UK Pressures Apple to Break Encryption in Major Privacy Clash; How Dems Can Win Back the Working Class: With Former Bernie Sanders Campaign Manager Faiz Shakir
Apple and the UK government clash over a backdoor feature that could allow the UK government access to private, encrypted data. Privacy advocate Sean Vitka explains why U.S. Apple users should be concerned about the encryption feature. Plus: former Bernie Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir reveals why Democrats have lost their way, and he shares his plan to bring working class Americans back to the party.
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God knows where he is or what he's doing, but happy birthday, Glenn.
Today on System Update, we look at a variety of issues.
One is the brewing fight between Apple and the British government.
The British government, in order to comply with some of its new surveillance laws, has demanded that Apple break its very strong end-to-end encryption, changing Apple products really globally by providing a backdoor for the government.
This is a demand that has been made by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies in the past.
Now the British government is making it.
We talk a little bit about what this means for users, what this means for encryption, and where the Trump administration stands on these issues.
The Trump administration, of course, has evolved on encryption and privacy.
It really changed from the first administration to the second.
It looks like the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Kabard, is supporting the push by Apple to push back against the British government.
Later during the program, I speak to Faz Shakir.
He previously managed Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign.
He's advised a variety of Democratic politicians.
Advising a more perfect union, this new media startup that lifts up working class voices.
We talk about the Democratic Party, where it stands today, why it's become a party that's associated with the elites, with the billionaire class, with the kind of professional managerial elite.
And how we talk a little bit about how the party can reconnect with everyday Americans and kind of champion the old school democratic values of a strong social safety net of basic meeting the basic needs for middle class and working class Americans.
I want to welcome our guest, Sean Vitka.
He is the Executive Director of Demand Progress.
He is a tireless advocate for privacy rights, and he's fought for a very long time on these issues, fought to reform the NSA, fought to reform the FBI, worked with members of Congress.
He's worked in other venues in the policy arena.
Sean, thanks for joining the show.
Thank you for having me, Lee.
Well, first, I just want to ask if you could explain the lay of the land.
What is happening with Apple and the British government?
What are they demanding?
What is this backdoor that they're asking for?
Yeah, so there have been some profoundly important developments happening behind the scenes.
And over the last few weeks, they broke out into public view.
So this goes back on the UK side.
At least to what we all call the Snoopers Charter.
In short, it's a bad law that the UK passed to force access for the government to things like private communications.
Now, where that runs into a very significant policy question, one that affects not just people in the UK, not just people in the United States, but every single person on the planet, is...
When it undermines what we call end-to-end encryption or what anybody would think of as strong encryption.
But what happened in the UK is the government ordered secretly Apple to install what we all call a backdoor in their encryption.
It's developed on the other side of Apple rolling out a feature that allows users to keep their backups that are stored in the cloud to encrypt them.
Now, encryption is something that is baked into Everything that people do online.
But there are a number of different gradients of it.
The only truly strong encryption is what we call end-end encryption, what I mentioned before.
And the reason it's called end-end encryption is because, in effect, there are only two points of access, the sender and the receiver.
The way that it works, to skip a lot of complicated math, is that the necessary key, the decryption, Part of the equation is only held by each of those actors, and they each have a different key that accesses it.
End and encryption, therefore, creates an ecosystem in which only the sender and receiver can view whatever the given communication or data is.
Otherwise, you still see things, you know, banks encrypt information when it's stored, when they have it, when they are hopefully doing at least the minimum in terms of cybersecurity.
But when you interact with your bank, you will also enjoy end-to-end encryption in the course of using just the browser.
The browser will, you know, HTTPS, for instance, will create a conversation in so many words between your device and between the receiving device.
And the question is, if somebody were to access it, if somebody were to be able to look at that conversation, what would they see?
So this maps to the Apple iCloud issue because the question is, what can Apple see?
If you store all of your sensitive information, everything on your phone, everything on your computer, on Apple's servers, can Apple go and access it?
Now, the feature that they rolled out basically changed it from yes to no.
The no is dramatically better for cybersecurity.
And the reason is there's only two keys.
If Apple has the ability to access all that information, not only is there a third key that somebody else can use, but it functions much more like a skeleton key.
That backdoor, and the reason we call it a backdoor, is impossible to protect effectively, frankly.
It becomes maybe the most valuable thing in the world if there is, you know, a special, you know, string of characters that gives you access to anything in Apple's possession.
So what we have in the UK is a situation where Apple rolls out this feature and then it runs right up against the Snoopers Charter.
And so the UK says, Well, you must comply.
Now, this was all happening behind the scenes.
In fact, Apple was not particularly vocal about it until recently, where they have just initiated a lawsuit.
But reporting came out starting a few weeks ago that said this is happening.
And the government, for their internal legal process purposes, succeeded.
They got the corridor they wanted, and it was going to force Apple to install this backdoor.
What happened since then is important.
Apple, at that point, has three options.
There's the worst option, without a doubt, which is, okay, we'll give you a skeleton key.
We're going to install this backdoor access into our systems and effectively compromise anybody who's got their information stored on the cloud, namely the UK. But it sets a precedent that would make it easier for the United States or any other government to force the exact same.
Next option, which is the one that they took, is certainly better, but it's not perfect, and it's to withdraw this feature in the UK. I would offer that the best option would be to withdraw from the market, by the way, because that's the kind of pressure that clearly the government needs to see.
But in this second part, what it really means is that Apple is knowingly, or is forced to at this point knowingly provide, What about Tulsi Gabbard,
the newly confirmed Director of National Intelligence, someone who was a Democratic member of Congress, really a gadfly in the Democratic Party, who was vocal about privacy rights and at least previously championed the release of Edward Snowden.
She's now serving in the Trump administration.
She's walked back some of her more bold privacy positions, but she is fighting this Snoopers Charter attempt to break encryption at Apple.
Can you explain a little bit where Tulsi stands on this?
Yeah, and this is really where the global significance, I think, shines through.
I want to say about two weeks ago, Representative Biggs and Senator Wyden, both tremendous privacy champions, sent the Director of National Intelligence a letter saying, you know, this is an issue in so many words.
What are you going to do about it?
And the Director of National Intelligence responded kind of encouragingly quickly, frankly, and I believe described it as an egregious threat.
To privacy rights.
And frankly, she's exactly right.
That is encouraging, I think, is the easiest way to summarize it.
And if it's okay with you, I would spell out a little bit more about what it means for the...
So in the United States, we have our own very complicated relationship between the government and encryption.
And we've...
Actually, for those of us who have been doing this work for a long time, you've been able to sense...
There is a bit of a gradient of opinions about encryption and, frankly, privacy generally when it comes to government agencies.
So you have on one side, the NSA certainly invades a lot of privacy, certainly represents a threat to privacy.
Also, clearly a little more understanding of the value of N10 encryption, which I'd like to circle back to in a moment, actually.
But, you know, over to the far other side of the extreme or the other extreme is the FBI. And the FBI has a history of trying to do precisely what the UK just succeeded in doing.
About almost a decade ago, folks may remember that there were protests in front of FBI offices because the FBI was on the cusp, was seeking, in fact, and on the cusp of securing, a court order to do the exact same thing.
And you're referencing the San Bernardino terrorist attacks, or is this another?
So, yeah.
I mean, this ends up showing up whenever there's an attack, especially considering encryption at some level is increasingly built into things, which is frankly just good overall.
But yes, you'll run into a situation like Santa Bernardino where there's a phone, the government wants to access it, and I'm not even going to say they can't because that's actually...
It's kind of not true.
They can't do it as easily as they want to, and it might be worth spelling that part out a little bit.
But overall, yes, after the San Bernardino attack, there was a phone that the FBI wanted to access, and they thought the easiest way to do it was to force Apple to, I mean, basically, the technical side of it looked something along the lines of forcing Apple to sign a software update.
That was not an update of software.
It was just to install a backdoor.
The second something like that exists, once again, it's one of the most valuable things in the world.
Every bad actor on the planet would think of it as the Holy Grail.
You have potentially infinite applications of it, and the ability to exploit it is of terrifying value, unfortunately.
And this is one of the things I wanted to unpack.
This is not just a privacy issue.
This is also a security issue.
We have heard government agencies' political, you know, I think actually cynical political voices for many, many years argue, you know, we can have privacy and security, et cetera, et cetera.
This is one of these moments where privacy is security.
The question as to whether or not the FBI can access your phone is the exact same question as to whether or not Saudi Arabia can access your phone or Russia can access your phone or China can access your phone.
And that's if you trust the United States government.
And unfortunately, the United States government has also given us reasons not to be super trusting of it.
There is no end, frankly, to the consequences of a...
The world where end-to-end encryption is effectively banned.
If you listen to any of these government agencies, whether it's in the UK or here in the US, whether it's the FBI or others, they are focused on saying, hey, we're doing this to prevent child predators, terrorists, some type of criminal that's emotionally evocative.
It's only tailored to stop those bad guys.
But once you break end-to-end encryption, you create this backdoor.
It's not just for the government to use.
Clearly, any nation-state and cybercriminal or terrorist group, really anyone who wants to invade your privacy rights, it's creating a gigantic opening for any kind of actor that wants to enter this space.
Could you just talk a little bit about that?
No, I mean, I think you have it exactly right.
It's worth thinking about how this would work in practice, including a detail that I think kind of gives me chills.
Let's imagine that there is a backdoor, whether it's end-to-end encryption, generally specific to Apple services or any number of other services, and a lot of them do depend on strong encryption.
Those actors are also...
Strongly incentivized to not reveal that they have that access.
Just like the NSA wouldn't want everybody else to know that they've got access to some system that they want to keep their access classified or otherwise hidden because, of course, they don't want people to avoid that service.
They're trying to get the people who are using that service.
In this case, if there is a skeleton key to Apple's encryption at any level, Firstly, the amount of targeting that would occur at, you know, from those bad actors, the nation states, the cyber criminals, etc., you know, directed at whoever had access to that skeleton key is, it would be tremendous.
It would be a threat to those people, frankly.
Two, if they did have that access, once they secured, you know, once they gained, you know, it's math, right?
So it's not, once you know the equation, There you go, right?
You don't need to tell anybody.
It's not like the key goes missing.
It's not like a physical key goes missing out of the office.
It's somebody else knows your secret passcode, in so many words.
They are never going to tell anybody that.
They might sell it to somebody for a billion dollars, but they're not going to tell anybody that they've got it, and the person who buys it sure isn't either, because suddenly their billion-dollar investment is not worth so much.
But there's something else here that I think is really important to touch on.
The government, whether it's the UK government, the US government, or any other government, has never really been kept out of accessing any of these devices.
So the reason why they approach it this way is because they want to make it as easy as possible to go after as many different devices or accounts or people as possible.
However, what we saw in the San Bernardino case is extremely illuminating because, you know, just the individual phone itself Is not perfect.
The particular software update they have is not perfect.
The version, right?
There are plenty of companies that sell special access approaches, in so many words.
Plug the phone into this box.
It will do that update that you want to force Apple to do.
The difference is that it's not an Apple-signed security vulnerability being forced into a device.
Instead, it's this one phone, and yeah, you're going to have to do it.
The ACLU published a fantastic resource that I love to encourage the FBI to review whenever they have this question as a policy matter back during the San Bernardino debate.
And they literally walked through how you could crack that phone.
And I think they even put the math down.
It was like, this would not cost more than $50,000.
And literally, this is the way it would work.
You've got the phone.
You need a passcode to enter it, right?
Not the backdoor skeleton key version.
You need that individuals.
That is the other way, right?
There are still two keys to access this information without the one that they're trying to force Apple to create.
At the end of the day...
Every password is only so strong.
And a lot of phones, including the San Bernardino one, you're talking about four to six digits.
At that time, you were just talking about numbers, although you can use, obviously, other characters nowadays.
You clone that phone.
You make a copy of it.
It comes through encrypted.
So you've got potentially as many of the copies of that phone as you need.
And then you run.
You brute force it.
Try to brute force it.
Exactly.
You just try all the passwords you can until you get one that works.
It's simply plausible.
It's just a way to do it.
Again, they're not really looking for access to that one phone.
They're looking for an easier way to access any number of phones, whatever phone that they run into in the future, and they want precedent to be able to do it whenever they want.
That's really what's at stake whenever this debate shows up and wherever this debate shows up.
In the San Bernardino case, there are some fantastic experts who do a lot of research on what the FBI's capabilities are and or should be.
Susan Landau comes to mind.
The FBI is, unfortunately, not very good at this side of the equation.
This is maybe one of the things that's fueling their desire to create a backdoor in everybody's phone is that they're...
Just not that good at this.
Unfortunately, of course, a skeleton key that compromises everybody's cybersecurity is a very bad answer to that challenge.
But instead of the $50,000 approach that the ACLU laid out step by step, you know, eight years ago, they ended up just paying, I think, Celebrate.
As a company, a million dollars for, you know, for a particular service that unlocked that phone.
So, you know, I actually think we run into a waste fraud and abuse angle from that perspective because it's just a bad use of taxpayer money.
And I don't love the idea of taxpayer money going to companies that are actively selling privacy or actively selling our privacy, I should say.
But again, still significantly better than the skeleton key that compromises.
Well, I want to also discuss one aspect of this that's potentially unknown.
We don't really know the answer, but maybe we can just talk a little bit about the dynamics.
And that is the evolution of the Trump administration.
During the first Trump administration, there were not signs that this was a very privacy-forward Republican administration.
You know, Democrats have not been great on this issue as well.
Much more deferential to these FBI demands to break encryption or to expand surveillance powers.
And we've seen really a change within the Republican Party in just the last few years, perhaps because of the FBI's conduct in the kind of Russia investigations, because of some of the potential civil liberties violations around January 6th and some of those nonviolent protesters.
Whatever it may be, we've seen it in Congress.
Very loyal and supporters of the president, MAGA Republicans, who have been vocal and working actually with House progressives in beating back the FBI's 702 powers, which is a different debate, but it's related in the sense that these are expansive powers for the government to kind of snoop on private communications.
Now that Tulsi Gabbard is kind of supporting this pushback, Yeah,
I mean, yes.
The first thing that I would want everybody to recognize going into any conversation about this is privacy, especially as it relates to privacy from the government, is not a left versus right issue.
It splits both parties right down the middle.
We had a ferocious fight last year around reauthorization of Title VII of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of FISA. I don't think I've seen, and I'd love for somebody to let me know if there's anything that quite looks like it, but the marquee reform that privacy advocates were fighting for was something called a backdoor search fix.
And we get into the substance.
The short form is, should the government be able to access communications that people in the United States send to people overseas and may receive from people overseas without Getting a warrant, in so many words.
We were all, and for over a decade, the civil liberties advocates have been fighting for, yes, you should get a warrant before that.
It's a communication.
You need a warrant to look at a communication if it involves a person in the United States.
Okay.
That vote, April 12th, I believe, 2024, we lost by one vote, 212 to 212 on the House floor.
It was as close to 50-50 on both sides, on the Democratic votes and the Republican votes.
In other words, half of the Democrats voted against privacy, half of them voted for privacy, and the Republicans the same.
Now, the reason I mention this is because understanding the Trump administration, and to be honest, who can fully understand the Trump administration, one or two, in any event?
Is very much informed by this context within the Republican Party.
And this is just a debate that does not look like any other debate.
So it's, I think, maybe the most interesting prism with which one can analyze the administration.
But going back to the first Trump administration, you had folks like Bill Barr, certainly, at the Department of Justice as Attorney General.
Bill Barr arguably invented the modern surveillance state.
Now, I have no idea if that was something that was on Trump's radar or anybody else in the first administration's radar at the time, but certainly we have watched Trump and people around Trump shift away from Bill Barr-styled Republicans.
At the same time, we saw other people in the administration say unhelpful things, and I think we can even see that split today.
Just looking at the last month of activity, for instance, around Trump's nominations.
The Director of National Intelligence has a long history of being pro-privacy, and it is very encouraging to see her go back to those roots, in so many words, in this dynamic with the encryption.
She further, in her questions that she was asked by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is, with the exception of Ron Wyden and Senator Heinrich, kind of famously anti-privacy.
But they asked her a series of questions about Title VII, Section 702 in particular, of FISA, including what do you think about this backdoor search fix issue?
And it was very interesting.
Senator Lankford, also a Republican, famously anti-privacy.
You know, did this whole media tour about two weeks or a week before her confirmation hearing and said she's totally flipped on the issue.
She's pro-FISA now.
She loves surveillance.
You know, I was astounded at how many TV shows he got on to make that point.
The questions for the record came out.
And while it's not repeal FISA, which is close to where...
Representative Gabbard was at the time, or about a decade ago.
She actually explicitly endorsed, you should get a warrant before you access these communications.
And that is very specifically the proposal that we were pushing last year and for the last 10 years.
And that she has a history of support.
Now, that's not representative of the whole administration.
Exact harmony across policy positions is not what I would think of as a marker of Trump administrations.
Kash Patel explicitly rejected it during his confirmation hearing.
Now, the director of national intelligence and the director of the FBI happen to be two of the most important voices going into, you know, in terms of these questions.
So I don't think we know where Kash Patel is on the N10 encryption issue.
I certainly hope that he's in a better position than where the FBI was during the first Trump administration, where they sought a similar, almost identical kind of order as the UK secured against Apple.
But we know at the very least that he's not really standing up for reforming FISA, at least not as far as his confirmation hearing would tell us.
So where is this all going to land?
I don't know.
Folks should be aware that that ferocious fight that I just referred to from 2024 is coming right back around as we speak.
That Title VII of FISA was only reauthorized for two years.
And so that means that all of that debate is coming back around with a timer, with an expiration date of April 2026. And that debate, generally they take about a year to play out.
So, you know, I think in about a month, I mean, we already saw a lot of conversation about these issues in the context of Patel and Gabbard's nominations.
But I think it's going to continue to escalate because that's going to be one of the biggest policy questions that Congress faces this session.
And it's also one of the most complicated.
Yeah.
Yeah, and we saw just in the last reauthorization debate just incredible revelations that the FBI had even spied on the domestic and for, you know, what's effectively the domestic communications of even sitting members of Congress.
So, you know, I think it'll be so interesting to watch the reauthorization next year as it's, you know, the partisan dynamics change when now it's a Republican in power, you But hopefully this coalition, this populist coalition for privacy holds.
Sean, I want to thank you again for joining us.
This was great, and thank you for your insights.
Of course.
Thank you, Lee.
And I certainly agree with you.
We have a lot of fight ahead of us and a little bit of a reason to be optimistic about at least this one thing.
Great.
Thank you again.
Okay, my guest today is Faz Shakir.
He's a former journalist, a former advisor to Democratic leadership.
He was the campaign manager for Bernie Sanders' previous presidential campaign, the co-founder of More Perfect Union, a new media startup that uplifts the stories of working-class Americans, and most recently, a candidate for the chair of the Democratic National Committee.
Faz, welcome to the program.
Thank you for having me, Lee.
Good to see you.
Yeah, great to see you.
Well, I just want to ask kind of big picture question.
Where are the Democrats?
You know, I think that's what a lot of people are asking as Trump is kind of pushing on all fronts.
You know, whether it's Doge cutting the federal workforce, in many cases, a lot of seasoned government scientists and other kind of longtime government workers slashing financial regulations now with a budget that.
Well, Democrats are lost in general because of a certain reason.
So let's get into the why.
Why are Democrats lost?
And it's, I think, in general because they've lost the DNA of what used to be.
A core Democrat.
A core Democrat, going back to the lineage of, let's say, Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Truman or Kennedy or Johnson, was focused on economic justice issues.
The plight of average working class Americans in improving their lives.
The notion of being an economic justice party has long been the backbone of being a Democrat.
So regardless of how you might feel about a lot of other things, it was understood that, quote-unquote, an old-school Democrat, to this day, if you go out and talk to people, Lee, right, and say, hey, what do you think about some of those old-school Democrats?
There's a lot of support for that notion.
The old-school Democrat was somebody who just cared about the working person.
Working man, working woman, and tried to improve their lives and had ideas, specific ideas to improve them.
We are more divorced now as a Democratic Party from that notion than I think.
Has ever been the case, at least as long as I've been alive.
Now the notions of being a Democrat are not fit for a moment in which we are living in massive wealth and income inequality.
People are angrier than ever at billionaire class and corporate exploitation and greed and want champions who focus on that issue.
And at the same time, the core Democratic brand that used to be around those issues is more focused on other things than that.
And now you get the answer as to why.
The Democrats are both lost, why their approval ratings are so low.
That's at least my answer to the question.
Well, you know, there's this concept of the Brahmin left that social democratic parties all across the West, the old school labor parties or the social democratic parties of Europe, and just like the Democratic Party in the US, you know, used to represent labor unions and people active in representing working class people, middle class people.
And now...
The upper echelons of these parties are run by the children of bankers, pharmaceutical executives.
It's run by people who only went to elite colleges.
And, you know, just to share an anecdote, a friend of mine who works adjacent to financial services, you know, he went to one of these diversity conferences recently.
And in private and at the kind of panel discussion, everyone said, oh, no, you know, this is a racist, sexist.
We're going to fight like hell against this administration.
But then at the cocktail party after, they said, nothing could be better.
We're excited for our stock portfolio.
We're excited for the mergers and acquisitions as they roll back the FTC and get rid of Lena Kahn.
We're excited for our business prospects.
So there's kind of a little bit of fronting going on in terms of virtue signaling about what you're supposed to say as a member of that class versus...
How they are materially affected by a lot of these policies.
Could you talk a little bit about this dynamic in the current Democratic Party?
That elite class that you're talking about has long affected the Republican Party, and Trump has been trying to fight as a countervailing trend to that of the notions of what was a Mitt Romney-style Democratic Party or what was a John McCain-style Republican Party.
Now, you know, he's obviously got a kind of working class populist element to him, at least particularly as he campaigns, in the way in which he politics, in the way in which he tries to talk to regular people.
We can get into that.
But at the same time, you've got the fact that the Democratic Party, that elitism has now grabbed hold.
of the ideology and the vision and the direction of how we campaign and how we would talk.
So, you know, no need to litigate over again, but if you look at the last Harris campaign, at the moment where she jumps in, there is a directional pull, gravitational pull from a Mark Cuban or Reid Hoffman or the elites to say this is the style of a Democratic Party that we think people want to hear from.
It's targeting the Liz Cheney's of the world.
It's a moderate right party, not a Bernie Sanders party.
This is not one that revolts against too much power in the hands of too few.
That is not the core ethos.
And it was kind of telling, right, that Joe Biden on his exit says oligarchy.
That's a major problem.
Right.
But it was that that notion was startling to many people because the Democratic Party had not.
We're not discussed or raised or oriented around that until here's the President of the United States on the exit saying we should be fighting oligarchy.
You're like, right, but some of us have been long arguing that is the actual mission.
And people know when you're bullshitting on this question, right?
If it isn't your mission, tell me both when you're engaged in friction or fight against somebody with power that makes them upset.
One of the reasons that Bernie has succeeded so well is that, look at his enemies.
They identify him.
They're like, we are concerned about you.
And that way advertises that he's the real deal.
And his solution orientation is taking them on.
Medicare for All is an actual problem for the healthcare industry.
They don't like it.
And you look at the Democratic brand.
Are we offering any of that?
Are we picking both fights of those people suggesting we don't like what the Democrats are doing?
In some cases...
When they are upset, Elon Musk is a good example of this.
Mark Zuckerberg, another good example of this.
They were upset about the things that Lena Kahn was doing, that Rohit Chopra was doing.
We're obviously learning more about that now.
They move away from the Democratic Party, say we're going to be MAGA now.
But is the Democratic Party leaning into that and telling you, hey, we have so upset Elon Musk as a billionaire because of the following reasons.
These are our core values.
We are pro-union, pro-labor party.
He is not.
And he has decided to be a union buster.
Therefore, we are angry at him and are going to take actions against him.
That is why he's over there and we're over here.
That isn't a message that you hear from the modern iteration of the Democratic Party, and I would like to see more of it.
I'm kind of puzzled by where Democrats stand and fight on some of these issues.
Obviously, it's a very crowded field.
There's a lot of issues to fight on.
I kind of understand the complexity there.
You do have to make a priority and pick your battles.
Just watching, why stand in front of USAID, which does have a complicated history.
This is an agency that has played a role in undermining democratic elections and overthrowing foreign governments.
It's very complicated.
It also does some very good things.
They were rallying in front of USAID, but CFPB is being wound down where this is an agency.
That has returned billions to consumers.
That's taking on the oligarchs.
That's taking on both Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
And you don't see the rally outside of the office there.
There's a big rollback of the protections against debanking.
This is kind of a marquee issue for both the right and the left.
And here's all these Republicans that are complete hypocrites on this issue.
Again, Democrats did not seem to make an issue out of this.
And to add, agreeing with everything you say, to add a couple of points to this.
One is...
The Democratic Party, in my view, is at its best when it also embraces being a reform party of the government.
Because we are so associated...
We want them to function.
We want them to do well and do right.
And the other side, and Musk exemplifies it now, doesn't believe in the institution.
This has been a long core, as you know, ideological trend of the right, from drowning government in bathtubs and just cutting the legs out from underneath any government service, privatizing and outsourcing all functions of it.
We're now seeing that iteration, but a core good Democrat.
I so care about this institution of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and delivering for taxpayers that I am angry at corruption inside of it.
And so therefore, I will root it out ourselves in the right way.
But when we don't do that job...
And people don't feel like you're going to root out corruption at USAID or like a waste or a fraud or abuse.
If they don't feel like you're going to do it, they obviously are now gravitating to the guy who's going to bring the machete or the chainsaw.
And I want a Democratic Party who embraces government reform.
And there are examples of it, right?
We just don't talk that way.
We don't talk about taking on corruption within government.
Why do we have a Medicare drug pricing negotiation program?
What is the reason for it?
Because you're taking on corruption of a pharma industry that says, we're going to charge you what the hell we want to charge you.
And you say, no, that is not the way the government works.
It's a different kind of a language and a talk, right?
Why do we create the CFPB, by the way?
Because we're taking on the corruption of a financial industry that felt like we were unregulated out of the housing market, and no one can tell us what to do or say, well, yeah, guess what?
We're going to take you on, and here's how.
Here's how we're going to reform government to do it.
So I would like the modern iteration of the Democratic Party to say, we are a reformer.
We find corruption and waste, fraud, and abuse in it, and we're comfortable and happy to take it on.
That means people get fired when they do bad jobs.
No one got fired under the Biden administration.
Hold people accountable for doing it.
You have to care deeply about it.
And we'll get into this together, Lee, but also this moment calls for a populist revolt.
And you and I have lived through some iterations of this, so we'll have a nice discussion about this.
But you can sense the kind of kindling is there.
People are hungry for that kind of Occupy Wall Street, Tea Party revolt of a different nature.
It's there at this moment if the right leaders and the right people grab hold of it.
Talking about that populist revolt, I'm broadcasting from San Francisco.
I think the power of San Francisco is part of the problem in the Democratic Party.
My hometown here in San Francisco exerts a lot of influence in the party.
And this city does not necessarily represent most communities in America.
It's very high income.
It's people see the problems of open drug use and crime and they see all the waste and fraud and abuse of, you know, the $1.7 million toilet and, you know, all the kind of issues that become like a parody of San Francisco and all the tech wealth and opulence.
Meanwhile, we have rural community health centers closing.
We have a rural poverty and overdose.
And Democrats have turned away from rural America.
I think what was fascinating about both of Bernie Sanders' campaigns is that he at least attempted to pivot the party a little bit away from the coastal elites, the big cities, and to talk a little bit about rural America because he's done, you know, as for Democrats, most Democrats over the last 20 years have disappeared in rural America.
Bernie Sanders has still performed very well in Vermont in its rural communities by talking about issues that are important to those communities and then also taking away the kind of divisive social issues and just putting those to the side.
You know, he's not prioritized guns or other kind of more divisive social issues, identity issues, and created kind of an on-ramp for those types of people who are also struggling.
Can you talk a little bit about that, why the Democratic Party is constantly reflecting the interests of a city like my own, like San Francisco?
Well, and it's a divorce from, again, the old school Democrat who used to create the Tennessee Valley Authority and care about, you know, agricultural farmers and making sure they were getting a good pay for, you know, milk or produce.
I understood the markets that a lot of the small business entrepreneurs were having to live in.
And right now, the major issue for not only rural communities, but a lot of people throughout the heartland is just they are at a loss of great economic freedom.
Do not feel like they can call their own shots because megaliths, a lot of them live in the San Francisco Bay Area.
You take the big tech world.
What has happened with big tech is that the notions of hyperscaling.
This is something that Reid Hoffman cares deeply about.
Hyperscaling has taken over the notions of how you run a business.
So it isn't sufficient enough to be a farmer who services Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa with some good beef anymore.
No, no, no.
In order to succeed in the modern marketplace, you have to hyperscale.
You have to sell to anybody and everybody.
And the persons who can do that, Lee, you know this well, are the big tech.
They're the ones who can take a small farmer and say, we'll be your middleman.
We'll be your agristats.
We will be your data broker and help you reach tons and tons of people.
But by the way, we're in control for your price.
You're not going to get a great cut.
You know who's going to get a great cut?
Uber as a company, not the Uber driver.
You know who's going to get a great cut?
Ticketmaster, not the small business entrepreneurs trying to hold the event in Omaha, Nebraska.
And that is what's going on all over this country.
And we as a Democratic Party become divorced from the notions of the modern economy and the people who live in it.
Whether you're a small business entrepreneur, a consumer, a person who's trying to work as a nurse or a teacher at one of these rural schools.
If we get closer to those, become a populist party, become a working class party, become somebody associated with regular people again, we'll be on our way back.
And this moment provides all those opportunities because you have Elon Musk tearing it down.
You're saying, hey, here's veterans being fired every single day.
Medical researchers being fired every single day.
Here's a whole bunch of social security workers being fired every single day.
And they live not only in D.C. or San Francisco, they live across this country.
They're park rangers, right?
They're people who are doing wonderful and are wonderful people who service others beyond themselves.
If we can't find it right now in us to connect with those types of people, what use is being a political party?
What is your purpose, right?
You got to open your doors and let people in and connect with them, right now especially.
You know, you made some headlines recently in your campaign for DNC chair.
In particular, there are questions around identity politics.
During the campaign, you know, the DNC hosts these forums for the various candidates for chair to essentially debate and discuss the issues.
At some of the last forums, I think in Georgetown or in the D.C. area, there are questions about, okay, what should we be doing as a party?
Should we be creating a new kind of council?
For Muslim Americans, for other identity groups, transgender Americans, who need to create some quotas in terms of, you know, uplifting certain identity areas, you are the only candidate to not raise your hand, to reject that.
And it led to a little bit of controversy.
Could you discuss what happened there?
Yeah, I mean, so I was at this forum and there was a person who initially raised their hand to say, you know, as a transgender person, they would like, you know, certain seats on a kind of elite committee of the Democratic National Committee based off their identity.
And in my view, I said, I don't like that kind of an approach to Martin Democratic Party because it does a couple of things.
Both it rewards you for just the sake of identity, which is splitting us all apart from each other.
Saying, hey, you're somehow different than I am, and as a result of your difference from me, you should be rewarded especially with a pat on the head, literally a seat.
And I said, I want us to be thinking in collective endeavor, in solidarity, about purpose and mission.
What do we want to accomplish?
And I think it leads to the false notions that I've accomplished something.
If I got a seat.
On this thing or that thing?
I mean, the next person who asked me a question was, hey, I'm a Muslim and I would like a Muslim caucus.
And I was like, here, I'm a Muslim and I reject that idea.
I don't want you to have a Muslim caucus because they're going to make you believe that if you got a caucus, you got a nice little pat on the head and you won something.
You don't win anything.
Like, the way in which we should think about purpose and mission, as I was suggested if I was to run the DNC, is say, hey...
We need to be a grassroots party.
We want to do grassroots organizing across this country.
That's a purpose and a mission.
Now, as a Muslim or a transgender person, I want to see your ideas of how we would bring your communities into this party.
That's a purpose and a mission.
Not you getting a seat on some kind of elite.
No, how are you going to bring people in?
So in addition to grassroots organizing, how about more working class candidates?
That's a purpose and a mission.
How about you as a Muslim person or you as a black person or a Latino person?
Help us find and identify the barriers that stop working class candidates from being able to run for office.
That's a purpose and a mission.
And I wanted us to say, let's abolish some of these.
Identity caucuses that I think too frequently say we're accomplishing something and getting truly pats on the heads.
I'm reminded, actually, you might remember this, that the head of Goldman Sachs, I remember a few years back, David Solomon, he said, new plan, Goldman Sachs will only invest, and I forget, he might have said it was like a billion dollars.
We're only going to make investments into major billion-dollar-plus companies.
That have at least one seat devoted to diversity on the board.
And it was like revolutionaries.
Like, oh, we're going to care so much about diversity, equity, inclusion.
The new way in which we're going to make investments is somehow you have to tell us that a diverse person is on your board.
And that was the method of how we were going to solve the economy's problems.
A lot of these diversity, equity, inclusion campaigns came from the Goldman Sachs and JP Morgans of the world who said, hey, instead of you joining in solidarity to compel us to unrig this economy and make it work for working people, how about I split you off?
I want to find us talking about our similarities, not our differences, because when we talk about and focus on these differences, we're giving the powerful a way to bring wedges into us that divide us from the truly class-based, populist, major things we've got to address together.
So anyways, you get a sense of my frustration about this issue.
So I share the frustration.
I've done a lot of reporting in this area.
I talked to a whistleblower from BlackRock who was very against these initiatives because he said, look, internally the way that BlackRock and other asset managers, big corporations spoke about this, this was a way of distracting the public away from corporate reform.
This is how to get the...
The public and the regulators not to talk about higher corporate taxes or better, you know, standards for workers, how to get regulations on pollution.
No, if we just kind of show them that we're doing this superficial thing on a board of directors or some ESG report that says, hey, we've moved from 42 percent people of color to 44 percent people of color, you know, a meaningless statistic that can be easily fudged.
That's the way we kind of do this corporate reputation washing.
And it's just kind of.
I think it's hilarious in a dark way that so many left-wing organizations, Democratic Party organizations, have embraced the same school of thought, that rather than do meaningful reforms that help actual people, they do this kind of superficial identity politics that comes straight from corporate America.
And I would say, you know, what you and I kind of also know is that...
There's a reason why it's attractive.
And one of the reasons why it's attractive is it's a tangible and easy result.
If you're frustrated about the modern economy and the rigged nature of it, it's like, oh, I could accomplish getting a Latino on the hiring committee of this particular corporation or something.
I can get them on the audit committee.
And you're like, great.
But that didn't accomplish.
It does feel like for people looking for quote-unquote wins, if you're a non-profit advocacy group, you're trying to find, can I get something to tell people I got?
Yeah.
You got it.
The things that you and I are talking about are pretty high.
They're really important things that would change the nature of the modern economy, right?
A class-based, populist approach to delivering on health care, delivering on wages, delivering paid sick leave, child care, elder care, retirements again.
Those things, that's where I think we're at our strongest.
That's what people expect of us.
But the deviance and divergence away from this.
Is a problem.
And all I'm saying is I can sense why people gravitate to it.
It's like, oh, I think I got a win.
And I'm like, no, you didn't.
Please, don't sell us on the notions that you got a win.
And that win, in some sense, is pushing other people away from us.
So now you're a white working class person in Appalachia.
It's like, hey, I don't think you fight for me.
I don't think I belong in this group.
And I'm like, no, you definitely belong here.
This is who we're supposed to be.
Fight for working class people, and you're certainly one of them.
Well, in addition to pivoting the Democratic Party away from these kind of more superficial image-related issues and towards a more working-class setting, you also talked about a pretty radical change to the party in terms of changing it into kind of a new media operation that is more than just like a press release center, something that actually speaks to the way that people receive and interact online.
I feel like that's kind of a challenge to also the consultant class that have kind of done the same thing over and over again with very few results.
Could you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, let me work you upstream first.
The problem of a modern Democratic Party is that we have lost a sense of populism and grassroots-ism within it.
It means that regular people who want to associate with the Democratic Party have fewer opportunities to do so now than they probably did at any time in the recent past.
And so I'm saying open the doors to the party.
Now is the time, right?
Why are we relying on other groups like, let's say, Indivisible MoveOn or other outside actors?
Make the Democratic Party a place both of building civic organization of the left.
And if you do that, it gets to this point that we're talking about is when you try to measure for attracting people at scale.
If that becomes a way in which you assess your success of an operation, the small-dollar donor base and the vibrancy of volunteer actions, how many people attend in-person events that we put together, when you start to measure for the quote-unquote populist things, it will also give you a sense of what people want to hear from you.
You will kind of get a sense of like...
The inputs into this party are no longer, as you say, consultant-driven or from the top.
There's a reason why the modern Democratic Party, if I needed to reach 10 million people tomorrow, Lee, right?
And I said, if I went to Chuck Schumer's office and he says to me, hey, I got this great thing, I need to reach 10 million people.
And I'm like, right, there's only one method available to you to do that.
What is it?
It's a paid ad.
So if a paid ad is your only way to reach lots and lots of people, what does it mean?
Well, now I have to go reach wealthy donors to give me the dollars.
Then I have to go work with a consultant who's going to produce the ad, digital TV, and then I'm going to force it down people's throats without even knowing whether...
As an input into this party, do regular people want to hear this message that you've concocted?
Do you think that this 30-second ad will resonate besides having run a poll or focus group?
Are there any other inputs coming into this party?
That's what I'm controlling for.
That's what I want to address.
And so when you drive me to the issue of media...
If you're building a good YouTube channel, any social media outlets of this party to deliver content and news, you're also going to get a sense of what regular people are interested in hearing from you about.
And I'm really focused on that idea.
So I want media, to be clear.
I want us to be telling stories that are class-based, both about our history and ideas and solutions that we've...
But I also just want to fundamentally change the notions of what are your inputs as a broken party that is too reliant on elites and wealthy?
How do you change that?
Well, one of the ways you change that is you start to prioritize grassroots media, like reaching regular people.
All right, Faz.
I really appreciate your time, and it's a great conversation.
