"How MAGA learned to love AI safety" is a long-form article by Nicky Woolf, published in Transformer on October 23, 2025. It reports on the bipartisan coalition that defeated the 10-year state AI-regulation moratorium inserted into the 2025 "One Big Beautiful Bill" reconciliation package, and traces a fissure inside Trump's MAGA coalition between technofuturist-libertarians (Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Ted Cruz, David Sacks) and nationalist populists (Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Josh Hawley, Sarah Huckabee Sanders).
Author: Nicky Woolf (former Guardian internet reporter; New Statesman America) Publication: Transformer (substack.com) Published: October 23, 2025 Source: transformernews.ai
Summary
Woolf presents the article as a narrative of how AI politics divided the Trump base in summer 2025 and of how a populist-religious-conservative alliance combined with labor unions to defeat federal preemption of state AI regulation. The article also documents an industry counter-mobilization through two super PACs and surveys the religious and theological objections that fed the AI-skeptic side of the coalition.
Defeat of the state AI moratorium
The provision at issue was a 10-year ban on states passing any regulation of the AI industry, inserted into the 2025 reconciliation bill known as the "One Big Beautiful Bill" quietly enough that organized opposition mobilized only after House passage. Woolf reconstructs the coordination among lawmakers and outside figures that stripped it on the Senate floor.
Texas state senator Angela Paxton wrote what Woolf describes as a "bombshell open letter" calling for the Senate to remove the provision: "I want Texas to continue to be a light touch regulation state so that we don't inhibit innovation, but we don't beta-test on our kids." Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly stated that she had not known the moratorium was in the bill when she voted yes in the House: "I am adamantly OPPOSED to this and it is a violation of state rights and I would have voted NO if I had known this was in there." Sarah Huckabee Sanders, joined by 16 GOP governors, wrote to Congressional leadership: "As Republican Governors, we support the One, Big, Beautiful Bill and President Trump's vision of American AI dominance. But we cannot support a provision that takes away states' powers to protect our citizens."
Senator Josh Hawley, per the reporting, "was one of the first lawmakers who said, 'we've gotta burn this proposal to the ground'." Steve Bannon killed Ted Cruz's last-minute compromise — a 5-year moratorium with limited exemptions — by phoning Marsha Blackburn's office: "You just can't let these tech bros not have any regulations for a decade. It doesn't work." The Senate floor vote stripped the moratorium entirely, 99–1. Mark Beall of the AI Policy Network described the timing: "It came down to like a one o'clock in the morning play on the Senate floor."
The MAGA cleavage
Woolf frames the dispute as part of a broader division inside the Trump coalition between technofuturist-libertarians and nationalist populists, which he presents as the article's organizing thesis:
| Technofuturist-Libertarians | Nationalist Populists |
|---|---|
| Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel | Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson |
| Sen. Ted Cruz | Sen. Josh Hawley, Sen. Marsha Blackburn |
| White House AI czar David Sacks | White House counterweight: harder to identify |
| Pro-H1B (with reservations) | Anti-H1B; supported $100K visa fee |
| Pro-AI-deployment | "Beta-testing on our kids" rhetoric; child-protection focus |
| Pro-state-preemption (federal lighter touch) | Pro-states-rights (federal cannot preempt local protection) |
Woolf argues the cleavage is structural rather than confined to AI, noting that Trump drew populist criticism over Iran strikes, the Epstein files, and Silicon Valley H1-B usage in summer and fall 2025, and presenting AI as the most acute current flashpoint.
Two strands of AI-skepticism
Per Peyton Hornberger of the Alliance for Secure AI, AI-skeptic concerns cluster into "two big buckets": acute harms — children's online safety, exploitative chatbots, and mental-health crises being worsened by AI tools rather than addressed by humans or families — and existential or long-term risks.
Woolf reports that the acute-harms strand was galvanized by the Raine v. OpenAI case, after the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine testified before Congress in September 2025, and describes this strand as the political vector through which AI-skepticism became a populist-conservative cause. See Raine v. OpenAI, Inc..
Religious and theological strand
The article documents religiously framed objections to AI on the conservative side of the coalition. An evangelical pastors' letter to the White House in May 2025, hosted at christianailetter.org, called for caution: "we want to see the AI revolution accelerating responsibly... pay attention especially not only to what AI CAN do but also what it SHOULD do." Joe Allen, a contributor to Bannon's War Room and author of Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity, characterized AI as "among the most blasphemous endeavors that one could embark upon... the intention of creating this image, first of the human mind, and then to create something greater than the human mind, something that's a de facto God." Brendan Steinhauser, CEO of the Alliance for Secure AI, said the religious AI-skepticism rests on "this idea that we were created by God and in his image, we have a special place on Earth, and that we are not to be superseded by anything else."
Woolf connects this American evangelical strand to Pope Leo XIV's May 2025 inaugural-address framing of AI as a Catholic-social-teaching priority, while noting that Leo XIV speaks from a Catholic rather than an American evangelical tradition. See Religious and Civil-Society Voices on AI.
Industry counter-move: two $200M super PACs
Woolf reports that on August 26, 2025 — the same day the Raine suit against OpenAI was filed — a group of tech companies and figures including Meta, Andreessen Horowitz, Perplexity AI, and OpenAI founder Greg Brockman pledged $200 million to two new super PACs intended to target AI-skeptic politicians in the 2026 midterm elections. In Woolf's words: "On August 26th, the same day as the Raines' gut-wrenching suit against OpenAI was filed, a group of tech companies and figures including Meta, Andreessen Horowitz, Perplexity AI and OpenAI founder Greg Brockman came together to pledge $200m to two new super PACs which will target AI-skeptic politicians in next year's midterm elections."
The article supplies a funder list and the August 26, 2025 founding date for the Leading the Future super PAC, coincident with the Raine complaint filing, and frames the pledge as a coordinated industry response to AI-safety legislation.
Roger McNamee's critique
Activist investor Roger McNamee is quoted on what he frames as the deeper cultural logic behind the dispute: "The thing the Reagan Revolution brought to the United States was this notion that capital deserved a lot of advantages in our economy... that corporations deserve to have all the benefits of humanity without any of the responsibilities. And if you do that for long enough, eventually you get where we are now." On existential risk, McNamee argued: "The only way you get to existential risk is by un-employing all the people, finding no work for them, and then having a revolution in which gazillions of people die." McNamee's position — that p-doom rhetoric functions as fundraising rather than analysis — is presented as a counter-position to AI existential-risk discourse.
Relation to other wiki pages
The moratorium and America's AI Action Plan share a preemption posture, and the moratorium's defeat illustrates the political ceiling on preemption. Trump's December 2025 federal preemption executive order, Executive Order 14365 — Ensuring a National Policy Framework for AI, continued the preemption project through the executive branch after the legislative version failed. For the Leading the Future (super PAC) super PAC, the article supplies the August 26, 2025 founding date, the funder list, and the $200M figure. The article links the Raine v. OpenAI, Inc. litigation to the populist-conservative AI-skeptic coalition, and adds the American evangelical strand to existing Catholic and Vatican coverage anchored by Pope Leo XIV under Religious and Civil-Society Voices on AI.
The article introduces several figures for which it serves as an AI-policy-position citation: Joe Allen (planned), Peyton Hornberger (planned), Brendan Steinhauser (planned), Jeff Grenell (planned), Angela Paxton (planned), Roger Mcnamee (planned), Marjorie Taylor Greene (planned), Steve Bannon (planned), Sen. Josh Hawley (planned), and Sarah Huckabee Sanders (planned). Sen. Josh Hawley is an existing entity; the article anchors Hawley's posture against the moratorium.
Provenance and confidence
The source is long-form journalism from Transformer (Substack), treated as Woolf's reporting with named sources. The technofuturist-versus-nationalist-populist cleavage is Woolf's own framing rather than an established fact. The $200M super-PAC figure should be verified against direct super-PAC FEC filings before high-confidence citation. Confidence is rated medium.
Relationships
- supports: Leading the Future (super PAC) (founding date + funder list), Religious and Civil-Society Voices on AI (American evangelical strand), Raine v. OpenAI, Inc. (political mobilization context)
- contradicts: America's AI Action Plan (preemption posture); industry framing of AI safety as a non-political technical question
- related: Executive Order 14365 — Ensuring a National Policy Framework for AI, AI Industry Lobbying — The 2025-2026 Political Offensive, Sen. Josh Hawley, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Pope Leo XIV, AI Political Cleavages
- instance-of: AI Industry Discourse Analysis