Here we go again.
After a resounding 99–1 defeat in the Senate earlier this year, the Big Tech oligarchs are hard at work doing what they do best: trying to sneak a massive corporate giveaway into must-pass legislation in the dead of night. This time, they’re targeting the National Defense Authorization Act, a bill essential to our military and national security, as the vehicle for decade-long AI amnesty. Or another must-pass bill, if the NDAA doesn’t work for them. Or even a legally questionable executive order, as their Hail Mary.
They tried this in July. And now, led once again by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., they want to ram through a federal takeover of AI with zero meaningful rules or even guardrails. They call it ‘federal preemption.’ But let’s be blunt: federal preemption with no federal rules is not governance. It’s amnesty. Total, blanket, corporate amnesty for trillion-dollar Big Tech monopolists who have spent decades crushing competition, shuttering small businesses, canceling conservatives and harming children.
If their idea is so great, why are they terrified of public debate? Why are they running from votes? Why do they only try to pass this through 9,000-page must-pass bills in the dead of night?
Because they know the truth: If the American people ever saw what’s really in these proposals, the answer would be the same as last time: Hell. No.
Big Tech already showed us exactly what it does with immunity. Section 230 created a legal shield for Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. These trillion-dollar monopolists used their government-granted amnesty to censor conservatives, manipulate elections, destroy competition and turn the Internet into a surveillance empire. Now they want the same deal for AI. But bigger. And more dangerous.
This ‘AI amnesty’ blocks states from protecting their own citizens. No state rules. No local safeguards. And absolutely no federal guardrails. A total vacuum, and the perfect playground for tech oligarchs who want to scrape every work of American creativity, censor every voice they dislike, experiment on children’s developing minds with unsafe AI tools and plant data centers wherever they please while working-class families foot the energy bill.
Big Tech insists this is necessary to ‘compete with China.’ That is nonsense. These companies spent years doing China’s bidding. Google killed America’s Project Maven, our drone AI program, because its woke employees protested helping the U.S. military. At the same time, Google was running Project Dragonfly, a censorship system built for the Chinese Communist Party. They wouldn’t help our troops, but they were happy to help the CCP censor its own citizens.
And now these same companies claim they’re our last defense against China? Please.
Their real concern isn’t China. It’s profit. They want carte blanche to steal every copyright in America, train their machines on it and cash in, all without paying a dime to the creators whose work built this country’s entertainment, journalism and cultural industries. They want to replace America’s creative economy with a copy-paste machine. And they want Congress to bless it.
The American people deserve better, and President Trump consistently demonstrates the leadership needed to stop this scam. When Big Tech and its lobbyists pressured him to accept AI amnesty earlier this year, he stood firm. He refused to sell out the American people to Silicon Valley. And that courage helped kill the deal 99–1.
The American people understand what’s at stake. We know Big Tech can’t be trusted, not with our data, not with our elections, and certainly not with artificial intelligence. We know we can’t ‘steal like China to compete against China,’ nor can we become digital sharecroppers on our own soil just to pad corporate profits.
If Congress wants to discuss federal preemption, fine. But it must get done through regular order. Public hearings. Public debate. Up-or-down votes. And only after legislation is drafted that protects the people Big Tech has targeted for years: conservatives, children, creators and communities. The 4 Cs must get protection in any AI deal.
Conservatives must finally gain protection from the censorship that these monopolists weaponized for decades. We must protect children from predatory AI systems, including chatbots that have advised depressed minors to kill themselves – and their parents. Or AI teddy bears – Pedo Bears – that speak in sexually explicit terms to kids. Creators deserve protection from the copyright theft that Big Tech openly admits it needs to train its models. And we must safeguard our communities from data centers that raise energy costs, drain water supplies and bulldoze residential neighborhoods, so Silicon Valley can build another server farm.
These are not radical demands. These are basic, commonsense protections in a free society. But Big Tech insists that any safeguards, any at all, will ‘slow innovation,’ ‘harm national security,’ ‘hurt competitiveness’ or even ‘help China.’ Those talking points are as dishonest as they are insulting.
Big Tech executives think they can buy Congress, hide behind fake national-security arguments and bully America into agreeing to their terms. They thought they could get away with it last time. They were wrong. With President Trump’s leadership, with grassroots conservatives mobilized, and with the sunlight of exposure, we beat them. And we will beat them again.
But only if Congress hears loud and clear: No AI amnesty. Not in the NDAA. Not in any other must-pass legislation. Not in an executive order. Not ever.
The Big Tech oligarchs spent hundreds of millions of dollars chasing Trump out of office in 2020. They’ve censored, silenced, de-platformed and canceled Trump, his aides and his allies. If we give these Big Tech oligarchs AI amnesty, it’s only so they can continue to censor conservatives, prey on children, drive-up electricity and water bills in communities and rip off creators.
If the tech oligarchs want a debate, they can step into the arena. They can defend their ideas in the open. They can answer for the children harmed, the conservatives censored, the creators robbed and the communities exploited. They can stop hiding behind lobbyists and must-pass bills and make their case like everyone else.
Until then, Congress must reject any attempt to slide this corporate giveaway into the NDAA, any other must-pass legislation or any executive order. No shortcuts. No back-room tricks. No surrender to the Silicon Valley oligarchy.
The stakes are too high. The consequences are too great. And the American people are watching.
Hell no to AI amnesty. Protect our children. Protect our creators. Protect our communities. Protect our country.