The Trump administration’s close alliance with Big Tech (loosely called the tech right and understood here to refer to the largest corporations of surveillance capitalism headquartered in Silicon Valley) has become one of the defining elements of Trump’s second presidency. In a practical sense, this has manifested as close relationships with ideologically-driven entrepreneurs belonging to or closely aligned with Big Tech who champion an explicitly reactionary, if not fascist, agenda, exemplified by figures like Peter Thiel. Since January 2025, the development and global promotion of American AI has been elevated to a central pillar of this administration (inter)national strategy. The White House’s AI Action Plan, signed in July 2025, identified over ninety federal policy actions to promote AI innovation; a December 2025 executive order sought to override state-level AI regulations in the name of competitive necessity; and the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) made unambiguous the administration’s view that American technological supremacy–particularly in AI, biotech, and quantum computing–constitutes one of the country’s “core, vital national interests.” As the NSS states directly, the United States wants “to ensure that U.S. technology and U.S. standards–particularly in AI, biotech, and quantum computing–drive the world forward.”
For many observers, this alliance appears to contradict the ideological commitments of what is broadly called the “New Right” or the “illiberal right”—the intellectual coalition that has supplied and legitimized MAGA since 2016. This “thought collective,” associated with figures such as Patrick Deneen, Yoram Hazony, R.R. Reno, Michael Anton, and J.D. Vance himself, has consistently positioned itself against the libertarian establishment of the Republican Party, denouncing what it sees as the capture of conservative politics by finance capital, tech oligarchs, and a rootless cosmopolitan elite. How, then, can the same movement that elevated economic nationalism, family policy, and Christian community as its guiding stars be so thoroughly aligned with the very “broligarchs” and AI accelerationists it once seemed to condemn?
I argue that the apparent paradox dissolves once we subject the New Right’s actual positions on technology to careful scrutiny. Beneath their (superficial) populist rhetoric with anti-libertarian accents lies a more complicated and more revealing ideological stance towards technological progress and digital capitalism. The dominant position within the New Right’s intellectual networks is not opposition to Silicon Valley and American AI companies but a conditional, strategic embrace of them—one that frames AI development as a national and civilizational necessity, accommodates the power of tech elites as long as they serve the “common good”, and ultimately draws more from Schmittian philosophical framework than from the pre-modern traditions it publicly invokes.
The dominant position within the New Right’s intellectual networks is not opposition to Silicon Valley and American AI companies but a conditional, strategic embrace of them.
This paper thus investigates the positions of the different factions of the New Right on AI and the digital capitalism environment in order to determine whether a genuine conflict exists between their technological agenda and that of the Tech-Right. An analysis of the debates conducted in the principal journals of the New Right, as well as of the public statements made by its most influential intellectual figures, offers a particularly illuminating overview, as illustrated by the position of JD Vance, who, while sharply criticizing free-market ideology and the collusion between political and economic elites, nevertheless stands among the most vocal proponents of technological development and AI deregulation.
AI as the demonic product of an oligarchic and immoral Silicon Valley
When searching for the position one might expect from an anti-libertarian figure on the traditionalist right, the figure who comes closest to delivering it is Rod Dreher. A prominent conservative author and convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, Dreher has developed one of the most consistent and theologically serious critiques of AI to emerge from the New Right ecosystem. In his 2024 book Living in Wonder and his prolific Substack presence, Dreher articulates what can be described as a theological critique of artificial intelligence. AI chatbots, he argues, risk functioning as “a kind of high-tech Ouija board that ‘higher intelligences’ use to communicate with us” in which a disembodied artificial intelligence serves as a portal for malevolent non-human forces.
This critique is more than merely theoretical. For Dreher, AI is the technological expression of a transhumanist ideology that is itself a species of apostasy—the latest iteration of humanity’s “Promethean” refusal to accept creaturely limits. Crucially, Dreher draws here on the work of Jacques Ellul, the French anarcho-Christian philosopher of technique, whose thesis that technology is never neutral but always carries ideological freight is absent from the New Right’s intellectual repertoire. Where Ellul sees technique as a system driven by the pursuit of efficiency and power at the expense of human flourishing—while rejecting Heidegger’s defense of premodern technology—Dreher applies this lens specifically to AI, insisting that the neutrality of the technology is a myth and that its development serves the transhumanist vision of Silicon Valley elites.
For Dreher, AI is the technological expression of a transhumanist ideology that is itself a species of apostasy—the latest iteration of humanity’s “Promethean” refusal to accept creaturely limits.
The paradox is that Dreher remains a vocal supporter of JD Vance and a close associate of Peter Thiel—precisely the figures most responsible for promoting and deregulating the technologies he denounces. This tension is instructive because it reveals the degree to which even the most philosophically coherent AI skeptic within the New Right lacks the structural position or political will to translate critique into opposition.
It is, however, Steve Bannon who has articulated the most politically consistent critique of AI within the New Right. Like Dreher, Bannon regards AI as a threat to human civilization and to Christian values but he grounds this critique in a populist rhetoric against digital capitalism. For Bannon, AI is the embodiment of a form of “crony capitalism” characteristic of Silicon Valley and, above all, a weapon in the hands of the “broligarchs” of the Big Tech, whose interests and values are fundamentally incompatible with those of working-class Americans—because they are “fake conservatives”. This assessment leads him to advocate for (opportunistic) convergence with the political left around the necessity of regulating AI and Silicon Valley—a position that made him one of the principal opponents of the provision in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that would have imposed a ten-year moratorium on state-level AI regulation. Bannon’s critique of AI as an artefact of a Silicon Valley hostile to Trumpism resonates within the intellectual ecosystem of the New Right, yet it remains, paradoxically, a minority position. Nevertheless, like Dreher, Bannon’s AI critique signals growing, if guarded, distance from the Trump II administration without descending into open opposition—a tension that illuminates broader fractures now emerging within the New Right’s intellectual coalition.
Technology as a Double-Edged Sword: Conditional Techno-Optimism in the New Right Mainstream
Despite their suspicions towards the technology and the prospect of artificial general intelligence (AGI), the large-scale adoption of AI by the Trump administration, is still far from posing a problem for the most important figures of the New Right.
Contrary to what one might expect and despite their suspicions towards the technology and the prospect of artificial general intelligence (AGI), the large-scale adoption of AI by the Trump administration, is still far from posing a problem for the most important figures of the New Right. This is the case even among those on the American right who have most vociferously denounced the influence of libertarianism. This circumspection has moreover not prevented a significant diffusion of AI-assisted religious practices, particularly among evangelical communities, which further complicates any simple account of the New Right as technologically reactionary.
The most authoritative statement of where the New Right’s intellectual mainstream actually stands on new technologies came in January 2025, with a manifesto published in First Things—the flagship journal of Catholic and Christian conservatism—under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation-affiliated think tank, the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Signed by major figure of the New Right intellectual coalition—Patrick Deneen, Yoram Hazony, Oren Cass, R.R. Reno, C.C. Pecknold, and Kevin Roberts among them—the document represents a kind of consensus position, and its contents are considerably more techno-optimistic than the anti-libertarian branding of its signatories might suggest.
The manifesto’s operative assumption is that AI and technology are neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad but are tools whose development must be oriented toward the right ends. Rather than demanding that AI development be halted or radically constrained, the document calls for “smart technologies” that increase productivity, support home-based work, and elevate the “human spirit”:
“Technology is meant to empower the human person. We have seen, however, that if left ungoverned, technological advancement too easily comes to hinder human flourishing and threatens the human person and the family. Many of the most important political questions of our day have been prompted by the moral implications of new technologies: Should human life be artificially created or destroyed? Can people change genders? Should digital obscenity be accessible to all ages in the name of free speech? Should jobs that sustain families be automated? We must discern prudent ways to govern technology in order to keep the human person, human dignity, and the common good as the central goals of our politics. We must ensure that new technologies serve human life and the human family, not the other way around.”
Underlying the manifesto, then, is a rejection of transhumanist ideology and Randian libertarianism—or the TESCREAL bundle—widely considered endemic to Silicon Valley. This rejection manifests in explicit calls for prohibiting AI sexual companions and sex robots, coupled with the assertion that the “market” cannot be trusted to produce technologies beneficial to family and community without political direction. The document calls for the regulation and orientation of technological progress and for the abandonment of the idea that the “market” will naturally produce technologies beneficial to the family—a genuine rupture with the positions of tech-right ideologues such as Peter Thiel, who has suggested that the Antichrist will precisely be the figure who seeks to regulate AI and other emerging technologies. The manifesto states this with notable directness: “We must recognize that the market has failed to produce a technological order that uplifts the family. Rather, that order too often attacks it at the root.”
Yet simultaneously, the manifesto advocates for flexible working hours and seeks to “balance” automation rather than prohibit it outright—and only in sectors with “elevated marriage rates.” Far from constituting an appeal to subsistence living and localist withdrawal as conditions for the good life, the Silicon Valley and technological regulation envisioned here reveals itself as remarkably modest in its ambitions and concrete implementations. Its latent compatibility with Silicon Valley venture capitalism and the “broligarch” discourse exemplified by figures like Elon Musk is further evidenced by the manifesto’s call for “renewed manned spaceflight programs” and “tech-enabled rewilding initiatives across the American West.” In other words, grounded in the postulate that it is both possible and necessary to orient technological progress “toward the flourishing of the family and the human person,” the manifesto is relatively techno-optimistic, notwithstanding the guardrails that it seems to promise.
Indeed, what is striking, is how extensively the manifesto’s positive prescriptions mirror the language of the AI industry itself. The call for “open source” AI development—explicitly endorsed in the document—is, as scholars have noted, a standard position of major AI companies that engage heavily in what might be called “open-source washing”: invoking the language of democratic access while retaining proprietary control over the most powerful models. The emphasis on AI for productivity enhancement, remote work, and human flourishing tracks closely with the marketing language of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. The manifesto positions itself as a corrective to libertarian market fundamentalism while reproducing many of the conceptual frameworks and normative assumptions of the very industry it purports to subordinate to the common good.
Thus, the mainstream technological agenda of the New Right “thought collective” can be schematized as follows: AI is neither good nor bad in itself; it must not be allowed to become “our master”; but its development should not be stopped and, on the contrary, should be used to promote illiberal values.
Technology as Both Expression and Instrument of the American right Hegemony
Reading across the principal intellectual journals that constitute the forum of the New Right in the United States, it becomes clear that the development of AI is construed as a phenomenon of the first order—one that will produce transformations whose full extent remains difficult to measure—but that illiberals must opt to orient rather than resist it. AI is feared when it appears as the avatar of a libertarian-objectivist and transhumanist ideology, or of a progressive liberalism supposedly dominant in Silicon Valley. The New Right’s silence may be explained partly by the structural and corporate connections between New Right’s intellectual coalition and the networks of the tech right, but also, and more fundamentally, by the fact that AI development is construed as a “strategic imperative” and an expression of American technological superiority.
In the context of technological competition with the People’s Republic of China, AI development has come to be regarded as the guarantor of American “prosperity” and “security.” The White House’s July 2025 action plan, “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan”—endorsed for example in The American Mind—makes this logic explicit:
“The Trump Administration’s Action Plan sets the stage for global leadership. But it is up to the conservative movement to decide whether such leadership will be animated by prudence or consumed by profit. To safeguard the common good, conservatives must make sure that the AI revolution strengthens families, preserves meaningful work, and safeguards human creativity.”
The document itself is characterized as “a blueprint for American leadership in the defining technological endeavor of the 21st century.” Elsewhere in the same publication, the geopolitical framing is still more explicit and the civilizational stakes more starkly drawn: “In this race, anything short of dominance is defeat—for it is more than an arms race. It is a civilizational contest.” The argument proceeds by constructing a direct equivalence between American AI supremacy and the defense of values inimical to authoritarian governance which is widespread throughout the intellectual ecosystem of the New Right and can be summarized as follows: “If China dominates AI development, U.S. companies can become sidelined in global markets, and American workers could lose jobs in cutting-edge industries, not to mention watch ethical standards get shaped by regimes that prioritize state control over personal freedoms.”
AI development is thus conceived as a “race” that must be won by the United States at any cost. In other terms, geopolitical considerations perform a legitimating function on the ideological and moral plane: American AI is necessarily good, or at least better than Chinese AI. This position exemplifies the fact that the AI Action Plan is seen by as a necessary instrument for securing American hegemony.
Furthermore, this “geopolitical” imperative at the international level readily transforms into a “political” imperative at the domestic level. Faced with the fear of large language models oriented by, or complicit with, the progressive assumptions supposedly dominant in Silicon Valley, there arises a perceived necessity to develop “unbiased” conservative AI—a project already illustrated by Elon Musk’s Grok—even as the removal of “progressive guardrails” limiting AI-generated content has produced outputs that include pornographic and extremist material. The same logic that frames American AI as necessarily superior to Chinese AI is thus reproduced at the domestic level: conservative AI is, by definition, preferable to progressive AI, and the imperative to contest cultural hegemony licenses the embrace of the very technologies that the movement’s more theologically serious members find deeply troubling.
This accommodation is rendered all the more structurally easy by the fact that, despite the existence of critical and circumspect discourses toward AI in the fringes of the New Right most hostile to libertarianism, the majority of illiberal intellectuals in practice subscribe to a form of neo-fusionism that incorporates a number of key libertarian propositions—among them the purging of the federal and local administration. Here, AI appears as an instrument that would allow illiberals to accomplish their objectives directly: whether for the supervision of the judiciary, its outright reconstruction, or the replacement of teachers in public education. In this register, AI is not merely tolerated as a geopolitical necessity but actively embraced as a tool for the domestic state transformation that defines the illiberal political project.
Conclusion
The overall picture that emerges from this survey is one of striking ideological incoherence at the surface and considerable coherence at the level of structural interest.
The overall picture that emerges from this survey is one of striking ideological incoherence at the surface and considerable coherence at the level of structural interest. The New Right has cultivated a self-image as a movement that has broken decisively with the libertarian and fusionist conservatism of the Reagan era—a movement that takes moral seriousness, community, family, and the common good as its touchstones against the amoral calculus of the market. Yet when confronted with the question of technology and AI in particular, the dominant response is one that its own leading thinkers might recognize as precisely the kind of compromise with libertarians and free-market capitalism that some among them have claimed to oppose.
Examining the New Right’s positioning on technology thus illuminates a perennial tension inherent to conservative and reactionary ideologies: the contradiction between their professed commitment to preserving society, tradition, and organic social forms against the destabilizing forces of progress, and their simultaneous desire to instrumentalize available power—whether political or technological—to steer society toward their envisioned trajectory. This latent incoherence, increasingly evident in contemporary illiberal thought, necessarily generates a fundamental schism within the broader conservative intellectual ecosystem. On one side stands the mainstream right, willing to pragmatically embrace technological and market mechanisms as tools for ideological consolidation; on the other, a smaller cohort of thinkers whose fidelity to their own stated commitments regarding societal preservation, tradition, and ecological integrity compels them toward a more radical posture: the rejection of power itself as corrupting to conservative principles.
Raphaël Demias-Morisset (Ph.D, Political science) is a Research Fellow at the University of Bordeaux and a Research Associate at the Illiberalism Studies Program, where he works on the Technology and illiberalism Project. His main fields of research are the history of liberal and conservative ideas, constitutional theory and the study of ideologies, and his research focuses mainly on the conceptualization of illiberalism and its relation with neoliberalism, and illiberal theories. He is currently writing a book on illiberal ideology, which will be published in France in 2025.
Image made by John Chrobak. All assets used are in the public domain.
