Author Wynton Hall argues in the newly released book Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI that conservatives who dismiss artificial intelligence as a glorified spellchecker or a turbocharged Google search are making a dangerous mistake. Hall writes that AI is not a neutral tool. It is political power, and the people who control it know that, even if many conservatives don’t.
“Technology is ultimately political because technology is a form of power,” Hall quotes DeepMind and Inflection AI cofounder Mustafa Suleyman, who was named CEO of Microsoft AI in March 2024, as stating. “Technology and political organization cannot be divorced. . . . This has important ramifications for what’s coming.” Hall adds bluntly: “In other words, we’re facing more than a tech revolution. We’re facing a pixelated culture revolution.”
The money trail tells the story. As Hall documents in CODE RED, 85 percent of Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Google’s political donations flow to Democrats. Bill Gates pumped $50 million into Kamala Harris’s campaign. LinkedIn and OpenAI cofounder Reid Hoffman blew nearly $35 million backing Democrats. Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz poured $38.9 million into Democratic coffers. Employees of Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, donated forty times as much to Kamala Harris as to Donald Trump. These are the same people building the AI systems that hundreds of millions of Americans now rely on for information.
And the bias shows. Hall cites a 2023 study published in the journal Public Choice that found “robust evidence that ChatGPT presents a significant and systematic political bias toward the Democrats in the US, Lula in Brazil, and the Labour Party in the UK.” Machine learning researcher David Rozado’s 2024 analysis of twenty-four AI chatbots confirmed it: “Most conversational LLMs tend to generate responses . . . manifesting preferences for left-of-center viewpoints.”
A 2024 study Hall cites in CODE RED showed that exposure to partisan bias makes users “significantly more likely to adopt opinions and make decisions aligning with the AI’s bias, regardless of their personal political partisanship.” A billion-dollar AI projecting supreme confidence and delivering a single, seemingly authoritative answer is not the same as a web search where you choose whose arguments to trust. Hall writes:
Unlike a standard web search, where you choose from endless links and decide whose arguments and facts to trust, an AI chatbot offers up a single, seemingly authoritative answer. It gauges your tone, senses your intention, and confidently delivers its response. The issue is whether the chatbot’s bold and authoritative answer is accurate or merely convincing-sounding BS hallucinated out of thin air. It’s hard to know because, like the savviest of con artists, AI projects supreme confidence and sounds incredibly sure of itself.
Hall also points in CODE RED to the concept scholars call “automation bias,” the tendency for people to defer to automated systems even when they produce wrong answers. “People assume that a billion-dollar AI ‘robot’ built by Silicon Valley geniuses must be right, even when it’s wrong,” he writes. “That’s why an AI steeped in leftist political bias isn’t just a theoretical problem, it’s a ticking time bomb for public debate and election fairness.”
The conservative response, Hall argues, cannot be indifference. “Some dismiss AI as overhyped Silicon Valley PR,” he writes. “Others reduce it to a mere tool, a glorified spellchecker or a turbocharged Google search. A few shrug it off as sci-fi silliness or a ‘shiny object’ they’re too busy to learn or worry about. I respectfully, yet vehemently, disagree.” Hall contends that AI’s architects “are building systems capable of muzzling dissent, manipulating narratives, disrupting economies, displacing jobs, evangelizing leftist ideologies, unleashing new national security threats, warping human relationships, cementing educational indoctrination, maximizing surveillance capitalism, and controlling media and information on an unprecedented scale.”
Hall has written Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI, to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world. One crucial component of the book is how AI will impact politics ranging from the 2026 midterms to the next presidential election and beyond.
Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI, praised CODE RED as a “must-read.” She added: “Few understand our conservative fight against Big Tech as Hall does,” making him “uniquely qualified to examine how we can best utilize AI’s enormous potential, while ensuring it does not exploit kids, creators, and conservatives.” Award-winning investigative journalist and Public founder Michael Shellenberger calls CODE RED “illuminating,” ”alarming,” and describes the book as “an essential conversation-starter for those hoping to subvert Big Tech’s autocratic plans before it’s too late.”
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