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AI Doomerism and Who Really Wants Control: Jim Pfaff on Worldview Tube | Sep 16, 2026

Published: September 16, 2026
Network: Worldview Tube — Washington Report
Analysis: Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff

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A man worked at Anthropic for six months and is now turning up more and more as the expert on whether the technology will end the world. On the September 16, 2026 edition of Worldview Tube’s Washington Report, Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff cut in to open his case against AI doomerism: the two loudest voices warning the models will kill everybody are the men building the models, what the frontier labs actually fear is open-source competition they cannot control, and the outcome they are lobbying for hands the most powerful tool of the century to the one actor with the power of the sword. The program played Jensen Huang of NVIDIA making the engineering case, ran a side-by-side of Klaus Schwab’s pandemic-era warnings, and after the break turned to clips from a far-left convention held in Chicago.

Topics Covered

• The Six-Month Expert and the Money Behind AI Doomerism
• Barcodes, Revelation, and Judging a Tool You Have Never Used
• AI Doomerism Ends With Government Holding the Sword
• Jensen Huang: Safety Is an Engineering Problem
• Open Source, Liability, and What the Labs Are Really Afraid Of
• The Chicago Communist Convention and the Godless Society
• Key Takeaways

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The Six-Month Expert and the Money Behind AI Doomerism

The host was queuing up another voice from the last 24 hours warning about artificial intelligence. Pfaff cut in before the clip rolled.

“This is a guy who worked for Anthropic for six months, and all of a sudden he’s the expert.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

He was careful about what he was not saying. He is not claiming AI can do no harm, and he is not claiming it is the perfect technology. It is not. It is an incredibly useful tool. What he objects to is the kind of fear being manufactured around it, and he pointed to a specific piece of reporting for where that fear comes from. Megan Basham, the author of Shepherds for Sale, has tracked money moving from secular organizations into so-called evangelical organizations — money going to pastors and Christian leaders to get them talking about the technology in terms of FUD. Fear, uncertainty and doubt.

That is the mechanism behind the AI doomerism he sees: not a debate that grew organically out of the technology, but manipulation by people who, in his words, do not even understand what is really going on. TCC has followed this money before, in our reporting on the data centers, Chinese money, and the AI race.

Barcodes, Revelation, and Judging a Tool You Have Never Used

Pfaff addressed the part of his audience that believes the technology is how the Antichrist enters the world. There are a myriad of ways the fulfillment of Revelation could come, he said, and then he reached for the precedent.

Back when barcodes were invented, everyone thought a barcode was going onto the right hand or the forehead. It never happened. It was never going to happen. That was not the tool, and nobody knows what the tool is. His objection is to the method: throwing out apocalyptic visions of what might happen without ever addressing what the actual technology is or even knowing what it is.

“I’m using it every single day, and I have to tell you, AI is a fantastic tool. It is helping our organization do some amazing things.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

That, he said, should tell people to rethink what they are concluding: it can be used in a very effective way to take down evil, as much as someone could use it for evil. He reached for the gun issue himself — everyone says the gun is the problem — and for the internet, and the host agreed that the internet is used for good and evil both. The same argument applies to the polling everyone cites. Eighty percent of the public may be against this, but 80 percent support for the Save America Act rests on a clearly understood principle people can have a consensus about. On AI, 80 percent of people are not even using the technology, so they do not know what to say about it. Get around it a little, he said, see what it actually does, and then start speaking against it if that is where you land.

AI Doomerism Ends With Government Holding the Sword

The real issues, the host offered, are censorship and control of the people who use it — and the harm is government getting its hands on it. Pfaff agreed and made it an appeal.

“You accepting this doomerism are working with people who want to hand this technology over to government actors who, if you think you were censored during the Biden administration, watch out.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Ten times worse, he said, or a hundred times worse. And it is not only the American government being asked to step in.

“These people aren’t even advocating for the American government just to step in. They’re wanting a world government body formed.”
— Host, Worldview Tube Washington Report

Pfaff’s reply closed the circle on the Christians he had been addressing: the people who are worried AI is going to bring about the Antichrist are handing it over to him, and that is literally what is taking place. The host finished the thought — they are trying to form a one-world government to oversee these people.

His grounding for that is not a political forecast, it is a doctrine of man. Six thousand years of recorded human history proves the moral depravity of man, he said, and you are proposing to give the tool to the people who own the sword of government. He paraphrased Benjamin Franklin: anyone who will give up essential liberty for security deserves neither security nor liberty, and will have neither. When evil stays diffuse, in the hands of individuals, society recognizes failures and reacts to them. When it consolidates in government, the power becomes an evil you cannot overcome, because government has the power of the sword and will take you down — the way, he said, the Biden administration did for four years.

“When government controls anything, it destroys everything.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

He drew a line around what actually belongs in the surveillance debate. The Flock camera fight is an important one, but it is not an AI debate — those are tools AI could be used with in a nefarious way, and the problem there is general security and the Fourth Amendment, which is the actual question there. Put a FLIR camera in your own backyard and that, he thinks, would be the most effective thing you could do for your own security, because it catches what a regular camera misses. Do not put it on a street corner with government authority behind it. The problem is never the device. It is the use of it.

Jensen Huang: Safety Is an Engineering Problem

The program ran a clip of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang answering a question about the debate over pacing and safety. Safety is paramount, Huang said — in a lot of ways, job one. But it is an engineering problem, because what is being built is software, a complicated computing system but ultimately a computing system. That means building test environments in a good and safe way, then testing the products in them.

“If you build a product or a service and you’re not confident in its functionality, capability, or safety, then don’t release it.”
— Jensen Huang, CEO, NVIDIA

Huang’s conclusion was the one Pfaff had queued the clip for: the market forces are already there, no new laws are needed, no new regulations are needed. Companies pace themselves until they are confident, and innovation speed versus safe products is a false choice — you can have both at the same time. If a company feels at any point that it or its product is out of control, take a pause and get it right.

Pfaff gave a working example of the self-regulation Huang described. Anthropic built a frontier model, found in testing that the design did not have safety in it, and withheld the parts of the model it could not resolve before releasing the rest. Ask that model to help you build a chemical weapon or a nuclear bomb and it stops you immediately and shuts down your account. That is how you deal with safety, he said, and that is what Jensen Huang is talking about. You do not release something that is not safe, as any responsible company should do.

Open Source, Liability, and What the Labs Are Really Afraid Of

Then he named the two men and the two motives. The people preaching the doomerism, he said, are the people building the technology: Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI and the ChatGPT models, and Dario Amodei, who runs Anthropic and the Claude models.

“Well, two of the people there who are preaching the doomerism are the people who are building the freaking technology themselves. If you’re so worried about it, then stop.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

If you think what you are building is going to kill people, then stop building it. Bill Gates is the third name in the montage and, to Pfaff’s knowledge, is not working directly in AI at all — he is a technologist who has been pushing doomerism on climate and vaccines for a long, long time. The host’s read on the clip reel was that a script had been handed out, with everyone singing the same tune, and Pfaff’s answer for why is the first of two issues he sees at the frontier model companies.

“What they are worried about is competition from open-source models that are proliferating out there right now.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Those open-source models are increasingly capable of being used in a significant way without your data being shared with any other company, and the hardware to run them locally already exists. The Conservative Caucus is implementing them right now on its own equipment, for voter data, donor data and everything else the organization runs on — outside the control of the model companies, and not even accessible to the people who created the open-source models TCC will use. That capability is increasing exponentially, and competition is staring the incumbents down. They want it to go away.

The alternative already works. Facebook was sued over safety failures affecting young women abused through its platform and settled rather than go to court — the judicial system working on behalf of the consumer when a company causes harm.

“If you do something unsafe, you should pay a consequence for that, and people should be able to sue you if you do what’s wrong.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

That is how you deal with things in a free market, he said. You do not deal with them by asking the government to fix it, because the government does not fix anything — it makes everything worse. There is no time in human history when government did not cause a problem, whether war or product safety. And if these companies cannot manage self-government and restraint, the answer is to sell their assets to someone who will use them in a better way, not to hand the technology to the state, and definitely not to an internationalist organization.

The Chicago Communist Convention and the Godless Society

After the break, the host turned to something he had missed while Pfaff was at the convention in Dallas: a gathering of the far left in Chicago that people were calling a communist convention. He was not sure it was an event the Democratic Socialists of America had actually endorsed; Pfaff’s reaction to the clips was that you could easily call it communist. The program played several minutes of the reel. A speaker calling GLP-1 drugs fascistic. A call to give up the fantasy of being fitter than the fascists. A Green Party figure asking a room whether it was ready for a war in the streets. Pfaff’s first reaction was to the masks still being worn in a room with no risk that requires one — at best irrational, he said, and in many cases worse than that. Then he took the movement seriously.

There is a movement on the Democrat side of the aisle, he said, and many of these people would not call themselves Democrats, but that is the party they are going to work in — and it believes most of what it is saying. It is a cultural battle, and if it turns violent, these are the people to do it, because they have been using violence all the way back to the Obama administration: the Ferguson riots, what happened in Wisconsin, the George Floyd riots going into 2020, and the 2025 riots in Los Angeles and elsewhere. TCC has tracked this movement’s growth inside the Democrat Party in our coverage of the Democrat Socialists of America’s rise.

The battle he is fighting, though, is a battle of ideas, and he put the Judeo-Christian frame on it directly. Real peace and true progress in society happen among people who take the Ten Commandments seriously and recognize an objective rule of law with its origins in the God of the universe, who set out principles that bring about peaceful societies when followed. We did best as a society when we honored that more. He traced the turn to Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s successful effort to get the Supreme Court of the United States to take prayer out of the public schools — not because of the procedure itself, but because recognizing accountability to the Creator and to his law is a safety to society.

“What these people in that communist convention are promoting is a godless society where power will determine who gets what and when.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

That is the basis of communism, he said: a godless concept with no foundation in truth or rule of law. It is also the thread back to where the hour started. The argument against AI doomerism and the argument against that convention are the same argument — that power consolidated in human hands, with no accountability above it, is the thing to fear, whether the tool in those hands is a statute or a frontier model.

The show closed on 2028: Gavin Newsom told Jake Tapper he would not run if Kamala Harris runs. Pfaff called that probably the easiest way for a Republican to get into the White House, whoever the nominee turns out to be. The host’s own view was that Harris will not go uncontested.

Key Takeaways

1. The doomers are the builders – Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic are the two men warning the models will kill everybody. Pfaff’s answer: if you think what you are building is going to kill people, then stop building it.
2. AI doomerism is being financed into the pulpit – Megan Basham has tracked money from secular organizations into evangelical organizations, going to pastors and Christian leaders to push FUD — fear, uncertainty and doubt.
3. Open-source competition is the real threat to the frontier labs – Locally run open-source models keep your data out of any other company’s hands. TCC is implementing them now on its own equipment for voter and donor data.
4. The second motive is liability – The labs want to release models with the product liability shifted onto government, the way Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson were shielded on the COVID vaccines. Facebook’s settlement shows the courts already do that job.
5. Safety is an engineering problem, not a statute – Jensen Huang: build the test environments, test the product, and if you are not confident in its functionality, capability or safety, do not release it. No new laws, no new regulations.
6. The danger is consolidation, not the tool – Six thousand years of history proves the moral depravity of man; hand the tool to the actor holding the sword and the censorship of the Biden years becomes 10 or 100 times worse. That is where AI doomerism leads.

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About The Conservative Caucus:
The Conservative Caucus is a grassroots public policy action organization, formed in 1974. Headed by President Jim Pfaff, the Caucus is committed to advancing free enterprise, limited government, and traditional values.

Originally broadcast Sep 16, 2026 on Worldview Tube — Washington Report.