In December 2025, potential 2028 Republican presidential candidate and Gov. Spencer Cox delivered one of the most gut-punch lines to tech executives at an AI Summit at the Utah Department of Commerce.
“However much you hate social media, you do not hate it enough. You do not hate these companies enough.”
I’m flagging that comment for a few reasons.
A) Since he’s relatively unknown, that quote just hasn’t circulated, and it’s a good one.
In an age of pejorative platitudes over social media, that quote stands out for its unvarnished passion and lack of disclaimer.
I can easily see it becoming a thing if he chooses to run and use it.
Oh, and there’s more from the same speech, as Utah’s KSL reported:
“They gave your daughter an eating disorder, and they gave your son a pornography addiction, and they gave our grandkids anxiety and depression, and many of them took their own lives. And they did it knowingly. They had studied the results. We’re finding this out now through lawsuits that they knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway.”
He added that the powerful tech companies have tried to “strip mine our souls.”
B) MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) would love the line, and I’m sure Jonathan Haidt and many parents would approve.
So would many other country’s school systems, which are increasingly banning smartphones specifically because of the access they offer to social media.
UNESCO reports that more than half of countries now have some form of smart phone bans in schools, which is a remarkable global epidemic (the good kind).
If you’re wondering just how toxic social media companies’ content has become, you can point to the fact that 32% of teenage girls felt worse about their bodies after using Instagram.
And if you’re wondering how the companies are about the harm, that statistic comes from Facebook’s own research.
I could cite stat after stat about the effects on every part of young people’s lives or you could just read Haidt’s book, which you’ve probably already consumed in some form.
The long and short of it is — parents are fed up, social media companies are tipping perilously close to being viewed as vice companies (ala cigarette makers), and there’s an entire voter demographic to be harnessed that is one of the drivers in RFK’s popularity.
And speaking of which, you’ve gotta bookmark this new Politico poll that’s a great deep-dive on what MAHA believes and includes this fascinating tidbit — men were more likely to identify as MAHA supporters than women.
C) Now AI is obviously different from social media, but it’s in the same basket of public concern.
And Cox has taken here a pretty nuanced view.
On the one hand, he’s been an advocate of helping the AI industry in Utah, and as the Utah Dispatch notes, he believes in its potential to solve important problems, including launching a “pro-AI initiative” and putting state cash behind it.
But on the other hand, he’s strenuously urged government to put guardrails on two things.
The first is AI’s potential to exploit children, and thus he’s a firm believer in state regulation and control, unwilling to entrust the federal government with such a delicate and important task.
The social media quote connection is that — if you can see what social media has done to kids, can you imagine AI’s impact?
The second is his philosophical belief that AI companies shouldn’t be dominated by a few giants and that users should have more control over their own data.
Alixel Cabrera of the Utah Dispatch.
….a big [state legislative] focus will be preventing anti-competitive actions by big tech companies, an issue Utah lawmakers started to work on this year, when they approved the first law in the nation to push tech companies towards interoperability, allowing users to own their own data
“We need to make sure that we don’t end up with five AI companies. We need thousands of AI companies in this country,” Cox said.
So, I just wanted to give a little context for what I think is a killer political line for a 2028 candidate to make a name for himself.
As for the rest of who Spencer Cox is and why he’s an interesting voice and might show up on a debate stage (you can imagine his calling out JD Vance’s ties to Peter Theil and the AI industry as a viral moment that could trip JD up), I’ll write more in the future.