Down the Road, Conservatives Debate GOP’s Future

IRVING, Texas —While the Republican Party faithful streamed through Secret Service checkpoints in downtown Dallas, other conservatives flocked to the Rayleigh event center in Irving, less than two miles up the road. A new conservative programming organization called FORUM hosted a series of panel discussions to tackle the topics the convention rally wouldn’t touch: the cost of living, immigration enforcement, artificial intelligence and data centers, and the future of the GOP beyond Donald Trump.

Conservatives gather apart from the Republican Midterm Convention

The two events were not technically dueling, but while the president spoke to uproarious applause at the American Airlines Center, a smaller crowd of conservatives barely even watched the livestream of the president’s speech. Instead, attendees were buzzing about a mainstage debate on artificial intelligence.

“I’m tired of older institutions that don’t get it and are years behind the base for where the action is,” CEO Matthew Peterson told a crowd of a couple hundred, mostly men. “For the sake of finding the roots of our actual disagreements, we need to assume patriotism and good faith,” Peterson added. The whole point of the day is to get into it and to have a hell of a good time doing so.”

The afternoon and evening event featured a half dozen scheduled debates, though most served more as panel discussions with little disagreement. Most speakers analyzed the philosophical underpinnings to current political issues.

These conservatives want to talk about – AI

As far as debates go, the ideologies represented were fairly similar for most of the conversations. Conservative YouTuber John Doyle moderated a discussion with state Republican groups and local elected officials on the need to boost Trump’s mass deportation plans to include legal immigrants who do not assimilate to American culture. In a discussion on the cost of living titled “$20 Burritos and the Common Good,” members of The Claremont Institute, the American Principles Project, and the Center for Renewing America did not disagree on what the common good meant or that burritos should cost less than $20. They also delicately avoided laying the blame at their party leader’s feet while simultaneously urging the Republican Party to move past its message that high inflation was the Democrats’ fault.

Throughout the afternoon and evening, some attendees sat at tables and listened intently to the main stage. About half of the crowd held side conversations at the bar and in the VIP lounge, making the discussions difficult to hear. But they were also talking about the same topics. One group shared their experiences with artificial intelligence, while another weighed Trump’s tariff policies.

FORUM took on topics that the convention rally either glossed over or passed off as Democrat problems. And AI was top of mind.

Is AI an existential threat to humanity – or our secret weapon against the Chinese?

The day peaked when the room finally filled for an hour-long moderated debate on AI. On one side, Joe Allen, author of a book on transhumanism, argued that AI poses an existential threat to humanity that conservatives must take seriously. On the other, venture capitalist and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale pushed for further development and claimed mass fears over AI are stoked by foreign interference, not reality.

I think we need to really ask ourselves who benefits from total transformation, and with all due respect, Joe Lonsdale, you’re insulated from the most damaging effects. The people that I speak to on a day-to-day basis … are not insulated from mass surveillance. They’re not insulated from mass manipulation, nor are they insulated from the more radical slop infestation of the culture, except for those who have the wherewithal to say no.

Joe Allen

Lonsdale countered that AI has already been used to achieve conservative priorities, such as using Flock cameras to identify illegal immigrants. He stressed that conservative leaders need to assuage fears with facts, not give in to them, particularly in responding to backlash against data centers.

They’re going to get built somewhere else, even if it’s offshore. There’s something irresponsible here. Yes, there is fear, but we should be reacting to the parts of the fear that’s rational, and we should be teaching them about the things where they’re irrational.

From there, the debate raged over whether the pro-AI side is simply populated by rich CEOs who want favor with the White House or whether opposition to data centers is a psychological operation from either the far left or China or both.

The conversation was in some ways a proxy between the burgeoning wings of the party jostling for a leading position in a post-Trump era. Lonsdale and the vice president share a mutual friend and partner in tech billionaire and fellow venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and Vice President JD Vance has often espoused pro-growth ideas about AI. Allen is an editor with Bannon’s War Room, hosted by former White House chief of staff Steve Bannon. In April, Bannon publicly rejected the idea of Vance becoming the heir to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.

Bipartisan legislating?

But where both parties see a struggle to determine a position, some see an opportunity for rare bipartisan legislating. Jason VanBeek, chief government affairs officer at the Future of Life Institute but speaking in personal capacity, leans more toward the Joe Allen camp.

“I think you have a very powerful fringe part of the of the coalition, which is the tech folks that have a lot of money, power, and ability to influence things, but I think most people out here in places like Texas, Iowa, South Dakota are skeptical,” VanBeek told RealClearPolitics.

Lonsdale cheered AI development as a new Industrial Revolution. VanBeek likened it more to the rise of the Internet and social media, initially praised as a way to connect people and then revealed to be a mess of algorithms keeping users separate and hooked on rage.

“They’ve seen this movie before, where they were shutting down conservatives not that long ago, and there’s no reason to think that they wouldn’t do it again,” VanBeek said. “Big Tech is cozying up the administration. It’s only a matter of time before I think we’re back in a 2020 scenario where, you know, Twitter’s shutting Trump down, those kinds of things. The tide can turn very quickly.”

Vance emphasizes human involvement

Vance has generally espoused the pro-growth portion of the debate, but in the past two years he’s added more commentary on the importance of jobs, human effort, and human involvement. In a speech to Air Force Academy graduates in May, Vance said AI development should never be used in place of human judgment or life and death decisions in warfare. In an interview with Christian podcaster Bryce Crawford last month, the vice president expressed concerns about AI chatbots and how companies relate to their own products.

“You feel like there is some really, really weird spiritual dark energy,” Vance said about companies like Anthropic that hold a so-called burial ceremony for retired AI models. He lamented the rise of using chatbots for relational matters such as marriage counseling. “There’s no real human feedback. It sort of short circuits that social part of our brain where we respond to other people’s wants and needs … I think that’s kind of satanic.”

“He’s been in the technology space for a long time before he’s in politics,” VanBeek noted. “I think he’s trying to thread the needle too, and trying to balance a lot of the stuff that you saw on the stage here between the two Joes. So it’ll be interesting to watch.”

Reframing the debate

The Vance subtext spread beyond the AI debate. Early in the day, panelists discussing affordability brought up Vance’s anti-fraud task force and a reported proposal to give additional tax credits for childcare to stay-at-home parents. On the one hand, conservatives rarely cheer the idea of government handouts. On the other, many at FORUM noted that it could be an effective way at ensuring women have the means to stay home with children, thus likely improving the national birth rate.

“What JD Vance is doing is he’s reframing the debate,” founder of the American Principles Project Terry Schilling said on the panel. “He’s redirecting it from corporations to the American family directly.”

Vance himself was not present for the proxy battles being waged on his behalf. Instead, he sat in a VIP section of the convention and watched as Trump took his prime-time speaking slot, bumping Vance’s speech to Thursday night.

The vice president is spending the time in Dallas helping the party’s fundraising operation. He is speaking Thursday to the Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin delegations, all battleground Senate race states for the November midterms. On Tuesday, Vance hosted a donor group he co-founded in 2019, Rockbridge, with other Cabinet officials and top GOP donors for a pre-convention party at a nearby bar. And on Thursday night, he’ll take the main stage.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.