The News
A few minutes before Donald Trump got on stage in Dallas Wednesday night, Joe Allen was warning a hard-right crowd across town about immigration.
“You look at the data center, this incubator for algorithmic immigrants,” he said. “They’ve already broken out and invaded other companies. These immigrants are out of control.”
Allen was speaking at Forum, a policy discussion staged at a stylish venue fifteen minutes from the convention center to give the new American right an opportunity to debate some of the policy issues currently dividing it— in particular, the tension between populism’s activist promises and traditional small government, and the rise of artificial intelligence. (There was also a session on the virtues of peptides.) The main event featured Allen, formerly the “transhumanism editor” on Steve Bannon’s podcast, War Room, debating the venture capitalist and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.
“We see the kids being deranged by these technologies,” Allen said. “We see education slipping away and falling into the hands of the tech companies, whether through basic ed tech, we’re now the new supposed miracle of AI tutors or full on AI teachers. We see people’s relationships become more and more disconnected, more and more synthetic. And so we don’t buy the sales pitch anymore.”
Lonsdale, who seemed somewhat surprised to find himself on defense through most of the argument — Allen prodded him for, among other things, his connection to Palantir’s surveillance technology and support for Ukraine — responded that AI is simply part of the American tradition of driving economic growth through frontier technologies: “We have Kitty Hawk, we have 747s, we built the railroads.”
Lonsdale compared complaints about AI to the “Black Lives Matter hysteria,” and suggested they were driven by “psyops from China,” a claim Allen noted was based in part on an X report citing 200 little-seen accounts.
Data centers, he said, are “a constant humming reminder of a future they don’t believe in.”
Ben’s view
The politics of AI are heating to a boil, as a high-profile resignation from Anthropic Wednesday fueled more calls for regulation. Democrats are increasingly aligned around the argument for greater government intervention, but Republicans are divided: President Donald Trump recently posted that data center opponents want to be “backwards and poor,” while other figures are simply dismissive of warnings about safety. Silicon Valley’s engineers are merely “high on their own supply,” the new right thinker Curtis Yarvin said at the same event earlier in the day.
But Allen’s dominance of the much-hyped debate offered a clear sense of how well the language and ideas of MAGA populism are adapting to the rising campaigns against big AI companies.
“People like me,” Allen said, “are subject to the decisions made by billionaires, and we were not consulted, and to the extent that we have revolted, we’ve been told we’re a lot of reactionary rubes.”
An anti-data center group on the right, Humans First, planned to launch its “Data Center Revolt bus tour” near the convention center Thursday morning.
The only solution, Allen said,would be the intervention of “big daddy gummint.”