AI Machines Are Learning—and They’re Learning to Be Fascists

by | May 13, 2025 | Opinions & Commentary

Image: The Hartmann Report

AI Machines Are Learning—and They’re Learning to Be Fascists

by | May 13, 2025 | Opinions & Commentary

Image: The Hartmann Report

AI is not just another tech revolution. It’s the perfect storm of surveillance, manipulation, and digital obedience—and the far right already has a head start.

Republished with permission from Thom Hartmann

Pope Leo XIV just labeled AI one of the main threats facing humanity, saying it poses challenges to “human dignity, justice and labor.” He’s right, but it’s even worse than that: it represents, unless it’s rigorously regulated, a threat to democracy itself.

In every generation, the enemies of democracy change costumes, but their playbook remains eerily familiar. They lie, divide, intimidate, and exploit every available tool to consolidate power. In the 1930s it was radio, in the 2010s it was social media, and now, in 2025, the newest and most dangerous weapon in the authoritarian arsenal is artificial intelligence.

Make no mistake: AI is not just another technology. It is power, scaled. And in the hands of the far right, it becomes the most effective tool for dismantling democracy ever invented.

Authoritarians—whether MAGA-aligned in the United States or part of the global movement that includes Putin, Orbán, Modi, Netanyahu, and others—are not blind to the potential of AI. They understand it instinctively: its ability to simulate, to deceive, to surveil, and to dominate. While progressives and democratic institutions have scrambled to comprehend its implications, the authoritarians have already started weaponizing it with devastating efficiency.

Let’s look at the mechanisms.

AI can now generate millions of personalized political messages in seconds, each calibrated to manipulate a voter’s specific fears or biases. It can create entire fake news outlets, populate them with AI-generated journalists, and flood your social feed with content that looks real, sounds real, and feels familiar, all without a single human behind it. Imagine the power of Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine, but with superintelligence behind the wheel and zero friction. That’s where we’re heading.

And that’s just the beginning.

Authoritarian regimes can—and already are—using AI to surveil and intimidate their citizens. What China has perfected with facial recognition and loyalty scoring, MAGA-aligned figures in the U.S. are watching closely, eager to adopt and adapt. Right-wing sheriffs and local governments could soon use AI to track protestors, compile digital dossiers, and “predict” criminal behavior in communities deemed politically undesirable.

If the government knows not just where you are, but what you’re thinking, organizing, or reading—and it can fabricate “evidence” to match—freedom of thought becomes a quaint memory.

This isn’t theoretical. In 2024, we saw AI-generated robocalls impersonating Joe Biden telling voters to stay home (and millions did). In the next cycle, we may see entire election campaigns waged by AI bots masquerading as voters, influencers, and even public officials.

Trump, during the 2024 election campaign, reposted a fake AI image of Taylor Swift endorsing him, over her objection; many believed she’d become a Trump supporter. As the Carnegie Endowment for Peace noted:

“Meanwhile, deepfake audio clips of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Slovakia’s opposition head, Michal Šimečka, ignited social media controversies when they spread rapidly before fact-checkers exposed them as fabrications. The destructive power of deepfakes also hit home in Türkiye when a presidential candidate withdrew from the May 2023 election after explicit AI-generated videos went viral. In Argentina’s October 2023 presidential election, both leading candidates deployed deepfakes by creating campaign posters and materials that mocked their opponents—tactics that escalated into full-blown AI memetic warfare to sway voters.”

The goal often isn’t just to win; it’s to delegitimize the democratic process itself. Because once trust is broken—once people believe that “both sides lie” or that “you can’t believe anything anymore”—then strongmen step into the void with promises of order, purity, and salvation.

And when they do, AI will be there to enforce it.

Imagine a future where police departments outsource their decision-making to “neutral” algorithms, algorithms coded with the biases of their creators like Musk is doing by training Grok on Xitter. Where AI-driven systems deny permits, benefits, or even due process based on behavioral profiles. Where loyalty to the regime is rewarded with access, and dissent is flagged by invisible systems you can’t appeal.

That’s not democracy. That’s techno-feudalism, wrapped in a red-white-and-blue flag.

It’s already happening in Bangladesh, Colombia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, the Philippines, and Thailand, according to the Carnegie Endowment. They add:

“In the EU’s Eastern neighborhood, countries like Georgia, Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine face a deluge of hybrid threats and AI-generated disinformation campaigns aimed at destabilizing societies, disrupting electoral processes, and derailing people’s democratic aspirations.”

If we allow the far right to continue merging political power with AI without guardrails, we will see the rise of a system where freedom is algorithmically rationed.

Elections will still happen, but outcomes will be massaged. Dissent will still exist, but only in controlled pockets, easy to monitor and suppress. History books will be written, edited, and distributed by code optimized for obedience. The “news” will be whatever the regime’s AI decides you should see.

This is not science fiction. It is the logical endpoint of unregulated, authoritarian-aligned artificial intelligence.

So what do we do?

We must treat AI regulation as a democratic survival issue. That means:

  • Banning the use of deepfakes in political ads.
  • Enforcing transparency on algorithmic decision-making.
  • Creating unbiased public, open-source alternatives to corporate-controlled models.
  • Creating disinformation infrastructure as we would biological or nuclear weapons that are not just dangerous, but potentially civilization-ending.
  • Demanding that social media outlets publish their algorithms so we can see how we’re being manipulated.

And we must do it now.

Because history teaches us that once authoritarianism takes root, it rarely gives up power voluntarily. The longer we wait, the more embedded, autonomous, and intelligent these systems become. We’re not just fighting bad actors anymore: we’re fighting machines trained to think like them.

The battle for democracy in the age of AI will not be won with slogans or optimism alone. It will take law, oversight, courage—and above all, vigilance. As always, democracy is not a spectator sport. If we want to preserve the sacred right of self-governance, we must recognize the existential threat in front of us and act with urgency.

This time, the fight isn’t just against the usual suspects.

This time, the algorithm is watching.

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann, one of America’s leading public intellectuals and the country’s #1 progressive talk show host, writes fresh content six days a week. The Monday-Friday “Daily Take” articles are free to all, while paid subscribers receive a Saturday summary of the week’s news and, on Sunday, a chapter excerpt from one of his books.

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