite: “The frontier of artificial intelligence is advancing at an alarming speed. Over the weekend, industry leaders voiced support for an idea that the American people and many AI researchers in their own labs have been calling for: We must responsibly slow the pace of frontier AI development.”
Doesn’t our favorite Venn diagramist understand that the intersection of “Remain the Leader” and “Slow the Pace” is the empty set?
If the head-snapping 180 weren’t enough of a red flag about the Democrats’ real designs here, then the coordination of their talking points certainly should be. Everyone on the Left, from Harris to Barack Obama to Pete Buttigieg to Hakeem Jeffries to Ro Khanna, is parroting the alarm from those malcontents within the AI industry who say we’re “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
How, exactly, these superintelligent man-made systems are going to go all Frankenstein’s Monster on us is still somewhat murky, but don’t bother these Cassandras with specifics.
China, of course, would love it if we responsibly slowed the pace of our AI development. As The Heritage Foundation reports, Bernie Sanders recently invited two Chinese AI “scholars” to Capitol Hill to call for American restraint on the AI frontier and in its construction of data centers — “while Beijing plows full speed ahead with its own AI rollout.” Talk about useful idiocy.
Hillary Clinton, that old war horse, even called for the Trump administration to “get off the lies, get off social media, quit worrying about ballrooms and ridiculous arches, and come up with a plan to enlist the Chinese.”
To enlist the Chinese, eh? This is why we thank our lucky stars that Hillary never broke the glass ceiling. Otherwise, we’d be looking up at China instead of just slightly down. What kind of lunacy is it to suggest that the lying, thieving, cheating Chinese Communists would ever honor an AI treaty with the only country standing in the way of their global domination?
Man alive. So many old Democrat hay-burners, and so few glue factories.
“In this case,” said Trump AI adviser David Sacks last night to Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, “we don’t have trust and we can’t verify. So let’s not be foolish about this and just hand the whole ball game to China.”
Why now, though? Well, for one, Donald Trump is four-square in favor of the U.S. winning the AI race. And he’s calling the naysayers out: “The AI Hoax being perpetrated by the Radical Left Dumocrats is reminiscent of their Global Warming Scam of not so long ago, where everyone was going to die from extreme heat. What happened?”
Democrats have been conditioned to reflexively take the opposite position that Trump takes, even if that position is as politically suicidal as letting men compete against women in sports or supporting taxpayer funding of sex-change operations for illegal alien criminals.
Why right now does the Left tell us that the AI sky is falling? Well, think about who’s aligned here in this call for an AI slowdown. The Democrats want us to slow down, and the Communist Chinese want us to slow down. Why on Earth, then, should we slow down?
“Every Democrat senator,” says Attorney General Todd Blanche, “suddenly races to a microphone to talk about AI after being eerily silent for months and months. … So, to talk about the timing of this as being nothing but an effort to influence the midterms, I shouldn’t have to say that out loud, of course.”
These AI companies are tech companies, so their youngish leadership leans left. But they’re also opportunists. They’d love for the federal government to indemnify them, Section 230-style, like they indemnified the social media giants against being sued for anything that appears on their platforms. How nice it would be for these companies to not have to worry about lawsuits if their technology really does result in harm.
Heck, if these AI companies want to tap the breaks a bit, what’s stopping them? Answer: Nothing.
As National Review’s editors put it: “Nobody of a responsible disposition wishes to be reckless. But, by the same token, we ought to avoid panic — especially when that panic lines up so neatly with the commercial ambitions of its progenitors. At some point, there may well be a case for a different approach to AI, but, for now, we’d counsel keeping calm and carrying on.”
The tell in all this will take place sometime after November 3, but only if the Democrats win control of Congress. If they do that, mission accomplished. And if we don’t see or hear from them with the same intensity about the need for a Great AI Slow-Down, then we’ll know with certainty what we already suspect: that this is at its heart a politically motivated ruse.
