OPINION:
The most insidious threat facing an insurgent political movement often isn’t its opponents. A much more serious threat is the one posed by those who seek to co-opt the movement for their own ends.
As one of the original leaders of the tea party movement, I saw this firsthand. Establishment politicians and monied interests first fought the movement and then, knowing they couldn’t stop it, sought to co-opt it to push their corporatist agendas.
We see the same dynamic at play now with the MAGA movement. Nowhere is it more obvious than in the case of Big Tech and the growing power of unregulated artificial intelligence.
I recently spoke to thousands of grassroots MAGA supporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas. They shared my concerns about Big Tech’s influence on conservative politics and Republican politicians.
The same billionaires who censored conservatives for years — who silenced President Trump after the 2020 election, deplatformed any of us who dared challenge the COVID-19 narrative — are now suddenly supposed to be the stewards of MAGA. In a move that would make even George Orwell blush, they want you to forget everything they have done and believe they now speak for us.
While these “Big AI” billionaires are setting policy, the people who have fought for “America First” for a decade don’t even get a seat at the table.
When we spoke to people about AI, it was clear they saw the technology as a serious threat. People spoke to us about the worries of hyperscale data centers being built in their communities and the rising cost of electricity.
They told us of their concerns about AI-powered job losses and how they would impact lives and communities. Americans are watching their work disappear as machines take over roles that once provided dignity, purpose and paychecks to support families.
Our children are being put at risk. We have all read the horror stories of children taking their own lives after being manipulated by chatbots.
Big AI itself expects these problems to multiply and worsen, and it has little clue how to solve them. Cyberattacks, aiding terrorism and losing control of the AI systems entirely threaten human extinction.
These concerns are not just MAGA’s. A Quinnipiac poll shows that 80% of Americans are concerned about AI and 74% believe the government is not doing enough to regulate it.
Although the American people are concerned, and rightfully so, the Big Tech billionaires and their lobbyist armies tell us we have nothing to worry about. They tell us we can’t have commonsense guardrails on AI because any regulation would lead to China winning the AI war.
Yet the globalists who say this are the same ones advocating for the right to sell the Chinese the computer chips they need to win the war. They want to have it both ways because they don’t care about stopping China. All they care about is lining their own pockets.
The Big Tech billionaires don’t care about the grassroots movement or our concerns about unregulated AI because they don’t think they have to. They think our movement can be bought, which is why they have promised to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to punish candidates who support any guardrails on AI.
Well, I have news for them: Washington politicians might be for sale, but the MAGA movement isn’t.
Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 despite being outspent by hundreds of millions of dollars. The MAGA movement didn’t transform the Republican Party by buying politicians or elections; we transformed it by listening to the people and harnessing grassroots power.
A few politicians in Washington are willing to stand up to the Big Tech billionaires, including Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. As we all know, political courage, especially in the face of an avalanche of globalist money, is rare in our nation’s capital.
The good news: MAGA has proved that change doesn’t have to start in Washington. Indeed, it almost always starts with the people.
It is time to let the Big AI billionaires know that our values and movement are not for sale.
It is time to harness the power of the grassroots to push for commonsense regulations and safeguards that will ensure our AI policy really puts America first.
• Amy Kremer is the founder and former chair of Women for Trump and is now at Humans First, ensuring that the people, not Big AI, have the power.
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