Welcome to Wednesday’s edition of Washington Secrets. If a friend sent you this and you’d like to sign up, CLICK HERE. We spent yesterday at the big AI summit in Washington. We listened to Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders find common ground, and then asked key players what they thought. We also parsed the very deep differences between Bannon and Sanders on what comes next. Plus, just why did Jim Banks endorse JD Vance for president this week?
Alan Minsky is the executive director of the Progressive Democrats of America. He believes in the Green New Deal and that conservatives are using culture war issues, such as trans athletes in women’s sports, to divide the working class and distract from the real struggle.
No wonder the words almost got caught in his throat as he discussed how the Left needed to wake up and work with Steve Bannon, the economic nationalist rabble rouser, to confront the existential peril posed by artificial intelligence… until they came out in a great torrent of ideas.
“Progressives need to understand that Steve Bannon is to a great degree in alignment with our position about protecting us from the peril, and need to realize and then be realistic about the landscape of American politics,” Minsky told Secrets.
“The progressive left has a long history of shunning any coordination with people on the far Right. That would be unwise,” he added. “He obviously is a highly accomplished strategic thinker, and we should accept that we need to move in parallel with him and other people from his political formations.”
He apologized for the wordy response. (The paragraphs above are just the final chunk of the whole thing.) “I can make it more concise,” he said.
These are strange times for everyone.
Minsky was at the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, where Sen. Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, and Bannon were the two top speakers.
Somewhere in the crowd was Amy Kremer, who organized the Jan. 6, 2021, rally that was followed by the attack on the U.S. Capitol. And from the stage, Ashley Judd, the actor, peppered her talk with phrases like “male entitlement” and the dangers of “sex hierarchy.”
Amid the woke and anti-woke audience, Bannon and Sanders emerged as the odd couple of AI regulation. They agreed that it was simply too important and too dangerous to be left to a tech billionaire class, people “whose chief goal is to achieve even more wealth and more power than they already have, no matter what the impact their work has on ordinary people,” according to Sanders.
And they both delivered a message that the technology has to be slowed down so that guardrails can catch up.
If Minsky represented the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party in the audience, his right-wing counterpart was Caroline Wren. She is an America First strategist and fundraiser who is deeply embedded in Trumpworld.
Wren praised the organizers for putting the two speakers together and described Sanders’ speech as “excellent.” Both speakers had their finger on the pulse of the American public, who were nervous about where AI was headed.
“It’s going to take people across both political lines and people within the grassroots activist movement and within legislation kind of step up, and so that was very fascinating to see them go back to back,” she said.
Back-to-back indeed, but not on the same stage together. Organizers knew it was a high-risk, high-reward strategy.
“Trying not to think about it,” said one when asked what could go wrong ahead of the speeches.
In the event, the two speakers delivered.
Sanders got the bigger reception, reflecting a liberal majority in the room. And there were sharp intakes of breath when Bannon proposed kicking Chinese students out of American labs to protect domestic technologies.
Yet it didn’t stop one progressive in the audience from wondering whether they might now risk appearing on Bannon’s War Room to discuss AI.
“You know, I view him as politically toxic and the root cause of a lot that is wrong in this country,” they mused, “but if we could just stick to AI in the conversation…”
Bernie v. Bannon
The two men offered similar but different perspectives on AI during their speeches. Their populist positions both emphasized that the risks posed by the new technology were simply too important to leave to unaccountable tech billionaires to manage, and that there was an urgent need to slow things down.
Yet they offered deeply different ideas on how to get from their shared starting points to their shared end points. These were their key differences.
The mechanism
Sanders, not surprisingly, as a legislator, believes legislation is key. Bannon thinks things cannot wait for the months or years that would take.
Sanders: “Congress and governments around the world must act now before it is too late. That is why next week I will be introducing legislation with Congressman Greg Casar to permanently ban development of artificial superintelligence.”
Bannon: “We have 1,000 questions. They’re not going to be answered in legislation on Capitol Hill. This has to be an executive action.”
On China
Sanders wants a treaty — he compared it with Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signing a nuclear deal in the ’80s — while Bannon made the nationalist argument that Beijing simply cannot be trusted.
Sanders: “It will be humanity’s problem, and that is why I hope very much that at their AI summit next week, President Trump will negotiate a comprehensive treaty with President Xi to establish a pause on advanced AI development and a ban on superintelligence.
Bannon: “We should quarantine, now, every aspect of the ecosystem of artificial intelligence away from the Chinese Communist Party today … We should take all Chinese nationals and get them out of their labs and get them back to mainland China.”
On Trump
Sanders couldn’t resist bashing the president, who has refused so far to back the idea of guardrails on AI for fear of losing the race with China. Bannon was polite in his response.
Sanders: “Congress, under both Democratic and Republican control, have been asleep at the wheel, and we now have a president whose ignorance regarding this issue is truly embarrassing.”
Bannon: “I think Sen. Sanders did a very job of summarizing the risk. Obviously, he and I have quite different opinions of the president of the United States.”
So why did Jim Banks endorse JD Vance so early?
Sen. Jim Banks (R-OH) introduced JD Vance at his first fundraiser after being announced as Trump’s running mate in 2024.
The pair are friends, political allies, and former colleagues from the two years Vance spent as senator for Ohio.
So it was inevitable that Banks would endorse Vance as the Republican nominee for president. The surprise is that it came this week (in a statement to the Indianapolis Star), before Vance has even declared he is running.
A source tells Secrets exactly why it came now. And the key to it is Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), who in an interview mulled a 2028 presidential run.
“JD will make a great president, and it’s bad for the GOP when s*** stirrers like Don Bacon try to muck things up to get attention,” said the source close to Banks.
The pair have a long-running beef, dating back to their time together on the House Armed Services Committee, when Banks thought Bacon was too much of a traditional hawk and too soft on DEI programs.
Lunchtime reading
God and Vance at Yale: The Vanity Fair piece that everyone is talking about asks: Is JD Vance a craven political opportunist? Secrets‘s view is that politicians are allowed to change their minds. But read for yourself and decide.
Charlie Kirk’s widow says in legal claim university failed to protect him: “The filing names the state of Utah, university officials, and campus police. It claims organizers of the event dismissed concerns shared with campus police about nearby rooftop access.”