David Pakman is a left-wing progressive political commentator and host of The David Pakman Show. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
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1. The Rebel and the Kingdom: https://amzn.to/3p9pLDt
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:49 - Political ideologies
11:17 - Twitter drama
26:13 - Biden vs Trump
33:13 - AOC
35:54 - Bernie Sanders
44:02 - Donald Trump: Pros and cons
1:09:52 - Joe Biden: Pros and cons
1:16:14 - Hate for politicians
1:32:35 - RFK Jr
1:45:55 - Republican voters
1:52:36 - Conspiracy theories
1:57:33 - January 6th
2:06:37 - Hunter Biden's laptop
2:10:53 - Tucker Carlson
2:13:51 - Wokeism and censorship
2:32:18 - ChatGPT and universities
2:38:16 - Libertarianism
2:41:53 - Elon Musk
2:50:21 - Dealing with attacks
2:55:03 - Truth
3:00:54 - Israel and Palestine
3:04:48 - Ukraine war
3:12:49 - Books
3:23:29 - Mortality
3:25:39 - Advice for young people
3:27:11 - Hope for the future

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I tweet that and then I finished the day and I wake up the next morning and I glance at my phone.

I'm seeing all these verified accounts that are, you know, quote tweeting it and demanding a retraction and whatever.

And I go, oh, okay, this looks like it's getting, looks like it's getting some attention.

I then continue about my day around noon.

I hear from my dad that he got a hundred messages from you should have aborted your son to we're going to find all of you to whatever else.

He's like, I don't know what this is, but I have a hundred DMS to everything else you can imagine.

And I start to get emails about, you know, we, you know, your Jewish faith, this and that and the other thing.

And so at that point, to me, I thought this is just going to get worse and worse and worse.

And I really regret doing that because over the 48 hours that followed, yes, the attacks escalated, it went through Candace Owens, and then at FoxNews.com, Newsmax, kind of peaking with Donald Trump Jr.

The following is a conversation with David Pakman, a left-wing progressive political commentator and host of the David Pakman Show.

I hope to continue to have many conversations on politics with prominent, insightful, and sometimes controversial figures across the political spectrum.

David and I have been planning to speak for a long time, and I'm sure we'll speak many more times.

This conversation was challenging, eye-opening, and fun.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's David Backman.

Are there interesting differences to you between terms like liberal, democrat, left-wing, leftist, progressive, socialist, communist, Marxist, far left, center left, all of these labels?

Is there interesting distinctions between them?

1 is if you just want to say, let's define each of these as political terms, they're all different terms.

You can be a progressive ideologically, but not be a member of the Democratic Party.

Many say the Democratic Party isn't even really very progressive.

So these are certainly terms that we could define, in order to have a conversation about the next thing, kind of as a precursor to a conversation.

Sometimes the terms are used in order to tag someone with a certain ideology that's not really linked to policy or any particular political question, but they can be used positively or negatively to just kind of say, here is the image of this individual that I have in my mind.

So like Marxist is right now very popularly being used by some on the right, to attack Democrats.

There's very few actual Marxists, certainly not in positions of power in the United States, but even among the general population.

So I think it's important to distinguish, are we defining these terms because we want to compare and contrast the ideas that a particular group might bring to the discussion, or are we using them as insults or to stifle conversation?

There are terms that can be used to start a

And the use of those terms is evolving rapidly month by month.

So the term leftist, I think, is a relatively popular term now to use in the negative context to describe what an outraged left-wing commentator.

I think what you're kind of grasping onto is that there's probably some set of ideas that would apply to most of those who consider themselves to be on the left.

The discussion of how that term is mostly being used is not about policy ideas.

You're accurately kind of identifying that.

And it does seem like progressive is no longer being used as a smear and leftist is being used as a smear more at this point.

Okay, but sometimes some of these terms are useful.

Like can we try to pick the terms that are useful like liberal and progressive and Democrat?

Is there an interesting definable distinction between liberal and progressive to you.

That's maybe 1 of the most interesting ones.

10 years ago, liberal often meant what now we mean by progressive.

More recently, the progressive socialist leaning part of the political spectrum has started to use liberal to mean Joe Biden, to mean someone who is not really left enough.

So liberals, very interesting because I remember talking with my audience years ago, maybe 8 years ago or something like that, where I identified, I'm going to now use the term progressive more commonly to describe my own beliefs because liberal has now been made a smear, it's being shifted into something else, and it also means more of like a center-left politics.

So it's changed in some sense by necessity, by force, and also because the spectrum has shifted to some degree.

Now liberal meaning some kind of embodiment of the mainstream Democratic Party, almost?

To some degree, sometimes I'm called, I'm written off by, you know, within my space, there are all sorts of shades of gray, which I'm sure we can talk about, about where I am versus should be, could be, or am wrongly placed.

And sometimes an attack on me is he's just a lib, meaning I'm not left enough.

I'm not progressive, socialist, wherever else you want to go.

So yeah, the problem with a lot of these terms and they're used very casually by people who call into my show, is that unless we actually define them each time, they very often mean very different things to different people and often come with an agenda attached to them.

And so I find that they often stifle meaningful conversation rather than encourage it.

Do you sense that there's a drifting of what is the threshold to be a progressive?

Or is there, should we use progressive synonymously with democratic socialist?

I think we should not use it synonymously with democratic socialist.

And this is where there's another linguistic confusion and a political confusion.

So we'll first talk about the linguistic 1, Social democracy versus democratic socialism.

My the way I operate is democratic socialism is actually a form of socialism where 1 would seek to socialize ownership of the means of production.

As an example, social democracy is a very, highly regulated form of capitalism, the likes of which we would see in Northern Europe, Denmark, et cetera.

I associate progressivism in 2023 with social democracy and would consider democratic socialism a form of actual socialism that is different.

We're no longer talking about a capitalist organization of society.

a fundamental shift in how society operates then.

And when you talk about social democracy, you're talking about socializing a couple more things than we socialize in most modern capitalist countries.

I had this conversation with Patrick bet David recently.

We've socialized the military already in the United States.

We've socialized some health care in the sense of like the VA and Medicaid, et cetera.

We're talking about socializing a couple more things still in a capitalist country.

Democratic socialism would be something beyond that.

And, and as someone who is not a democratic socialist myself, I'm maybe not the best advocate for explaining exactly how that system would function, but it would have some version of socializing ownership of the means of production, businesses, et cetera.

So you mentioned you appeared on the PBD podcast with Patrick Baird David.

I thought actually you did well and I thought Patrick did well and it was a good conversation.

I mean, there was a little bit of tension.

And I thought that Patrick actually, so I disagree with the internet.

I thought Patrick just took on a kind of devil's advocate.

Like he was purposely being stubborn to bring out the best in you.

But the internet thought that he's being stubborn, not being open to your ideas.

I thought the tension between ideas, I think a lot of the tension had to do probably with Donald Trump and Trump supporters.

And people wrote to me after, people wrote to me the full gamut of everything you can imagine from this was your best thing you've ever done in public to you got humiliated and your mother should have aborted you.

Okay, so every and everything in between.

But the most interesting feedback I got was from people who asked me after was it incredibly tense and awkward and because it seemed so combative.

And I think I'm so used to those types of tensions in the discussions that I have, that it's very comfortable to me.

It's not like afterwards there's a grudge or it's tense or whatever the case may be.

I'm very comfortable, just I disagree with people and that's it.

So I did not find anything that happened inappropriate.

I disagreed with a lot of the things he said, certainly.

So you also spoke on Michael Knowles, I think about the idea of what is a woman.

Can you speak broadly about your conversations with people you disagree with?

Some of the cases, it feels like it's gone wrong.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple different things and I'm the first to tell you that depending on who I'm talking to, I go in with a different attitude about how quote seriously I'm taking it in the sense of whether I think it's going to be a deep policy discussion versus where whether it's going to be more of a performance for an audience that is expecting a certain thing.

And I think there's different types of shows.

When I was interviewed by this guy, Jesse Lee Peterson in Los Angeles, it's very different, for example, than when I'm talking to Patrick Bette David.

I think the reason I stopped doing the Michael Knowles show was the number of threats I would get after the fact.

That's really the reason I was glad to engage with him to the extent that the interviews were interesting and you know, we could organize it reasonably efficiently.

But the reason I stepped away was sort of the aftermath.

But I did find him to be someone who was abundantly clear about his view and where he comes from.

And while I could not possibly disagree more with him in terms of politics and culture and our backgrounds, everything is just so different.

I found it easy to engage in the conversation just because of how upfront and clear he was about what his beliefs were.

And this, I don't know how much you saw about this recent Twitter dustup I was involved in that peaked with Donald Trump Jr tweeting about me and then that then declining from there.

I have to understand like, the way you study Shakespeare, I have to study your Twitter.

I have to understand how much of it is sarcasm.

I mean, here's the thing, and I know that there are people who will say, David, you're dealing with such serious issues.

It's really not okay not to take everything you do completely seriously.

But my view is it's so incredible that I've between chance and timing and so different things fallen into a position where this is what I do professionally and it's a career and it's financially sustainable and all these different things.

I don't want to end up taking myself too seriously because I recognize the timing and lock and all of these other things.

And this could have gone a completely different way.

So my approach to a lot of this is let's not take ourselves too seriously.

And in particular on Twitter, a platform that, you know, the degree to which it should be taken very seriously maybe has changed over time.

I'm always sort of thinking a little bit tongue in cheek on Twitter.

Yeah, to make give you a 1 minute arc and then we can pick whichever parts we want.

Now you might say there's like 2 or 3 a day.

After the Nashville mass shooting at a Christian school, I tweeted snarkily, tongue in cheek to point that thoughts and prayers not only aren't particularly useful after a shooting, they also don't prevent shootings, that there's some confusion about how there would be a shooting at a Christian school, given that it is a place where prayer is taking place.

I think I jokingly said something like, were they not praying enough or correctly?

This is the only display of journalistic integrity I will show today, okay.

I would love to, because it's such an interesting decision.

Because when you tweet something, 1 of the things I've also learned is you don't often understand how it's going to be read.

It's going to be analyzed, like I mentioned, Shakespeare.

Like there's certain, the use of certain words that you regret saying in a certain kind of way, maybe just because it wasn't as eloquent, as powerful, it didn't actually convey the thing, or it's a distraction to the main message, all that kind of stuff.

Okay, The actual tweet is very surprising that there would be a mass shooting at a Christian school given that lack of prayer is often blamed for these horrible events.

Is it possible they weren't praying enough or correctly despite being a Christian school?

And a lot of people quote retweeted that, which I'm assuming was criticism.

So Colin Wright wrote, I used to consider you a reasonable progressive, but you clearly devolved into partisan hackery.

It cannot begin to fathom using the murder of children and adults at a Christian school as an opportunity to dunk on the concept of prayer." And you responded, "'I'm dunking on the people who send thoughts and prayers and do nothing else and the shootings continue.'" Okay, I'm sure there's a lot of other interactions.

Do you know what time of day I tweeted the original 1?

I feel like it was in the afternoon or evening of on a Monday?

So basically I tweet that and then I finished the day.

I might've looked once at Twitter and it had 2000 likes and a few people saying, this might've missed the mark, but it's sort of like, it's 1 of my 20, 000 tweets, I don't know.

I wake up the next morning, my baby daughter did not sleep till 7 30 the way I would like.

So she's up at 6 am and I get up and I'm just there starting to make breakfast and I glance at my phone and I'm starting to, this was when verified meant a different thing than it means now.

I'm seeing all these verified accounts that are, you know, quote, tweeting it and demanding a retraction and whatever.

And I go, oh, okay, this looks like it's getting looks like it's getting some attention.

And so at that point to me, I thought this is just going to get worse and worse and worse.

And so I deleted the tweet and I really regret doing that because over the 48 hours that followed, yes, the attacks escalated.

It went through Candace Owens and then at Fox News dot com Newsmax kind of peaking with with Donald Trump Jr.

I mean, thousands and thousands of the, okay.

But once I told my audience about what happened, I got thousands of messages from people saying, David, Only someone who doesn't know you and is determined to interpret this in the worst possible faith would think you're blaming kids who died for getting shot.

I wish you hadn't deleted it so that it would still be up and you would now see the tide kind of turning on it.

This was not a fun 3 days regardless, but I do regret having deleted it because it was a panic.

I wanted to do the quickest thing I thought I could to get people to stop trying to find family members and send them threats.

And the truth is the threats didn't stop anyway, because everybody had screenshotted it.

And is there some degree, maybe stepping outside yourself, do you regret tweeting that?

In that it feeds the mockery engine that fuels Twitter.

So like, does that tweet really represent what you believe?

the disgust with a politics that includes saying we can't touch guns.

But we're willing to point to mental health or say we need more prayer in schools or whatever.

Is it the type of snark and sarcasm that I would use if given an hour to discuss the topic rather than whatever the number of characters is now on Twitter?

And so I am very cognizant of the fact that it was unnecessarily provocative how it was written.

I think I asked a similar question to Ben Shapiro.

Do you worry that this style of presentation can turn you from being, you know, a deeply thoughtful, objective, political thinker to somebody who's just a partisan hack or partisan, what's a good word, talking head?

Do you mean with regard to Twitter or the format of my show in general?

So Twitter for now, let's start with Twitter for now.

And can you silo your style of communication on Twitter from being a virus that affects your mind.

I don't have deep thoughts about the Twitter component beyond I think across all sorts of disciplines.

This is not the best way to most effectively solve problems and figure out solutions to complex issues.

Now, right now I'm talking about Twitter.

That being said, I think all of us to some degree have to adapt our content to the platform that we're using in the same way that what I post to YouTube is different than what I post to tick tock.

What I post to Twitter is also different.

Do I think Twitter has been an unmitigated good for society?

Have I chosen to step into Twitter as 1 of the ways in which I get my message out with the good and the bad.

And I think that there is a deep conversation to be had there.

I think zooming out a little bit in terms of what I do, and I was hoping this would come up because I think it's really interesting.

I will often get emails from people who say 2 things.

I will get the, you would have such a bigger audience if you did X type emails.

And usually they are plays to sensationalism, salacious and titillating content, more pop culture stuff, et cetera.

On the other hand, it's folks who say, listen, what you're doing really isn't as serious as it could be.

And it seems like you could do something more serious and you should consider doing deep dives.

You know, once it was do a deep dive into Calvin Coolidge.

So there it's not by accident that my show is the way it is right in an hour.

I'm thinking of all the platforms I'm on and I'm saying, okay, I want to do a relatively deep dive on the federal budget.

And I want to talk about some of the, political tomfoolery going on within the post office.

And I'm going to do a segment about the wacky rally where Trump said crazy things and made up 3 words and said he endorsed a candidate who's named it.

I'm crafting that in total to find a balance between let's build this audience as much as I can in order to have a bigger base to get my message out there and include the more serious stuff with the hope that there's a little bit of something for everyone and I'm finding a balance between those 2 sides of the spectrum.

It's a deliberate thing and I'm aware that if I were producing my show 50 years ago, the balance would probably be different and it would probably change again.

If we didn't, if the show was audio only, rather than having all these video platforms, it would also be different.

But it's a decision that's proactively made to try to get the best and most out of the hour that I'm creating every day.

Well, it just feels like there's an entire machine fed by Twitter and journalism that wants to divide people.

And the drama of that division, highlighting the partisan division, the drama of that division feels like it's a tension with objective, clear thinking sometimes.

And so that's the, I worry that there's a drug to it.

There's too much fun to mock ridiculous people

And the fact that that is true to me supports, I've talked with my audience about, you know, like the old food pyramid, which I guess was like wrong, but let's imagine that there was a pyramid that made sense.

The vast majority of what I do is the top of that pyramid.

And I tell people very openly, I don't consume a lot of the type of content I produce.

And I think it's really important to, as a base, be doing critical thinking, epistemology, how do we believe the things we believe, basics about the world.

After that, reading history, economics, philosophy, et cetera.

After that, now we're getting into current events.

I would mostly be looking at consuming, primary source reporting things like associated press, whatever.

I know everybody will have a different list of what counts there.

After that is when I'd say indulge in some of the commentary type stuff that I do.

If you find that I'm thoughtful enough to make it into that, but I'm very open.

And really what I try to do on my show often is in being that at the top of the pyramid, tell people there's all this other stuff that should be forming your foundation that I hope you're consuming in addition to just watching me and I'm very open with my audience about that.

What about the shape, the dynamics, the characteristics of your audience?

Is there some degree to which you're, through mocking maybe Republicans, that there's a lean to that audience and then you become captured by the audience?

I'm relatively comfortable that it's not shaping the program to a great degree in the sense that at this point I have a pretty good sense of the things I can say that will upset what I might call my core audience.

You know, 1 of the interesting things just to briefly go back to the Twitter thing was those people who were furious with me on Twitter and they contacted my advertisers and some advertisers dropped me And on and on and on.

None of them are actually in my audience.

None of them are regular consumers of my audience.

They were kind of weaponized against me by people who said, hey, look at this.

The people who follow Candace Owens on Twitter, other than for their kind of shock value, they're not in my audience.

And with my core audience, I know there are things I can talk about that will generate, displeasure.

I guess you could say with my audience, sometimes when I touch the Israeli Palestinian conflict, that will happen sometimes on vaccines.

There's a portion of my audience that is more generally skeptical of vaccines, sometimes on some foreign policy, issues or, you know, I, I'm not a big fan of Marianne Williamson nor Bobby Kennedy Jr's, challenges to Joe Biden, not because I love Joe Biden, but because I don't consider them to be the most serious challengers.

I know there's people in my audience who don't like that.

They get, they get mad at me about that and I'm totally okay with that.

And that tension with, with my core audience.

So in that sense, I don't feel as though I've had that audience capture take place, but I know it can happen and I'm very open to being told ways in which it may be happening without me noticing.

So I've made a call for questions on Reddit for this conversation.

There's a lot of good questions that I'll probably bring up, but 1 of them was about Mary Ann Williamson asking why David thinks she is a garbage candidate, which of course-

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David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism | Lex Fridman Podcast #375