VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: AI and the same old politicized hysteria

The midterm elections are just a few weeks away.

Suddenly, a debate has erupted over the existential dangers of artificial intelligence. Jacob Coxon, a little-known Silicon Valley researcher who worked at OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned and went public with a dire warning: AI now threatens the future of the world.

Shortly beforehand, news broke of the Hugging Face episode, in which OpenAI’s advanced AI “agents” autonomously hacked another company’s computers. Bedlam followed.

Almost on cue, Democrats seized on the alarm as a new cause célèbre, accusing President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement of recklessly courting Armageddon.

The Left demanded international treaties, ignoring the dismal record of such globalist projects: the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the Washington Naval Treaty, the Versailles Treaty, the Munich Agreement, the Paris Climate Accord, and the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Panicky AI executives soon joined the chorus, speaking as though they could neither control their companies nor monitor their own research.

Their conduct casts doubt on this safety rhetoric. Just yesterday came news that Anthropic had built a fully automated, AI-controlled biolab, even though AI-generated plagues are a staple of the doomsday case. OpenAI, meanwhile, is resisting legal liability for harm caused by its products.

The familiar political script followed.

Democrats in Congress demanded hearings. They are unlikely to use them to ask tech executives or administration officials serious questions. More likely, they will spend their allotted time shouting, wagging their fingers, displaying their ignorance, and spinning wild conspiracy theories.

Sen. John Kennedy, who has proposed reasonable AI regulation for years alongside Republicans like Sen. Josh Hawley, recently observed that “the Democrats clearly are trying to politicize this.”

The reaction to a June administration decision offered still stronger evidence. Both purportedly worried AI companies and Trump-hating AI-risk advocates objected when the administration barred Anthropic from giving foreign nationals access to its Mythos and Fable 5 models — models whose cybersecurity risks the company itself had publicized.

With the trans delirium and the demonetization of ICE losing force, however, the Left apparently needs a new existential crisis to blame on Trump before the midterms.

This tactic — never letting a crisis go to waste — is hardly new.

Baby boomers grew up hearing dire warnings about the “population bomb,” the title of Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller predicting that unchecked population growth would lead to global catastrophe.

Green apocalypticism followed this. The science of ecology gave way to radical environmentalism, and legitimate concern about industrial pollution and acid rain became propaganda that the Earth was doomed unless the West renounced capitalism. Even heat was redefined as pollution. When “global warming” proved insufficiently terrifying, it became “climate change.”

The new phrase was a brilliant catch-all. Rain and drought, snow and heat, calm seas and hurricanes could all be cited as proof that modern, fossil-fueled Western consumerism had doomed the planet.

The 1980s brought another panic: nuclear war would soon incinerate the cities, and the resulting dust would blot out the sun. Politics drove much of the frenzy. The Left despised Ronald Reagan and saw no other way to prevent his re-election in 1984. He later negotiated a missile treaty with the Soviet Union, proving that he was hardly the deranged warmonger that his opponents delusionally imagined he was.

By the turn of the millennium, America was lurching from one amplified panic to another. Al Gore became a centimillionaire and a Nobel laureate by warning that internal-combustion engines would boil the planet, bringing both lethal drought and catastrophic coastal flooding. The planet survived. Al Gore grew wealthier, and Goreism then quietly receded into the shadows.

#MeToo began with legitimate accusations against Hollywood predators such as Harvey Weinstein, who had long coerced young actresses into sex in exchange for roles — the old casting couch revived.

Before long, however, the movement had become a new Salem witch trial, treating almost any allegation of rude conduct between the sexes as the equivalent of rape.

As #MeToo faded, COVID hysteria took its place. The initially virulent virus warranted serious concern; more than a million Americans would die from it. Yet concern became madness once defeating Trump took precedence over fighting the disease.

Officials presented the new mRNA vaccines as ironclad protection against infection and transmission. Those who resisted were treated as near-outlaws, fired, or ostracized, although the shots had not been proved to guarantee lasting immunity or perfect safety and often carried with them serious side effects, many or most of which were denied or swept under the rug.

What ended the panic?

As a few sober — and therefore demonized — health experts had predicted, the virus evolved into less virulent strains while prior infections increased natural immunity.

COVID eventually receded to the level of a severe flu. By then, this hysterical, manufactured response to it had wrecked the economy, destroyed the final year of the Trump administration, and inflicted incalculable physical and psychological harm on the American people.

The lockdowns helped ignite an even greater panic after George Floyd died in Minneapolis police custody. A video showed an officer restraining the resisting Floyd with a knee on his neck, using what was then considered a more or less standard protocol; within moments of its release, the country erupted.

False claims spread that police disproportionately killed unarmed black men. Murals portrayed Floyd as a haloed martyr with angel wings, although he was a career felon detained for passing counterfeit currency who resisted arrest, was high on drugs, and suffered from cardiovascular disease and the effects of a recent COVID infection.

No matter — riots soon swept the country. More than 35 Americans were killed, roughly 2,000 police officers were injured, and about 14,000 people were arrested. Property losses reached some $2 billion. Rioters torched a police precinct and a federal courthouse and tried to storm the White House grounds.

Universities dropped SAT requirements. “Black” was given a sacral form of capitalization; “white” was conspicuously left lowercase.

New racial quotas sharply reduced white male admission rates at elite schools. Institutions hired tens of thousands of DEI commissars. Campaigns to defund the police, release habitual felons, and decriminalize theft spread nationwide.

The post-Floyd frenzy finally ebbed as the public recognized that tribalism and attacks on meritocracy were themselves racist and nihilistic.

What, then, does today’s Democratic embrace of AI alarm share with these earlier mass frenzies?

First, each began with a legitimate concern that politics and a profit motive soon warped the problem beyond all recognition. The Left appropriated the underlying issue to gain political advantage and power.

Worry about overpopulation goes back to Malthus, but The Population Bomb appeared in the election year of 1968. Its political subtext blamed Western consumerism, capitalism, religion, and traditional pronatalism for civilization’s supposed approaching end.

The danger of nuclear war had been real since the start of the atomic arms race. Nuclear-winter paranoia, however, was promoted to damage Ronald Reagan during his re-election campaign.

Al Gore’s book Earth in the Balance converted tentative scientific speculation about climate change into partisan dogma. It blamed capitalist consumer culture for destroying the planet and, in the 1992 election year, reinforced the Clinton-Gore campaign’s attack on the Bush status quo.

#MeToo reached its political peak during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. Democrats repurposed a movement against Hollywood abuse to derail Trump’s Supreme Court nominee with unfounded claims that Kavanaugh had assaulted a teenage girl decades earlier. Democratic operatives coached the now-troubled adult before she appeared on national television.

COVID began with legitimate fear of an escaped, artificially enhanced virus that killed millions — a fear the Left initially dismissed as anti-Chinese racism. It, too, was soon politicized. We now know that Anthony Fauci, his associates at the National Institutes of Health, and other presidential advisers despised Trump and understood that shutting down his booming economy could end his presidency.

The Biden campaign then blamed Trump for the economic damage caused by the lockdown.

George Floyd’s death was genuinely shocking on video, especially without the surrounding context. But the 2020 campaign transformed it into the catalyst for months of rioting and a weapon against the supposedly racist Trump and MAGA movement. As cities burned, the Left argued that Trump was powerless to stop the violence — and a Nazi if he tried.

Second, every panic was exaggerated. The planet was neither overpopulated nor running out of food and fuel. Nuclear war was not imminent, and Earth did not face destruction within a decade. Women were not experiencing an epidemic of sexual assault. The lockdowns likely caused more harm than the virus, and police were not conducting a mass slaughter of black men.

The underlying dangers were not equally imaginary. Nuclear war, for example, came terrifyingly close in 1962 and again in 1983.

Among genuine threats, AI most resembles nuclear weaponry. That assessment may change, but AI has so far proved to be an extraordinarily powerful and therefore potentially dangerous tool. Its moral character depends on the people who build and control it.

That is why the United States can neither entrust AI regulation to international bodies with dismal track records nor permit Communist China to monopolize the technology.

Trump, who is a much more skillful diplomat than his globalist critics admit, has instead pursued bilateral negotiations with China over the real dangers both countries face. Those dangers were illustrated recently, when an AI hallucination reportedly almost prompted a U.S. attack on a Chinese cargo ship.

In the end, Americans must rely on their own people, constitutional government, and open culture to harness AI for the public good — and to deter hostile powers from using it for evil.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Contact him at authorvdh@gmail.com.