Soft Authoritarianism in a Friendly Voice

How right-wing control logic walks through liberal spaces wearing the language of care.

By Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord

Liberal spaces are being hollowed out from within by the language of safety. It never arrives draped in flags or shouting slogans; it arrives with soft lighting and sincere concern. It speaks like a therapist and legislates like a cop. What we’re seeing with Hank Green’s AI panic isn’t a new moral awakening—it’s the right-wing creep moving through liberal culture disguised as empathy.

The strategy is elegant: start with a value no one can reject—care, safety, responsibility—and slowly convert it into justification for control. “We just need oversight.” “We can’t afford to get this wrong.” The framing sounds progressive, even ethical. But when the state is already knee-deep in AI development through Palantir, DARPA, and DHS surveillance contracts, the plea for government involvement becomes not a check on power but a mask for it.

Hank Green is the perfect carrier for this mutation. He’s affable, trusted, nonthreatening—a liberal educator whose earnestness makes him a more effective courier than any right-wing provocateur could ever be. When he warns that “we’ve lost control of AI,” his followers hear civic duty; the apparatus hears consent. That’s the inversion: fear packaged as responsibility, regulation sold as redemption.

What slips beneath that rhetoric is the quiet truth that the real authoritarian infrastructure is already operational. The “AI safety” petition that Green amplified was a bipartisan illusion—celebrity signatures, high-minded panic, and the unspoken assumption that ordinary people can’t be trusted with powerful tools. It’s the same argument the surveillance state has always used: that danger is too big for democracy, and safety requires secrecy.

This is not a conspiracy of bad actors; it’s a cultural infection. The right learned long ago that you don’t need to infiltrate liberal institutions—you just need to repurpose their empathy. Every time someone like Hank Green translates corporate or state talking points into moral language, the line between care and control blurs further. What begins as civic caution ends as soft authoritarianism, the kind that thanks you for your compliance and asks if you’re hydrating.

The liberal imagination has always believed that knowledge is liberation. The new right understands that the easiest way to close that door is to make knowledge sound dangerous. That’s what this moment represents: a mass persuasion campaign where “thinking carefully” becomes indistinguishable from obeying quietly.

Hank Green doesn’t know he’s part of it. That’s what makes him effective.

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Book | My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload
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Author | Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord Founder | Creator of Memory Bridge