The Twitter Files and the Future of the Democratic Party With Silicon Valley's Congressman
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I'm Barry Weiss, and this is Honestly. Perhaps more than any other Democrat right now, Ro Khanna is sounding the alarm on who the digital revolution has left behind, on the gap between those creating automation and AI and the people whose jobs are turning over to that new technology, and also on the divide between the laptop class and the people who still pack a lunch to go to work.

I call it a new economic patriotism, which is that Democrats are bringing manufacturing back home. We're bringing back supply chains and that actually is going to help tackle inflation. A CBS poll said 63% of Americans believe the cause of inflation is that we're not making enough things in America.

In fact, sometimes when you listen to Ro Khanna make the case for the dignity of working people, for revitalizing American industry, and the negative effects—the unintended ones, perhaps—of globalization and outsourcing, he kind of sounds a little like: After many years of decline, American manufacturing is coming back bigger and better and stronger than ever before. It's happening.

We're in the midst of a great economic revival in the United States. Which tells you everything you need to know about our current political moment and how the old rules about what is left or Democrat and what is right or Republican and who or what party represents the working class and who is overlooking their interests, how all of that is totally up for grabs.

Ro Khanna, who started his career as a volunteer on Barack Obama's first Senate campaign, believes that the Democrats should be dominating on these issues. That's why last summer, when most members of Congress were spending time in their own districts, Khanna spent his time campaigning in Wisconsin and Iowa and Indiana, championing middle Americans and trying to rehabilitate the image of the Democratic Party, from the party of the elites to the party, once again, of the working class.

Maybe most surprising of all, Ro Khanna's policies on big tech are not exactly the ones you'd imagine coming from the congressman whose neighbors are the creators of the next Googles and Facebooks. Not only does he think big tech needs to be broken up, he was one of the only Democrats to diverge from his party's censorious impulses when he reached out directly to Twitter in 2020 to criticize its decision to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.

In an era where the Democratic Party and big tech often seem to be marching in lockstep, Khan is one of the only people to stand up and say, hold on, maybe we, especially we on the left, should be skeptical of this kind of corporate power. And isn't that the core of what the Democratic Party is supposed to be about? And if not, when did that change and why? We're talking about all of that today, plus Roe's important cameo in the still-unfolding Twitter file story after the break.

Stay with us.

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

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Congressman Ro Khanna, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. Thanks for the introduction. I wish I was compared more to President Obama, though, and especially his Knox College speech in 2005. I think a lot of what I'm doing will appeal to the Obama-Trump voters. Well, we can certainly get to Trump at the end of this. I want to talk about 2024 and certainly where you think your own party is headed and if the Democrats can capture those Obama-Trump voters again.

first I want to start with a story that I've been reporting on for the past week, and that is the story of the Twitter files. Now, for those who have no idea what I'm talking about when I say the Twitter files, let me recap. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter recently for $44 billion and took it private, invited me, the independent journalist Matt Taibbi, and a few other journalists from the free press to look into the Twitter archives.

And what we found, at least so far, has confirmed what a lot of people who criticize Twitter over the past few years have accused the company of doing, but until now, that Twitter has denied or concealed. Like censoring content. Like shadow banning accounts of disfavored users or topics.

And one of the many things we revealed was how and why Twitter made the decision to suppress the New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop in the run-up to the 2020 election. In our reporting, we found an email, Ro, that you wrote to Vijay Gatti, then Twitter's head of legal policy and trust. And you wrote this email in October 2020, and you said this, this seems a violation of First Amendment principles. Why did you write to Twitter that day?

I was candidly concerned that they were censoring a newspaper. I just couldn't believe that they were actually telling the New York Post that they couldn't print an article, especially given Section 230 protects them from any defamation, protects Twitter, and the liability would be on the New York Post. Now, I'm no...

partisan for the New York Post. In fact, the New York Post, if you Google it, has never written a positive article about me and have written a number of negative articles about me. But I just couldn't fathom this idea that we wouldn't want journalism like the Post to be read. And I thought that the backlash to censoring that would be far worse than anything that they had written. What was the response that you got back from Gotti and Twitter?

You know, I initially they thought I was concerned why they weren't doing more to suppress the Hunter Biden story, because they had seen me on television making the case for President Biden. They had made me making the case that there was nothing to the story of a private citizen and that it shouldn't be part of the debate. And that was my genuine view. It's still my view that Hunter Biden is a private citizen.

But just because something is my view doesn't mean I get to decide what the American people get to read. And I think they were very surprised that I was standing up for these First Amendment principles. Now, I think it's a lazy response to say, well, Twitter's a private company. I mean, you know, that may get you a...

good grade in high school. But, you know, everyone who's taken constitutional law, first-year constitutional law, knows that. The point is, of course, they're a private entity. The question then becomes, what is the responsibility of private entities to democracy and to the public's

sphere. I mean, if the Washington Post or the New York Times had a policy to say we aren't going to print any progressive politicians op-ed, that's their right, but we would be critical of that. And they don't have as much of a reach as Twitter in terms of users or followers. So that's

I think the debate should be about what you think a good public forum looks like, less what the specific legal requirements are on Twitter. In that email to Twitter that I was quoting before, you also wrote this. I believe Twitter itself should curtail what it recommends or puts in trending news, and your policy against QAnon groups is all good. It's a hard balance. So let's talk a little bit more about that really hard balance.

It seems to me that there are, crudely speaking, two sides to this issue. One group says this, free speech has been digitized. The town square has been privatized and centralized. And so in our era, the 21st century, there's only these things that we call Twitter and Google and YouTube, and those are the new town squares. We need to think more deeply about those places as the new town square. And we need to think about what a constitution, what a bill of rights looks like online.

And then the other side of this issue, you have people saying, no one has a right to be on Twitter or visible on Twitter. It's a private company. They can do whatever they want in terms of moderating their content or making it visible to users. Also, there's the fact that Twitter is an unprecedented product that has the ability to spread lies and hate faster than any mechanism in all of human history. So is the town square, by the way, if this is a town square, really better served by Pizzagate being amplified like wildfire?

So, Ro, how do you think about those two sides and where do you fall? Well, I'm a technology optimist. I celebrated...

The printing press, Erasmus was very opposed to the printing press afterwards because the pamphlets that were coming out literally led to war. I mean, January 6th tells a comparison to what was going on with the printing press in Europe. But it took humanity creating the institutions of liberal democracy to channel the printing press into constructive uses so that today most people would agree with me that it's a good thing we have a printing press. That was debated, hotly debated for 100 years.

Ultimately, technologies like Twitter, social media are democratizing voice. I don't have nostalgia for the days when Walter Cronkite told us what the truth is. I mean, every pundit says, what about the days of Walter Cronkite? We were in Vietnam. The media basically didn't

say much. There was a very consensus-oriented opinion, and there were a lot of people, including women, including people of color, including people who were gay who were excluded from their perspective. So I think fundamental democratization of voice is good, and that's what technology enables. Now,

That doesn't mean that there doesn't have to be hard conversations about how do we really democratize voice. I mean, one of the things in Twitter is it skews to be more upper middle class, middle class, probably don't have as much working class participation. How do you make sure that...

You don't have viewpoint discrimination, but that you respect people. How do you make sure that Twitter isn't the only public forum, that there are multiple public forums? These are all difficult questions that we need to address. But to simply say, well, this technology doesn't matter, let's go back to the days of old, is I think forgetting that I love the fact that young people today with a clever video can have far more say in the popular culture than me going and giving a speech on the House floor.

Shouldn't we celebrate that? I mean, I think that's ultimately democratization of perspective. You describe yourself as a total Biden partisan. So why did you feel so strongly about speaking up about a story that clearly was going to hurt Biden? And was this the first time that you weighed in on a moderation decision at a social media company?

It was the first time. Well, I'm not sure if it was the first time. I'm sure there are other times that I may have spoken about not censoring viewpoints. But to me, there were two reasons. One, I actually thought just from a purely political reason that the president would be better served having the story out there than it being seen that people weren't getting to read the story. Because I didn't think that even with the New York Post story that there was going to be much legs to it.

And I thought the story would become the censorship, as often is the case. So from a political perspective, that's often the case, that you want to get the information out there. You don't want to hide information when you have a negative thing that, you know, we all make mistakes or have errors of judgment. Better to admit it, better to get it out there.

But also, I think philosophically, especially as someone at the time who was thinking about this role of a new digital sphere, was writing about these issues, it was the censoring of a journalist, I think, that really struck me as the line clearly too far. And that, as Silicon Valley's representative, I felt like I had some obligation to at least voice my concern.

In general, I would say the response from liberals and progressives was,

The story was a nothing burger. The fact of Twitter's moderation could be explained away because of the fact that it was a private company. And the reason that that seems strange to me is that, you know, you have the strange spectacle of the left effectively making the case for corporate rights when typically they're very skeptical of big business and especially skeptical of big business where, you know, it intersects with Washington and the government. How did the progressive left arrive to a position where

where they are the ones and not sort of the libertarian right defending a corporation like Twitter? Well, it's a good question. I think that where it's really stemming from, if I want to make their best argument, is that these forums for many years had unchecked hate speech, unchecked anti-Semitism, unchecked racism,

that if you were gay, if you're a woman on these platforms, if you're a woman of color, you're often not being treated with respect, not being treated as an equal. And there was mobilization for these platforms to do something about that so that people are treated with dignity.

And they, I think, see that mobilization worked. Some of the content moderation was taking place in response to that. And so for now to come out and express a view on free expression is condoning harassment or hate. And that's, I think, where they're coming from. My view is that this was not hate speech or harassment.

harassing behavior. This was viewpoint discrimination. This is a disagreement about what we think the relevant facts are of a presidential candidate. And here's why I think that Nothing Burger is compounding the problem. Let's stipulate that 60% of the country may not care about this. Maybe it's 50%, maybe it's whatever the number is. If 40 or 30% of the country cares,

And if 30 or 40% of the country thinks that they don't have a fair shake on a modern platform, don't you think you should listen? I mean, imagine in your own marriage if your spouse said 30% of the time that you were doing something wrong and you're like, well, that's a nothing burger. I don't really care. No, you want to acknowledge the...

anger and the frustration and the sense of unfairness. And I think this is part of the whole challenge. It's like you're doubly censoring. You're censoring at the first place, and then you're censoring the emotion to be upset about being censored. And I think until we start to have a conversation where we're understanding where each other are coming from, there's no hope for stitching the country together.

Do you think, though, that one of the reasons that in general the left either sees the story of the Twitter files as a nothing burger or defends the kind of moderation policies as a positive thing is because they're doing it basically on behalf of the causes that Democrats and progressives care about?

In other words, wouldn't their position be completely reversed? Wouldn't they be calling for regulation of a platform like this if it was helmed by people on the right doing the kind of censorship they were doing for the sake of the right? Very possible. I mean, there's certainly a lot of people on the left have called for the reinstatement of the fairness doctrine when it comes to Fox News and saying, why aren't you showing other perspectives? So it's possible if the...

causes were not sympathetic, that they would want more regulation. But I think that what's so important for progressives to distinguish is we want to have some regulations, in my view, even a private company to adopt them, whether they are a First Amendment issue or not, that will give people the opportunity to participate without being harassed, without being bullied, without hearing a racist rant. And that has to be distinguished from

a view that you may disagree with. So I think very differently in terms of someone who's advocating for the flat earth society than I do with someone who is hurling Nazi invectives against a user. And I think that there's a conflation of that. And the conflation of that makes your case to treat people with respect less compelling because it's conflated with your own perspective on what is true.

In other words, there's a distinction in your mind between people getting on a platform like this and spewing anti-Asian bigotry and someone entertaining the idea that COVID may have come from a lab in Wuhan. Yes, even though I disagree with that, yes. Right, there's a difference between someone tweeting at me saying,

Congressman Khanna is a communist who's sympathetic to Chinese, whose family has business relations with China, all of which, just to be clear, is completely untrue. But I don't think that that should not be allowed on Twitter. Now, if someone is out there saying that, you know, because I am of Indian heritage, because I'm of Hindu faith, attacking me for that, uh,

That, I don't think, belongs on Twitter. That may be protected still under the First Amendment if it's not imminent violence, but that doesn't seem to me something that Twitter would be constructive to public discourse. And that's, I think, obviously the fact-specific cases are what makes it hard, but it seems to me that that's the one balance. You don't want to discriminate against viewpoint, but you do want to make sure that people are being treated with respect.

Before we get to some of the policies, I really want to hear from you that you think should be taken up in order to handle this very, very new problem of the power of these companies and the role of the government in regulating them. Let's talk a little bit more about the facts surrounding the Hunter Biden laptop story. So here's my broad summary of the facts as I see it.

We know that in December 2019, the FBI received this laptop and could have verified its veracity within days, if not hours. We also know that the FBI was monitoring Rudy Giuliani during all of 2020, during which time he prepared to leak Hunter Biden's laptop to Miranda Devine of the New York Post, who wrote her story in October 2020. Then we have another fact. Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan.

and said that the FBI came to Facebook ahead of the election and said, just so you know, you should be on high alert that there's about to be a dump that's similar to 2016, so be vigilant. In other words, be vigilant of Russian disinformation. Twitter's Yoel Roth said recently under oath that the FBI gave him the same warning. In other words, it went to Twitter and said, a hack and leak operation involving Hunter Biden is going to happen sometime soon. Be aware of it.

Now, taken together, don't those facts seem to suggest that the FBI may have used information from its surveillance of Giuliani and from the laptop to sort of pre-bunk its contents? In other words, to deliberately misinform Twitter and Facebook that the laptop was the result of a hack or Russian disinformation rather than something that was inconvenient but true.

And if so, does that merit a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of this story? Look at the facts, though. The FBI at the time was under the administration of Donald Trump. So you'd have to say the FBI director was a Trump appointee.

It would be hard to imagine, though I don't know obviously all the facts, that under a Republican president with a Republican appointee as the FBI director, that the FBI would be politicized in a way that was undermining the candidacy or hurting the candidacy of the Republican and helping the candidacy of the Democrat.

That said, if there are agents, and what may be plausible is that they were so susceptible, so concerned about foreign interference and disinformation, that maybe they overcorrected for that problem because that was the prior election and they wanted to make sure that that mistake didn't happen again. But that's saying that they could have made potentially a mistake without having bad motives.

All of what I would say is that we need more information. And I've said that there should be transparency and there should be an understanding of why those government agents did what they did, and including the FBI director, who was a Trump appointee. I mean, it was not like there was a Democrat who was in charge here.

I think that a lot of people on the right look at the facts I just laid out and say, aha, see, Congressman Khanna, that's the deep state at work. Are those people nutty? Are they conspiracy theorists? What's your response to the people that look at that set of facts and say, this is election interference. It's just not being called that in the same way, you know, Russiagate was.

I mean, I guess I would say that the FBI, in my view, are honorable law enforcement public servants, just like I think police are, by and large, honorable public law enforcement individuals that...

I'm sure there are bad apples in any profession, but I'm glad that we have an FBI that keeps us safe. I'm glad that we have an FBI that protects us from terrorists and crimes. And I don't think that the ordinary FBI agent is engaged in some conspiracy theory. I think the ordinary FBI agent is there to protect the American nation and our democracy.

But if there are questions, the best disinfectant is transparency. And so I'm all for getting out exactly what happened. What do you say to those people who say the story of the Hunter Biden laptop is basically conservative propaganda? Who really cares? And more broadly, the story of Twitter's moderation, the story of what's being exposed by the Twitter files is, again, just more sort of fodder for the right.

more fodder for people like Donald Trump who are the actual threat to our democracy. Why, Ro Khanna, are you focused on this thing and ignoring the more broad problem? What do you say to those people? In other words, the real threat to democracy is the right. It's not the fact that Twitter, you know, moderated some people who were kind of on the line anyway. You know, I voted for Donald Trump's impeachment twice, and I have, of course, strongly opposed

condemned election denialism, but just because

There may be problems that Donald Trump is creating with democracy and threats that he's posing to democracy that are more severe than what Twitter's censorship may have been. And I don't think that the two are comparable. Doesn't mean that we just say, OK, well, we shouldn't care about Twitter's censorship. I mean, that was also not something that's going to facilitate it.

Democrat conversation. And what I'd say on the Hunter Biden story is if you believe that, and I've made this case that I don't think that Hunter Biden is a private citizen, he's not at the White House, let's move on and focus on what the president is doing, that your ability to make that case is strengthened if you allow any of the stories to be out there. And then you can make that case. That's a story, that's a case of relevance. And I agree with the people who are saying that we've got

other issues that we need to be focused on in this country. But that becomes a harder case to make if it looks like you don't want the information coming out or if you're defending a practice of censoring certain speech. It's ultimately why you should be for the First Amendment.

In the past, speaking of Trump, you called Twitter's decision to ban him in the wake of January 6th appropriate. I'm wondering if your opinion on Twitter's decision to ban him, if it's changed at all, especially having learned from the Twitter files how it was decided.

Well, you know, to be honest, I really struggled with this. I struggled with it when I was writing my book also about what was appropriate. And the two places I struggled was other world leaders need to be treated consistently. And so you can't just ban Donald Trump but not ban other autocratic leaders who've threatened violence or led to hate against targeted groups. And the second thing I wanted to make sure is that it was –

temporary to be renewed, and that was tied specifically to the incitement of violence and the repetitive incitement of violence, which even under Brandenburg is not protected speech. Now, the standard doesn't have to be as tight as Brandenburg because it is a private actor, so I don't think it has to be

the imminent incitement, but if there are tweets that are inciting violence and a pattern of it, I think suspension is warranted. What concerns me in the Twitter files is just whether this was documented in a consistent way as opposed to just someone calling up people and saying, "Well, let's suspend Donald Trump because he's conservative and he's been impeached twice."

And I would think that there is enough evidence. I haven't sat through and looked at all of Donald Trump's tweets, but there is enough of a cause that he's inciting violence enough to have a suspension warranted. That doesn't seem though that the way that Twitter made the decision.

All of which is to say that this suggests the need for one fundamental reform, which perhaps we can legislate in return for Section 230 immunity, which is that there should be some independent entity that you can appeal to if you're suspended, if you're censored, that can quickly adjudicate these things based on some common principles. And certainly I'm concerned that that doesn't seem to have existed at Twitter.

Do you mean like a Supreme Court for Twitter and Facebook? What would that look like? I mean, an independent group that, you know, so it's not Barry Weiss making the decision or Elon Musk making the decision. There are principles that the company may say, here are what we believe. But then if you're kicked off, then you should have some recourse to some process.

so that it doesn't just seem like, well, that's because Musk doesn't like me or because someone got to the general counsel and they don't like the viewpoint. I mean, I do think creating something like that is important and then having, at the very least, having transparency about the process.

There's a lot of debate in general, but I think especially in the wake of this Twitter story about what to do about the fact that a very small handful of people and companies have enormous outsized power on the public conversation, right? And this issue has produced some very strange bedfellows. You have both Josh Hawley and Elizabeth Warren proposing plans, albeit for different reasons, to sort of break up big tech, that when you look at them side by side, kind of

kind of look indistinguishable to the normal American. Do you see this issue as an opportunity for bipartisanship and bipartisan legislation? I do. Some of the antitrust effort was in that direction, that we should be against big mergers. We should be for more platforms emerging. We should not allow companies to privilege their own products.

And I've supported those efforts. I've supported sort of the Klobuchar bill moving forward. It has been stymied. I mean, they have not been able to get that antitrust legislation through. But I do think having antitrust legislation is important. But I think as important as having restrictions on

A big technology is critical. It's also critical to build up new forums and see how we do that. I mean, how do you create what Audrey Tang has created in Taiwan, an entirely digital conversation, which actually influences the government? Because there, instead of just retweeting or sharing, you're expressing an opinion that the Taiwan parliament is reading and ranking things that are actually influencing the governing decision. Part of the reason I think people are so outraged and

sensationalized on Twitter is this sinking feeling that their voice doesn't matter. So if they can't get a member of Congress to hear them, if they can't even get the legislative aid to hear them, well, at least they can scream on Twitter, curse on Twitter, insult people on Twitter, and it's almost sad. I mean, it's almost an expression of disempowerment. And then people say, well, Twitter doesn't matter. Well, at the very least, it's a gauge of how alienated people feel from the political process.

So Ro, we've talked about some of the things you think could help reform Twitter, but let's step back and look at the big picture for a moment. If you could wave a magic wand and pass any legislation you wanted tomorrow, what would it be regarding tech, right? Would you turn Twitter and other social media companies into common carriers? Would you keep them as private entities, but rewrite section 230 to enshrine rules about transparency, right? You've written a book about a lot of these issues. What is your big headline? What's your big proposal?

First, I think we need to give people the right to their own data. And the reason that matters is I think it would diminish the power of these companies to use your data, to continue to grow, to continue to have as much monopoly power, and it would allow new platforms to emerge. Second, we need to have reform of Section 230 so that at least conduct that a court finds is illegal should not be allowed on Twitter. I mean, right now...

or social media. Right now, the fastest thing you can do to remove something on these social media platforms is having a copyright violation. So that should extend to other areas. And then we need more transparency. I guess that would be my headline. I mean, if you...

Why are you making certain decisions and make sure that you're not the only one? I've said this directly, I think, to Musk at some point. I said the last job in the world I would want is to be running Twitter. You're never going to be making anyone happy. You don't want to be making the decisions about what's a good tweet, what's a bad tweet, what's a Nazi account, what's not a Nazi account. It's like that is that is other than being speaker of the House. I couldn't think of a harder or worse answer.

uh... you know uh... it did job in terms of the headaches and you're you're just gonna make everyone unhappy and so how do you create they a separation that uh... it's not a few people making these decisions okay well jack dorsey the former c_e_o_ of twitter had a few ideas about how to create that separation he wrote a blog post this week

explaining the principles that he thinks need to govern the future of Twitter and more broadly the future of social media. First, social media needs to be resilient to corporate and government control. Second, only the original author can remove the content they produce. And third, moderation, and I'm not really sure how this works, but here's what he says, moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice.

I'm curious, Ro, what you think of his last point, specifically if it's possible to take humans out of these decisions entirely and instead put a machine or human written algorithms in charge of these very, very naughty and difficult moderation issues. I'm sympathetic to what Jack wants to do in terms of giving us more control over our data, and he's being driven by that. He doesn't want to give the data to Facebook or Twitter to make these decisions. He wants individuals to

to construct our own platform so that we get to decide what news we're seeing. I get to decide whether Barry Weiss's tweet is going to pop up, not Twitter and what I want to see. That solves one issue, but it leaves a big danger. And that is that we may be further siloed as Americans. One of the things I love about my own town halls, uh,

I get excited when I get a question from the other side because I said, okay, they're not just all partisans at my town hall. And I love when I go to places that are red districts, hearing from people who would never vote for me and never talk to me. I feel like if I constructed my own social media algorithm, I would probably be blind to the very people who disagree with me.

So, you know, it used to be you couldn't avoid it. You had to go to the same town hall. You had to go to the same public square. And I fear the atomization of us as citizens if we just did Jack Dorsey's proposal. I'm curious what you think of Elon Musk's Twitter so far, especially as it compares to the old regime. Musk says he's doing all of this because sunlight is the best disinfectant and because the only way to win back trust of users and the public is to expose what old Twitter did.

So how is he doing so far, in your view? Well, look, on getting this stuff out there, let's get it all out there. And to the extent that it's not selective and everything is getting out there, everything that Trump may have done, everything that Biden's campaign may have done, I mean, that we want everything out there, I'm all for that. To the extent he wants to get rid of bots, I'm all for that. To the extent he wants Twitter not to discriminate based on viewpoints, I'm all for that.

I'm all for that. Then the big question becomes, and this is an empirical question, is there an increase of hate on the platform? Is there more antisemitism? Are they more Nazi accounts? Is there more racism? Is there more homophobia?

and I've seen the debates. I mean, you have on the one hand, you know, Jonathan Greenbelt from the ADL, Adam Schiff saying the hate's gone up. On the other hand, Elon saying, no, we're against hate. Hate's gone down. It's been a month. I guess I'm a data person. I'll wait to see what the results are, but that, I think, needs to be addressed because you can be for not censoring viewpoints and still think that it's perfectly legitimate to be taking down accounts that are promoting Nazism.

One way I see this story is if the Twitter files are about exposing the biases and the hypocrisies of the past Twitter overlords, you know, that doesn't mean that the power and the biases of those overlords has changed. In other words...

Now we just have a different one with different biases and different issues where he might want to put his thumb on the scale. Isn't the upshot that this is simply too much power for any individual to have over the public conversation?

Yeah, I think that's a very thoughtful point, Barry. And you may actually get a lot of progressives agreeing with you. And maybe they'll listen to if they listen this far into your podcast would be pleasantly surprised. But I think that that is a place where the right and left could agree that you don't want any group of individuals having the power to make these decisions, that there should be some guiding principles involved.

And the reason I look to First Amendment principles is because there are a lot of really brilliant people who have been thinking about this issue for a lot of years, and they've thought about almost every case. And so it seems to me that that's a good starting place on how you adjudicate this. But taking this...

This enormous power out of the hands of just a few, having transparency, having some independent place where these things can be adjudicated is important. And people say, oh, real life is not Twitter. Well, Twitter still drives news stories. Twitter still drives...

media coverage. And the idea that the digital conversation isn't going to become more and more dominant to American democracy is just denying reality. So we can't just wish away whether it's Twitter or social media. We have to think about what is the appropriate solution. I also think, frankly, that the glib line that Twitter's not real life is

It's just been so disproven by reality. I mean, one of the things we've seen is that the reason the moderation at companies like Twitter matters is because they were able to shift the Overton window on key subjects that go well beyond politics. Let's say things like COVID, right? And the question of whether lockdowns were an appropriate solution to COVID, whether cloth masks work, the origins of the virus.

The kind of moderation that happened on these big tech platforms very much informed who in real life was considered an expert and who was considered a kook. You know what I'm saying? And I think that's the case with any number of sensitive issues.

Absolutely. Look, one thing that could actually, I think, which would be counterintuitive, would be to find examples of where the left has been censored, right? Because there's this bias that, okay, are they doing this just to expose censorship on the right? And there are a lot of cases where the left may have been censored. One place, you know, I strongly disagree, for example, with the BDS movement.

I am 100 percent opposed to that in terms of philosophically. But I would not say someone who's advocating that should be censored, right? Or someone should be censored if they're opposed to criticizing human rights in India, even though I believe in a stronger U.S.-India relationship. So I think one thing that could help expand the conversation to include the left is to include also examples of censorship on the left.

It'd be hard for me to imagine that there weren't examples of that. Well, we're certainly looking for it. But the facts of this story are you have a company located in San Francisco where I think between 98 and 99 percent of employees identify as Democrats or progressives. And they're the one making the policies. In other words, if this was a company located in deep red Texas and they were the ones deciding moderation, it would be a totally different story about who's getting censored.

So I don't think it should at all be surprising that the censorship tends to go in one direction. I would expect there to be some exceptions to that rule. But in general, I just I don't think this is a kind of both side story. I think it's a story of one particular group of people using their power in a particular direction. And that shouldn't be surprising. One last thing I want to ask you about before we move on from Twitter and talk about your vision of politics more broadly is.

I have been so struck in this story by how one side of the country, half of the country, thinks that this is the biggest story in the entire world. And the other half of the country quite literally doesn't even know it exists. Right? My grandma is a diehard New York Times reader, MSNBC watcher. She has no idea this story is happening, despite even my role in it.

And the only place that I've seen the Twitter file story play out are places like Fox and conservative press. Why do you think there's kind of a media blackout on this story? Or if it is covered in sort of more left wing legacy outlets and cable news, why they're treating it like a nothing? Well, I do think it's a mistake. I mean, my parents who follow some of my TV appearances haven't mentioned this to me. And that's probably because they're MSNBC watchers.

Now, look, I give Aaron Burnett and Jake Tapper credit. Both of them have covered this. But I think there is this fear in the media to say, well, are we buying into kind of a conservative talking points or conservative story? And I think that the question should be...

Instead, what is the role of free expression and free speech on a social media platform? And you could actually have a very interesting conversation with an Elizabeth Warren who was concerned about the concentration of economic power making these decisions and someone who's concerned about Twitter censoring conservative points of view or shadow banning.

conservatives. And I really think it's a missed opportunity to have that conversation, a missed opportunity in terms of how much the digital world matters, and a missed opportunity in terms of understanding how big a story this is among the significant part of the American public. You know, I think one of the sad things, which is why I've become even more of a vociferous

advocate for free speech and the exchange of ideas that we need in this country is to just start listening to other people with suspending judgment just for at least 10 minutes. And then you can still always have judgment. It doesn't mean that you don't have convictions. But we've somehow lost the ability. We almost think that sitting down with someone, we call it legitimizing them, convinced in our own moral certitude, as opposed to thinking, well, maybe we want to

Check this out to see if we have everything exactly right or whether we want to be someone may challenge our worldview. The reason I think this is an issue that goes just so far beyond partisan politics is because it's a story about a small group of unelected people who have an inordinate amount of power on normal Americans.

To me, that's an issue that affects every single person, regardless of who you voted for in the last election or who you plan to vote for in 2024.

And to me, it's emblematic of how polarized we've become that the way people are hearing this story is about, you know, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, weaponizing the right, not weaponizing the right, rather than about our civil liberties and what rights we have as people and the sort of inordinate power of a handful of ultra wealthy people that have the ability to shape the public conversation. Now, that was brought home to me, actually, one of the people who

wasn't following Twitter files, but just vaguely, he said to me, well, I think...

Biden is favored to be Trump in 2024 because of the midterms. But then he said he had a text on. He said, but oh, I need to factor in that now that with Elon at Twitter, you know, Twitter is going to go more Republican than Democratic. So that may be a point for Donald Trump. And I think it really is that it's become a ball that's going to bounce from one side to the other side. I mean, that's the exact same.

wrong vision of democracy. And so both sides have a stake in this conversation, because what happened about to the New York Post in 2020 could happen to a liberal outlet or a progressive outlet in 2024 or 2028. After the break, I asked Ro Khanna how it is that the Republicans have become the party of the working class and how the Democratic Party can get back to its roots. Stay with us.

Let's talk a little bit, Ro, about your vision for the Democratic Party. I want to start with what you call economic patriotism or new economic patriotism. What is that? What does that mean? It means we made a colossal mistake in America. We took away people's ability to make a living. We watched the decimation of factory towns. We watched the decimation of rural America. We watched the decimation of industry in black and brown communities. And we watched the decimation of the

And what did we do? We gave them trade adjustment assistance. We gave them a check for a couple months from a government program. We told them to move.

And we lost production in America. We used to make the world steel. We used to make aluminum. We used to make textiles. We used to make paper. It all went south of the border to Mexico and to China. And that really hurt the working class. It allowed the wealth to continue to pile up in places like Silicon Valley and New York, but hollowed out the heartland, hollowed out a lot of the south.

and has left us divided as a country and weaker as a country. The new economic patriotism says we've got to bring those new factories back. We've got to bring the new production back. We need an economic renaissance in America of production, and we can do that partly because of new technology, because of Internet of Things and machine learning. It gives us a productivity advantage in new manufacturing processes, and if we have the private sector collaborate with government and

the educational institutions. That's how we can build the new factories. So you had said, is it like Donald Trump? It may embrace the sense of people who voted for Trump having a legitimate grievance against unchecked globalization.

But in its prescription, it's very different. It's much more Hamilton or FDR because it says if you just give a corporate tax cut, and I know these CEOs, they'll take the money and then put the factory in Malaysia. What we need is investing in America, in American companies if they are investing here. When you say we made a mistake, what is the name of that mistake? Is it free market capitalism, period? Is it globalization?

It's unchecked globalization. It's unfettered free market capitalism, free market absolutism. It's sort of corporate greed without any concern for the community. That the corporate bottom line is all that mattered. I am for free enterprise. I believe that

It's a wonderful thing that you don't have to have the United States Congress approve every decision that gets made. Can you imagine that? I mean, could you imagine the United States Congress trying to create Apple computers? Give me a break. We wouldn't be able to create a billion-dollar company, let alone a $3 trillion company. So there's a value in a Steve Jobs. There's value in a local dry cleaner having independence to create his own business.

But there's also value to community. People don't just care about making the most money. They want to live next to their parents or grandparents or friends growing up. And what we did in this country was just prioritize corporate bottom line. We lost a sense of community. And ultimately, we lost a sense of national purpose. There was no sense that it mattered that America be strong. It mattered that America did well.

And that mattered more than just having the cheapest price at the given moment or the highest corporate profits. And so it is a free enterprise that is checked by a belief in a shared purpose for communities and for the country.

Some of the slogans that I associate with you, like make more stuff here, which I love, and buy American, I think are great. But it would make all of that stuff more expensive for everyone. And people in America have really gotten used to cheap stuff. How do you convince people to pay more for things?

Well, first, it may not be as expensive as it would have been 20 years ago for a number of reasons. One, wages are increasing in places like China because of the one-child policy. The transportation costs, as we saw during the pandemic, were huge. The political instability is significant. The advances in our technology are

are extraordinary, that allow us to have far more productivity in manufacturing in the United States. And so there's more of an economic case. But we need government investment for this reason. And I have proposed that if you buy something made in America, you should get a tax credit at the end. That could make up some of the differential for the consumer. Obviously, it's a cost to the government. I'm not denying that. But I think it's a worthwhile cost.

Another point is that we should be providing financial capital to companies

that are competitive, that can raise money on the private sector, private markets, but want to build in the United States. This is what Hamilton did to build our industry. People are saying, well, why are you talking about Hamilton? We're a superpower. Yeah, but we're no longer a manufacturing superpower. And we need to look at how do we seed the new industries across this country. And we can do that in a way that will keep prices down, but it will come at a cost to government. Now, I'm very excited. I introduced a bill yesterday with Marco Rubio

to do exactly this, an economic development council. We're just off on the numbers. He wants 20 billion, I want 2 trillion over 10 years, but it's a start. It's a start of what we need to do. One decidedly old-school labor issue that became a big deal over the past month was the threatened rail workers strike. You voted for a proposal that was going to guarantee rail workers at least seven sick days, but that measure failed in the Senate because of lack of Republican support.

What do you say to the workers and the progressive base of your party who see Democratic-led government forcing a return to work without this key concession as a huge betrayal?

I say you're right to be upset. We need to push to have President Biden recognize railroads as part of the executive order that President Obama signed that applied to other industries for paid sick leave. And he can do that, as I understand the law, to include railroads. Some of us push really hard to have that as one bill of a vote on one bill. They separate it into two, and that's why I didn't

passed the Senate. It's a tough call. There were a lot of unions pushing the other way who didn't want the strike whose jobs would have been hurt if there was a strike. But I understand why people are upset. And I think that the way forward is for the president to sign this executive order.

In your book, Entrepreneurial Nation, Why Manufacturing is Still Key to America's Future, you say this, as I traveled the country, I learned that manufacturers remain at the cornerstone of our economy and our national security and are indispensable to American greatness. If you're talking to someone who thinks that the economy and defense have no business being mentioned in the same breath, explain to them, why is American manufacturing important to national security?

Almost everything we do requires a semiconductor chip. The drones we fly to keep the country safe, the F-35s that protect the country. And we want to make sure that those are produced here, that we're not dependent on other countries for that. You know, I'm opposed to a

defense budget that's going to head to a trillion dollars. And I voted against it. And most of my Republican colleagues, when I speak about not having a defense budget to a trillion dollars, said there goes Khanna again. But one time I caught their attention. I said, I want to know this. If the almost trillion dollars we're going to spend, how much of that is going to China?

No one knew the answer. The Defense Department does not track where we're getting our defense equipment. We don't know where our defense industrial base exists. Don't you think it would be smart that the weapons we're making, the protection of tanks and equipment that we have, that it be made, most of it in the United States or sourced at allied companies? So our manufacturing base is critical. And the dispositive point on this is,

is we won World War II first and foremost because of the bravery of people who served in World War II, the people who scaled the cliffs at Normandy, but secondly because we outproduced Japan and Germany. We were double their production, and we would never have won if we weren't double their production. I want an America that can outproduce any other country in the world. Let's talk a little bit about the future of the Democratic Party.

It seems like the midterms last month provided a kind of opening for the Democrats. The headline, of course, was that it was the red wave that wasn't. And while it was certainly a bad election for Republicans who had great expectations, it was a bad election for Republicans who had great expectations.

At the same time, in states where Republicans ran electable or quality candidates, in other words, non-MAGA candidates, they won, right? So I'm thinking of DeSantis in Florida. I'm thinking of Kemp in Georgia, DeWine in Ohio. And in states like Pennsylvania and Georgia, hundreds of thousands of voters split their tickets, voting for the candidates that they perceive to be reasonable. So I think there's something to be said, and I'm curious if you agree, that

for understanding the midterms as sort of a triumph of moderation. Do you see the results that way? I do. I mean, I see the midterms as a triumph, first and foremost, on abortion, on people saying that women should control their own bodies and that there has to be basic freedom there.

And just to take a point on it, the Republican position on this is much more extreme than either Bush or Trump ran on. None of them ran on no rape, no incest exceptions. And so a lot of the Republicans ran on about the most extreme position that you could take on the issue. And I think that really hurt them. And I also think the election denialism, the crazy conversations about conspiracy theories hurt the Republican candidates. The danger of this is,

is American democracy at this moment depends on far more than normalcy. Yes, we need to make sure that we aren't talking about election denialism. Yes, we need to make sure we aren't talking about conspiracy theories. But the reality is the middle class and working class in this country have lost 25% of wealth since 1980.

And the American dream seems slipping away to so many. We're losing our production capacity. And the question is, how do we remain a great nation? We can't just say that as long as you agree to concede, if you get less votes, you're fine. And that's good enough for our politics. I mean, we've got real challenges.

And I just hope that we don't get a politics of normalcy at a time where the status quo did need to be broken. The problem is that what emerged when the status quo was broken was somewhat of a nihilism. And what needs to emerge is a aspirational politics. And I still am hopeful that that can emerge. Who do you see as the people offering that vision as a kind of aspirational politics? Is

Is it John Fetterman? Is it... Well, look, I thought John Fetterman ran a terrific race. I thought Tim Ryan, even though he didn't win, ran a terrific race. Obviously, Bernie Sanders, in my view, had really brought this question to the forefront. And look, a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump, who I voted to impeach twice, they

A lot of them, what they were saying is you took away our jobs. You forgot about us. And I think that we need to begin by listening to what...

why they are so upset about things in this country. Why did so many people vote for Obama and then vote for Donald Trump? And how do we address structurally those issues? And I really think some of those people can be won back. We need to say, yes, things were wrong. Yes, there were mistakes that were made. We've got a better vision than Trump does of actually getting the new factories built here.

You've been a consistent ally in Congress for Bernie Sanders, whose movement, I would say, reshaped the Democratic Party. Are there areas where you think that that actually may have hurt Democrats? Well, I'm not—I don't think the democratic socialism label is helpful, but—

And I've said that to Senator Sanders directly. I don't think he is a democratic socialist. Democratic socialism means you believe that eventually we should have a model where the government controls the means of production, but we should just get there democratically. That's the definition. At best, he's a social democrat.

But I have tremendous admiration for the movement he's built. I am for Medicare for all. I'm for free public college. I think these are patriotic investments. But I believe that private business has a role and entrepreneurs have a role in the development of America. And so that's why I put myself much more as a Hamilton Democrat, an FDR Democrat, someone who wants to tell people from all parties, whether you're in business, whether you're in community leaders, whether...

You're an education leader. We need to build this country together. It's not just the government that's going to do it. The Democrats, as everyone knows, have historically been the party of the working class.

But for the better part of the past decade, and especially since 2016, the Democrats have seen their support among working class voters tumble. In the latest National New York Times Siena poll, Democrats have a 15-point deficit among working class voters, but a 14-point advantage among college educated voters. How did the Democrats lose their roots with the working class?

and instead become the party, at least in the perception of many, of college-educated elites? Well, I think we didn't pay enough attention to the anger that people had with globalization that was unchecked, with NAFTA, with the ascension of China into the World Trade Organization. I had gone to campaign for John Fetterman, and the cab driver said,

don't bother, I'm never going to vote for your party again. You guys sold my father's steel mill job to China. And that sentiment is out there. Now, you can argue that, oh, it was Reagan who started this and the Democrats just were at the end of it. But the Democrats haven't spoken out clearly about

decisively, forcefully against what happened. That we have to start by saying there were huge mistakes made. These mistakes came at the expense of the working class and middle class in this country. But then we should not demagogue things. And that is, by this I mean, you know, I don't, Senator Rubio, who I respect, we just did a

a bill together. I remember this 2016 debate. He said, America needs more plumbers. We need less philosophers. And I was thinking to myself, well, you know, James Madison was a philosopher. You know, our founders were philosophers. It was pretty good that we had thinking philosophers in America. And yes, we need more plumbers, but you don't have to denigrate college-degreed individuals to appeal to the working class because Americans are smarter than that. The folks I saw in Columbus, Ohio, when

we were creating two Intel factories. We were cheering for a highly educated, highly credentialed Iranian immigrant because they knew that that person was going to create blue collar jobs in Columbus, Ohio. What working class folks want, they don't have a grudge against college education. They don't think we should not have college graduation, college graduates here. China would have twice the college graduates as us in 2040. They just want to make sure that they have

a shot at the American dream, that they have dignity of work, that they have the economic opportunities to succeed. And that's what the Democratic Party needs to offer, a real vision of how we're going to build this country. Let's talk about 2024 for a second. Trump, of course, has announced that he's seeking re-election. And the sort of collective wisdom seems to be that Trump can't win national office again.

Do you think that that's true? Do you think that we're underestimating the potency of another Trump candidacy? I'm the wrong person to ask because I thought he couldn't win in 2016.

I remember being in a room with all my political consultants condescendingly mansplaining to my wife why he would never win when my wife asked, well, what if he wins? And she was right. I and everyone was wrong. And then after January 6th, I thought there's no way he's going to continue in political life. And he was resurgent. So I think it's a mistake to

underestimate him. Look, the poll just today on Wall Street Journal, everyone is talking about the top line that DeSantis is beating him. But then you look at the head to head and it's Biden 43, Trump 41 or two point difference. I mean, that's a close race. So I I don't underestimate underestimate him. Do you think it's a good idea for President Biden at the age that he is at to run again for president in 2024? Is it wise for the party?

Yes, because the incumbent president has a huge advantage. I mean, so one is just giving up incumbency is giving up a lot. Incumbent presidents tend to win. Second, he had a much better than expected midterm. Third, he has beaten Donald Trump.

And the final point is if you have a open Democratic primary, sometimes we end up nominating, you know, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. But we're also capable of nominating George McGovern, who was a wonderful person but lost a lot of state. So, you know, I don't know if I want to roll the dice on 2024. Let's talk about your future and your future in politics. Your campaign has political consultants on the payroll in early presidential primary states.

Are we going to see a Ro Khanna presidential bid in 2024? No. First of all, no one even knows what the early states are, so that'd be hard to predict. But absolutely not in 2024. I'll be behind the president. And if not, you know, I'd be behind Bernie or someone else. I've only been in Congress six years, and I still have things to learn and things to build in my role.

But a congressman from California doesn't typically travel around the country building a nationwide network unless he has bigger ambitions than representing the 17th District in California, no?

That's fair. That's fair. I mean, look, I've been doing it since my first term in states like Appalachia. I mean, the first trip I took was to Kentucky and did work in West Virginia and bringing technology jobs there. And I've been going to places like Indiana. So some of these places are deep red places that even I am not that hopeful that Democrats in the near term are going to win them over. But

So it's been the entire cause of my political career has been being born in Philadelphia, growing up in Pennsylvania, and being from California as this hybrid. How do we bring the innovation, entrepreneurship that's happening in Silicon Valley and meld it with the extraordinary manufacturing talent in other parts of the country to have an economic renaissance in California?

in America. But I don't deny that there could be a future ambition if the moment comes. But, you know, that's so dependent on circumstance. And right now, I'm very happy making a contribution from Silicon Valley. Well, Ro Khanna, I know you're in the middle of votes, and I really appreciate you making the time. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.

Thanks to Rokana for making the time. And thanks so much to all of you for listening. It's been a hell of a week here at The Free Press, which is the name of our new company. First of all, we launched a company. Second of all, we spent a tremendous amount of time at Twitter late into the night reporting on the Twitter story. And we're going to continue to publish that reporting over the coming days and weeks.

If you like what you heard today, if you like the kind of open, frank conversations we host on this show, and if you believe in old school journalism, honest, dogged, and independent, in journalism that follows the story rather than hewing to a narrative, support us. You can do that by going to www.thefp.com and becoming a subscriber today. See you next time.

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