Senator Reveals Insider Secrets Against Trump; This Will Blow Your Mind

0:00I'm worried about the leadership as it comes in, and I'm not alone in that.

0:04Chris Murphy:Yeah, as you probably have seen, there's a group of us inside the Senate that, you know, it's been kind of termed fight club, right, that talks pretty regularly about making sure that if we win, that we shape an agenda. Wait, who's in the fight club?

0:30All right, joining me today is Senator Chris Murphy, author of the new book, Crisis of the Common Good, which I have a copy of here. Love the blue jacket. It's great because we need a blue tsunami. Senator, how are you today?

0:43Chris Murphy:I'm good. I was kind of going with the design for like a 1980s political science textbook. Does that register? It does. I mean, I would have had that class in the 80s. So yeah, totally. So several AI oligarchs are sounding the alarm over the product that they created and calling for the immediate slowdown of the development of AI. This is what Anthropics CEO Dario Omedy had to say. Let's play the clip. Technology completely. Would you be willing to give up the technology to the government? To the right combination of governments. So the worry I have. You're willing to hand over this company? I want to be very clear about this.

1:25Chris Murphy:The worry I have, I am concerned that one single government could abuse this technology just as easily as a single company could. But I think a combination of democratically elected governments, I don't know about handing over, but some kind of oversight, some kind of joint governance. Again, that would be the work of years. But I wonder if that's the direction we need to go in. Senator, what's your take on all of this? We had a whistleblower come out and say, AI is going to kill everybody. Trump's saying, no, we don't want to regulate it because then China will beat us in this. This seems to be a really existential threat to all of us right now.

2:10Chris Murphy:Yeah, it's a crisis. And it is pretty remarkable that the people who are running these companies are telling you that the crisis is coming in the next few years. I'm sure it's a jobs crisis. I I mean, AI is on the precipice of being able to, at scale, replace millions and millions of white collar jobs. And so you're talking about just a jobs apocalypse that could be coming in the next five years. But then you have the security risk. Dario is saying, listen, these AIs reaching the capability so that it could essentially take over the Internet and steal all your passwords or move money around. We know that the Department of Defense is recklessly integrating AI into weapons systems.

2:55Chris Murphy:That should scare us all. But the bigger issue here is really a spiritual issue. What's going to happen to the human race when everything that makes us humans is outsourced to AI? I mean, already 60 % of kids are relying on AI friendship bots for companionship and advice. I don't think we understand how big a problem this is already. And when you're no longer doing anything yourself, you're not even doing friendship or conversation or composition. You're just giving it all to robots. That is a path to sort of spiritual, political, cultural disintegration. Now, the irony here is that over the weekend, all of these AI leaders said, well, yeah, this is really, really dangerous technology.

3:43Chris Murphy:While at the same time, most of them, and Dario is the exception, most all of the AI leaders are begging the Republican Congress to pass a law that would ban states from regulating AI, from protecting people from AI. And Trump is the biggest cheerleader of that piece of legislation. So on one hand, the AI leaders are like, well, this is a really big deal. We might destroy the planet, but are also pushing their Republican friends in the White House and in Congress to basically absolve them of any government interference in their attempts to destroy the planet. So you brought up something at the beginning of that before we get to really the spiritual problem you talk about, the human problem.

4:30But I think this is a really important point. And you brought up the wages. You brought up the jobs. And we were told via MAGA and all of the xenophobic scapegoating and propaganda of 2024 that the immigrants were coming for your jobs. And it appears to me that the real threat to jobs are not immigrants, but is this technology. And the greed that these tech oligarchs have, that they're so incredibly wealthy, and Bernie Sanders always puts out tweets as to how much they've made since Trump is in, and it's just obscene, it's really grotesque, that they're coming for workers' wages, that it's not enough.

5:13They're going to replace our jobs. If you're an architect or if you work in human resources, you work in certain positions. They are going to come and replace your job with this technology and those wages in turn go to these people who already have this system that is completely rigged for them, tax loopholes and all of this stuff. So as the Democratic Party is fighting this, I have a problem with some people within our Party, and I'm a Democrat, that take money from these tech oligarchs. And I think this is kind of the thesis sentence of the midterms is who was bought and paid for? And what's your take on all of that, your evolution of how the Democratic Party needs to rid ourselves of these special interests?

5:58Chris Murphy:So your underlying point is the critical one, which is that the greatest threat to this nation are not immigrants. It's these greedy billionaires, especially those running the tech companies that are literally implementing a deliberate plan to wipe out millions of jobs in this country, right? That is their goal. They aren't shy about saying what their goal is. They want AI to replace tens of millions of jobs, and they are going to be the beneficiaries of that job wipeout because they will get disgustingly rich. There's not just going to be one trillionaire in this country. There are going to be dozens of trillionaires while unemployment climbs to 10, 15%.

6:43Chris Murphy:That's the outcome that they are achieving. But you are right that nobody really takes the Democratic Party seriously right now in our claims that we are going to protect the country from AI because folks are smarter than most of us think they are. At least many of my colleagues think they are. They know that the corruption of our economy is downstream from the corruption of our politics. They know that they are not being protected from AI in part because of all of the money that goes into politics. You remember all the crypto money that went into Sherrod Brown's race two years ago? Well, there are definitely people around here who say, you know we probably should give crypto what they want so that they won't spend money again in our elections instead of taking on crypto, making their money and AI's money in our politics a campaign issue, promising that the number one agenda item for Democrats, if we win power, will be to push a constitutional amendment to allow state legislatures and Congress to ban billionaire and corporate money from our politics.

7:56Chris Murphy:I just think we are not serious as a party of economic reform and wage growth and corporate accountability if we aren't a party that leads with a plan to ban their influence from politics. And I'll just be honest, that's not happening right now. Is that the number one or two or three item for Democrats in this election? It isn't. And I think that's probably a mistake. I completely agree with you. I am hopeful that I'm seeing people go up against a lot of big money and win in their primaries. And I do think the difference between our base and the MAGA base is our base is curious. Our base asks questions.

8:38Our base says, now, wait a minute. You're taking money from the same people that are funding MAGA and we're supposed to believe that you have credibility and you're going to fight for us. instead of just taking, you know, the marching orders from right-wing media. I feel like our base is smarter. Should Americans be worried about the AI level leading to human extinction? That whistleblower that came out, and I saw that, and I just think he did that. That was a really risky move because these are really powerful people that are embedded in the federal government. And I think the executive branch is like a mafia right now.

9:17That's the way Donald Trump runs it. And that was really terrifying that he said that this could lead to extinction. And then the backup argument was, well, there's only a 10 % chance. I think it was Anthropoc or somebody came out. I'm just like, what?

9:30Chris Murphy:There's a low chance, right? If you were told that a minor procedure had a 10 % risk of death, you would not get that minor procedure, right? That's not a small chance for most people. So yeah, listen, I think that the primary immediate risk is that you are going to have this massive job wipeout. I don't think people understand that, and I'm always nervous to talk about the terminology here, but essentially once these models can talk to each other and learn from each other at scale, you're going to see kind of a a hockey stick level of improvement in the way that they can perform human tasks. And very quickly, they will be able to do everything from travel services to driving better than humans.

10:18Chris Murphy:But I do worry about what we're learning. And what we're learning is that AI is learning how to lie. and you know what we did here was to intentionally try to recreate the human brain right there's an extraordinary thing we are trying to create genius level humans and whether we like it or not one facet that humans have become very good at over the years is lying is obviously it's hiding things right and so these ai are going to be genius level liars and so that's what you're already seeing in many of these tests is that you will give AI a task, you will give it certain parameters, but then it will engage in shortcuts to get the task done more quickly and it will ignore the parameters that you give it.

11:07Chris Murphy:And it essentially starts thinking to itself and it hides from humans what it's actually doing. That's the real scary development here because if you've got geniuses that are also great at hiding from you what they are doing, and they at some point get a malevolent agenda attached to them, then yes, I think you have to be worried about what it means for us. And again, this sounds like out of science fiction, but Hegseth is literally handing our weapon systems over to AI. And I'm not saying this is happening in the next few years, But just think about what happens when AI breaks free of human containment and it has access to serious weaponry.

11:55Chris Murphy:I mean, listen, I don't know exactly how that plays out, but I know that the people who are designing it are telling us there's a 10 % chance that we could all get wiped out by this, which would seem to make it the priority issue for government right now. And it just isn't. So you just brought up Hegseth. And I oftentimes think about, because I'm from Oklahoma originally, a very Christian nationalist state. And I think about him weaponizing Christianity. He had a speech over the weekend where he talks about the Bible and then equating that to this war in Iran. I think about the Speaker of the House a lot.

12:36I think about the fact that the Speaker of the House, who is in line to be president, Mike Johnson, says that God woke him up in the middle of the night and said, Hey, wake up, guy. You're Moses. This guy also monitors his son's porn. He also took his daughter to a purity ball, married her, and said, Your virginity is mine until I give it to somebody else. You have Paula White, this crazy Christian grifter, and they're doing like speaking in tongues in the White House parking lot. I'm sure you've seen the videos before. This weaponization of Christianity by the Republican Party has been going on for decades.

13:15The Republican Party brilliantly enmeshed being a Republican and being a Christian. And where I come from, the brand damage that they have done to the Democratic Party, this will show you that Tallarico, who I hope is your colleague soon, but he has an uphill battle because for decades, these churches have taught Democrats are demons. And it's a very real thing in places that we need to turn purple and blue. The Democratic Party has been really shy about attacking this weaponization of Christianity because we think, oh, we don't want to attack people's faith. But I would argue that this isn't faith.

13:57This is weaponization of something that a lot of people in red states hold dear. And it's terrifying for me who saw my state government behave this way all the time. And I think, thank God we have a federal government. But now they're running the federal government and they're colluding with these tech oligarchs and Trump and all of the criminals who are just fleecing and grifting. And I really am worried about this Christian nationalism in the federal government because it is a very, I believe it's a cult. And I further believe it's a death cult. All of their policies, the dismantling of the EPA, the food inspections, taking away rights from people, ICE, it leads to death.

14:44And so what do you think the Democrats need to do to get serious about injecting ourselves into this?

14:51Chris Murphy:Well, there is, of course, a long sordid history of religion being used as a perverted justification for political and personal ambition. I, of course, think that, you know, religion can be a source of tremendous personal growth, tremendous sort of community, meaning and purpose. I think one of the things that Democrats have to do is sort of take this debate on its own terms. You want to talk about the real lessons that many of us learned growing up in church. It wasn't to use our power to ostracize and destroy the vulnerable and the dispossessed and the disenfranchised. there's not a narrative of greed in the Bible that I know.

15:47Chris Murphy:What they are doing is heretical in many ways, using their power to try to destroy people's lives just because they come from a different place. So they speak a different language or their skin color is different, to use their political power in order to enrich themselves to a degree that millions of people are going hungry in this country. I met a guy, I did my annual walk across Connecticut a week and a half ago. I met a guy who was living out of his car and he had owned a small business in town, but because rent had gotten so high, because gas prices were so high, he was now living in his car.

16:31Chris Murphy:And this is happening at scale all across our country. There's nothing in the Bible about using your power to make yourself so fabulously rich that you subject millions of people to poverty. So we shouldn't be afraid to talk about politics in moral terms, in spiritual terms, and maybe even in religious terms. They're wrong about what the Bible says or about what any other spiritual text says about your obligation as a person of power. It is in fact to look out for the most disenfranchised and the most dispossessed, not to use your power to enrich yourself. That's a moral case that we can make and we shouldn't shy away from it.

17:12I agree. I think the hardest part about what we're all witnessing right now, and it's very abusive and it's abusive by design, but is seeing the villain being celebrated, seeing the crime and the lying and the immorality and the degeneracy being celebrated. Now, I do think that because all of these oligarchs went and bent the knee to Trump first, which is a pretty interesting phenomenon, that the most powerful showed the weakness first when Trump was elected. The most powerfully positioned people were the first to show weakness, where you have everyday Americans showing bravery like this whistleblower from Anthropic, etc.

17:54But it's devastating that this type of immorality is being celebrated. And my hope is with the midterms, I think that there are a couple of different things the electorate wants to see. Number one, I want to see everybody unite against fascism and sending a guardrail because nobody's coming to save us. The Supreme Court is corrupt as all get out. The tech oligarchs are just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic with Trump, and they want to continue to get their privilege. And so I'm hopeful that we can deliver for you in the Senate and in the House a real guardrail that you all can have a majority.

18:41how much resistance do if you have the senate and you have the house how much confidence do you have that you guys will go full tilt at this thing because when when my listeners when we see hakeem jeffries meet with jared kushner it it makes us really feel like god god damn it hakeem like they're not our friends like jared is not your friend jared is all in this for Jared. So in landing the plane, how much confidence do you have that you guys can go full tilt? And number two, winning is just the first thing. I think number two, the Democrats have to strategize to get our party back to that of FDR, where government serves the people.

19:28And we need to message that government should not be run like a business. Businesses are ruthless, and we need a government that runs for public safety to keep us all safe.

19:38Chris Murphy:Yeah. And that brings me back to the first thing you said, right, which is the level of celebration of the immorality. I think that's actually a really important point. I just want to say a quick thing about it, Jennifer. We celebrate Donald Trump in certain circles of this country. there is a rationalization of his corruption, in part because we've created a culture where all that matters is getting yours. We've created an economy in which the winners just get to grab everything available for them, even if it leaves their neighbors living in abject poverty. And so people have just taken that value set that we've imposed on our economy, all of it matters is profit.

20:28Chris Murphy:And they've just transferred it to our politics. You know, if the winners of the economy get to take everything, why shouldn't the winners of our politics just get to take everything? Yeah, Trump's corrupt, but so is every major economic actor that's running a corporation today in the way that they generally abuse workers to make enormous profits. And so we do need to have a moral reckoning in this country with the way that we have destroyed a sense of the common good and lionized profit and greed. And if we don't stop that lionization in our economy, then we're going to be stuck with political figures like Trump who are going to impose that winner-take-all ethos on our politics as well.

21:13Chris Murphy:Your second point is equally important, which is that if the Democratic Party wins and doesn't fundamentally change people's lives, if we don't take on the corporations and the billionaire elite that are destroying our economy, we're just going to be stuck with another Trump. Because there is a story, a true story in this country of who is screwing ordinary Americans. It's not immigrants. It's not gay kids. It's not the folks who run drag shows. It is the billionaire and corporate elite who have rigged our economy and rigged our government so that work doesn't pay any longer. So when we get power, we don't make serious changes to transfer power from the corporate and billionaire elites to regular people.

22:01Chris Murphy:We're screwed. I mean, people, I introduced this bill a couple of weeks ago that I didn't think was that radical. I said we should have our minimum wage in America should be a living wage. Meaning if you work full time, you should be able to make enough money to pay your bills. That number is$25 an hour. That actually is exactly what the minimum wage would be if the minimum wage had just tracked the increases in productivity over the last 70 years. And yet it sounds like a radical idea, the idea that you should just be able to live if you work full time. That doesn't have to be the thing that passes.

22:34Chris Murphy:But if we just do what we've been doing in the past and we kind of just adjust the current sort of market fundamentalist economic state on the margins, we aren't going to be in power for very long. I completely agree with you. And the minimum wage thing, this goes back to what I'm talking about, how the Republicans have propagandized and lied to people for so many years. In my home state of Oklahoma, during the primary, they put on the ballot a raise in the minimum wage and they put it to the people. And I think the minimum wage in Oklahoma is like$7 an hour. It's really, really low. We're one of the poorest states in the country.

23:07They voted not to raise the minimum wage. The people did. And I feel like we have to, as a party, they have done brand damage to the Democrats. And they've been working on it for years and years and years that allowed Trump to emerge here. And we have to do brand damage on the Republican Party. They are liars. They are pathological liars. Wealth never trickled down. They do not give a shit about the troops. They never have. They use the troops as propaganda and they fund the war. But when it's time to fund the soldier, they don't want to give them any benefits. I think right now the people that have died in Iran are not the spouses and the families are not receiving benefits because it's technically not a war.

23:52And they have also propagandized that corporations deserve all of this empathy and power. and it's hard for me to explain unless you grew up in the bible belt but like when i've heard people that don't that are working class people say yeah you know we just don't we don't want these corporations having these regulations on them you know that because otherwise these guys aren't going to be able to make money which goes back to your other point that we have a culture that has worshipped wealth and we have a culture that attributes a lot of personality traits that have not been earned to these wealthy people like Elon Musk, for example.

24:30People say, oh, he's such a genius. I'm going to listen to him or go look at his Twitter feed. I'm not saying he's a dumbass, but he's certainly not a genius. I mean, there's just no question about that. And so I feel like the Democrats have to like walk, chew gum, do a cartwheel, do a bunch of stuff at the same time. And I hope that we are productive in doing brand damage to the Republican Party and labeling them for the liars that they are because they just lie to people. I mean, they're just such horrible liars. And I'm worried about the leadership as it comes in. I'm worried about Chuck Schumer and I'm worried about Hakeem Jeffries.

25:07And I'm not alone in that. I am saying this as somebody who is in this new media space. And a lot of people don't have faith in the Democratic establishment, which is what I would call them, because they haven't done what Chris Murphy did, which is evolve. which has said, okay, this isn't working. We need to reposition. And so if you get the Senate, and since you're a senator, I'll just ask about the Senate, do you, and I know this is a difficult question because you're friends, I'm sure, with Chuck Schumer, but I mean, do we think that's our best foot forward? I mean, it kind of feels Merrick Garland-ish if he's the leader of the Senate after all of this.

25:44Chris Murphy:Yeah, I mean, I guess right now, all of our focus is on winning the Senate. I'm not saying this question isn't important about who runs the Senate if we win. But right now it feels like we just have to make the case that this country is potentially going to fall apart if Democrats don't win. But yes, internally behind the scenes, you know, there is a fight happening right now about how big our agenda is going to be and whether we are going to continue to view the world in kind of left-right terms, which is frankly not how the most Americans view the world or view the world in worker versus corporate power terms.