Chris Murphy: ‘We’re in the Middle of an Authoritarian Takeover’

Sanders-TOWNSEND: “Have we flipped already into the authoritarianism? Is there a way out? I mean, give us your unvarnished thoughts here.”
MURPHY:” Well, listen, I mean, we’re not on the verge of an authoritarian takeover. We’re in the middle of it. Now, it’s not too late. We haven’t lost our democracy. But, you know, we sometimes like to think of the first-term Donald Trump, you know, the bumbling White House that didn’t seem to have any theory of the case from day to day. This is a very different White House, right? Stephen Miller and his gang, they have a plan. They have a plan that they are executing to transition our country from democracy to something fundamentally different, maybe even autocracy. And that’s what I tried to lay out on the floor today, is how this plan is being operationalized every single day. But no, it is not a lost cause. Ultimately, what we know from history is that when a big enough portion of the population — number’s normally around 2% show up to protests, are regularly engaged in peaceful civic action, enough sand gets thrown in the gears of the attempts to destroy democracy that they end up saving it. So we have an opportunity in these elections this November to send a signal, we have an opportunity through the protests on October 18th to show the country and the world that we aren’t lying down. So this is a serious moment. It’s almost lost, but it’s definitely not lost yet.”