Let’s say you wanted to sit down and have a chat with a member of Congress about the challenges facing the nation today, many of which were created by our own government. You might hope to find someone who was warning against the threats posed by a growing level of support for globalism in Washington. Perhaps you’d like to hear them talking about the way artificial intelligence and automation are eliminating the jobs of many middle-class workers. Personally, I would want them to stand up against censorship and the erosion of citizens’ First Amendment rights via collusion between the government and Big Tech. What if I told you that we’ve found just such a congressman? Would you be even more surprised to learn that he’s a progressive Democrat from California who represents Silicon Valley? Well, that’s what happened when Bari Weiss, one of the authors of the Twitter Files, interviewed Congressman Ro Khanna. She wrote about it this weekend on her Substack account.

Ro Khanna is a progressive congressman representing California’s 17th District—the wealthiest congressional district in America. He’s Silicon Valley’s congressman, so his constituents are the coastal elites of the elites.

But if you didn’t know any of that, you might think Ro Khanna was a congressman from a place like Indiana.

Khanna consistently sounds the alarm on the unintended consequences of globalization and the digital revolution; on the gap between those creating automation and A.I. and the people whose jobs are being turned over to that new technology; and on the growing divide between the laptop class and those who still head to work before the sun comes up.

There’s an audio recording of the full interview available at the link, but Weiss also provides a transcript of all the key points. She notes that a lot of the things Khanna says make him sound an awful lot like… Donald Trump. (Though he would likely recoil at the comparison.)

In October of 2020, Ro Khanna was one of the only Democrats to speak out against the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story. It’s not that he is convinced that Hunter and “the Big Guy” are guilty of any sort of shady dealings. (He has publicly repeated his support for Biden.) He just believes that people have the right to read what they like and to ask valid questions.

As far as the Twitter Files go, Khana rejects the idea that they are a “nothingburger.” He told Weiss that even if 60% of the country isn’t concerned over the idea of the government colluding with social media platforms to silence people, if 40% of the country feels that way, the government needs to listen.

Khanna calls the media blackout of the Twitter Files “a mistake.” He also criticized the suspension of Donald Trump’s account, not because he enjoyed Trump’s tweets, but because there were so many other world leaders out there who are so much worse and their accounts were never shut down. He’s criticizing the inconsistency in the enforcement of the rules under Twitter’s old management.

The interview covers plenty of additional topics. Khanna has quite a bit to say about how the Democratic Party has “lost its working-class roots” and ceded that demographic to the Republicans. The whole interview paints a picture of a representative who sounds almost nothing like the stereotype of liberal California Democrats that we’re used to seeing. Check it out.