Fear as a Governing Strategy
“Of all base passions, fear is most accursed,” Shakespeare wrote in Henry VI, Part 1. The modern Left has made it a governing tool, create fear, then present federal power as the only remedy.
The subject changes, but the method does not. First came global cooling, followed by global warming, followed by the more elastic and politically useful label of “climate change.” Every era requires an emergency, every emergency requires an expert class, and every expert class eventually demands more authority over how ordinary people live.
Gas-powered automobiles became a menace to be rationed through ever-tightening fuel-economy mandates. Lawnmowers and leaf blowers became environmental villains. Refrigerants required elaborate federal controls. Power lines, pipelines, housing developments, and industrial projects became presumptively suspect, unless approved by the same regulatory bureaucracy that has spent decades making construction harder, slower, and more expensive.
The pattern is not scientific inquiry. It is political opportunism wearing a lab coat. To make the system durable, the Left works to close the Overton window, objections once accepted as ordinary democratic disagreement are recast as ignorance, selfishness, or moral depravity. A debate becomes a “consensus.” A policy preference becomes “settled science.” Questioning the prescribed remedy is placed beyond respectable public discourse.
The practical objective is always the same, expand the state’s power to regulate, control, condition, and sometimes prohibit private conduct. Biden-era air- and water-rulemaking often went far beyond obvious health protection, extending federal leverage over land use, energy production, property rights, and local decision-making.
Now it is artificial intelligence. The public is urged to fear 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000, or some darker machine drawn from a favorite science-fiction novel.
A growing industry of activists, commentators, and Netflix documentaries turns the prospect of advanced AI into an imminent apocalypse. Indoctrination is the name of the game.
The warning is no longer merely that AI may disrupt jobs, facilitate fraud, or create new security challenges. It is that AI may end humanity itself.
That is an extraordinarily useful claim for those who want to centralize control over computing power, data centers, energy, model development, and speech. Fear makes almost any intervention sound responsible. It also closes the Overton window, because to dispute the premise is to be accused of gambling with civilization.
Meanwhile, China is unlikely to pause its AI development because Western elites have become frightened by Hollywood scenarios. Beijing regards AI as a strategic technology, a source of military, industrial, intelligence, and economic power. If America allows alarmism to convert its technological advantage into self-imposed paralysis, it will not make the world safer. It will merely shift the frontier of AI capability toward a hostile authoritarian rival.
The pattern is too consistent to be accidental. Fear is amplified, dissent is stigmatized, and the same coalition of politicians, regulators, activists, experts, media institutions, and filmmakers arrives at the same answer, more control.
As Shakespeare warned, “Of all base passions, fear is most accursed.” The question is not whether America should take AI seriously. It is whether it will meet this challenge with confidence, competition, energy abundance, and technological leadership, or surrender the AI arms race to China in the name of avoiding a fictional HAL 9000.
"I agree with President Trump's tweet that global warming doomsday scenarios were overplayed."
Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon tells
@seanhannity that past catastrophic warnings have amounted to "fear mongering," but argues AI is different because of how quickly the technology is advancing.
"We won't have time to respond to it before it's too late."