David Pakman: "The stage was really set."

0:00It's Monday, October 5th. I'm Isabella. Today, an intense conversation with David Pakman about his book, The Echo Machine, How Right Wing Extremism Created a Post-Truth America. Pakman traces the roots of Trumpism back to the backlash against the civil rights movement in the 1950s. He argues that right wing efforts to strip critical thinking and media literacy out of the curriculum in red states aren't accidental. They're strategic. When the conversation turns to misinformation, Mike pushes back hard and things get heated. Mike Pesca, David Pakman, up next. Today's executives are more threatened, more exposed, more vulnerable than ever before.

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2:24It's going to be Paxton or Tal Rico. Well, CalSheep has as of this recording in a bout of bucking decades-long trends. Tal Rico, the Democrat, winning a statewide election. He's up 59, 58 to 41, 42. But the great thing about CalSheep is, you don't have to, if you want to put money on Tal Rico, if you want to say that Tal Rico is going to win, but then you get wobbly, and the market goes up, you can cash out along the way. Or let's say you're more into the somewhat 50-50 right now. Slightly ahead, Chair Brown, Bruce John Hustead, Ohio Race. You can put your money where your instincts are, but then change your mind and cash out of the market as one would sell a stock. That's really interesting and valuable thing that CalSheep offers. But it's on CalSheep you're trading against peers in a live market, meaning there's no house. And as the probability changes, you could buy in and out of your position. For a limited time, download the CalSheep and use code GIST to get $10 when you trade

3:2710 KAL, SHI, CalSheep, trade on anything. 18-plus restrictions and eligibility will require a mid-supply event contract trading. Envolves risk and may not be suitable for all investors, prices, values, and available markets made different from those mentioned. For more information, see CalSheep.com slash regulatory. Maybe there's a weight loss goal out there and you make some progress or progress is hard, but you never quite reach the goal. Listen, you're not the only one. Weight loss by hymns can help you finally close the gap with access to a range of FDA-approved GLP-1 medications, including the Wagovi pill and the Wagovi pen. Wagovi is the first-ever GLP-1 weight loss medication available in a pill. It also comes in a pen and hymns is giving you the options to get started. With Wagovi, just go to hymns.com and complete an online consultation with a license provider who will determine if a prescription is appropriate, ready to reach your goals, visit hymns.com

4:28slash the GIST. To get personalized, affordable care for weight loss, hair loss, sex, testosterone, and more, at hihymns.com slash the GIST. hymns.com slash the GIST. Individual results may vary in stopping treatment may result in weight gain. Here's what happened when one journalist reported on DEI programs. I decided to just focus on the University of Michigan. I obtained internal documents that showed that the school had spent about a quarter of a billion dollars on DEI programs. I spent two weeks in Ann Arbor talking to everybody I could find. The unintended consequences of these programs, they had sort of left everybody to satisfy. And this expensive machinery the school had built just imploded. If you're a journalist, you are not on anyone's team. All you're trying to do is figure out as many of the facts as you can gather. The facts are going to guide you to where the story lands. You're not taking sides. I'm Nick Confessori. I'm an Investigation's Reporter for the New York Times.

5:31It's like Nick follow the facts wherever they lead. They go where news breaks, get answers firsthand, and publish what they find. That's Fact-Based Reporting. Seek it out if you don't already. David Pacman is the host of an eponymous show. That means his name's in the title. It's the David Pacman show. It's on YouTube. It's a podcast. And the left-leaning political commentator is out with a new book called The Echo Machine, How Right Wing Extremism Created a Post-Truth America, David Pacman. Welcome to the GIST. Thanks for having me. So this book, if I understand book publishing, was set to be published before Donald Trump was president. A lot of the criticisms, very easy to apply to Trump, Trumpism, what Trump does. But you go further and deeper and you're saying this is the right in general. This is conservatism that is afflicted by everything that you're diagnosing.

6:33Well, it's not so much conservatism in the sense that conservatism is almost really gone from the modern Republican Party. And maybe we'll even talk about that part a little bit. But certainly, one of the points I make and the book was done before we knew who would be president, and that's a really good point. One of the points I make is that Trumpism was not this thing that just emerged into 2016 out of nowhere and completely kind of restructured the American right wing, that it was the natural conclusion or consequence of a process that started in the late 50s as sort of antipathy towards the civil rights movement created this new group or direction, I guess we would say for the Republican Party. And we followed that from 58 all the way through Reagan, Gingrich, Bush, Obama. And it happened to be Trump, but it really could have been someone else because the stage was really set. Yeah. So Trump is taking advantage of a media ecosystem that not only doesn't punish lying in

7:37many ways, it allows for and and celebrates just a version of truth that most flatters the audience. That's a part of it. It's also that the, you know, I talked about there's very little conservatism left in the Republican Party. There's a chapter in the book about running against a party that really has no principles or policy and the pernicious nature of getting stuck in these theoretical debates about principles. When we've seen even just in the last two months, how none of those principles really mean anything. I mean, just to give a couple of examples to make it really concrete. One of the things that we've heard for 50 years from the Republican Party and to a degree, we have accepted is that therefore fiscal conservatism balancing the budget. And what we see if we just track the deficit among Republican or Democratic presidents is that the deficit grows much larger during Republican presidents. Another example is that they're against intervention into private industry by the government.

8:40And that may be true when it's convenient, but when it was, we actually want to force social media to publish COVID, this information. They were happy to have government interfere in private business when it's Elon Musk in the free market of ideas, seeing Tesla collapse because of what he's chosen to do politically. Trump holds an info-merchal for Tesla on the White House lawn. All of a sudden those principles go out the window and that's another important aspect to this. Yeah. So political hypocrisy runs rampant. I'll give you another one. The criticism of activist judges, unless the activism is in the flavor that you like, it's not all true. And Democrats don't do that. No, I'll answer the question. Of course, Democrats do that. Of course, Democrats engage in hypocrisy and take advantage of the situation in order to get their policies across and might say we want, well, some Democrats don't say this, but some Democrats criticize Republicans for not wanting a balanced budget, but they themselves don't create programs or submit bills that would lead to a balanced budget.

9:43But your general thesis is that it's not a difference of degree. It's a difference of kind. Whatever hypocrisy there might be among Democrats saying one thing and doing another when they have the leverage of power, it's nothing like what the Republicans do. Is that right? Well, I don't even know that I would necessarily accept that the kind of equivalence that you just drew is even a fair one because the position as I understand it of many Democrats, and it's certainly my position as someone of the left, is that it's not about deficit is good or deficit is bad. It's what are we deficit spending for? Are we deficit spending for programs that are economically stimulative, and I can define that, or are we spending on programs that are not? So I think one of the things I try to do in the book is really keep people accountable to what they say. And so, for example, when the right has made it their business to say, doesn't matter what we're spending on, just deficit is bad, and we're going to get rid of the deficit.

10:46That's the standard I hold them to. On the other hand, me as someone on the left, I don't engage in the deficit good or bad. It's there are certain ways governments can spend like taxes for the very rich that have a low economic multiplier. You give a tax cut to the rich. They don't really need that money for day to day living. It mostly ends up in a bank account, low economic stimulus. On the other hand, food stamps are one of the most economically stimulative programs that you can deficit spend for. So I think I want to hold Democrats accountable to what they say is their position, rather than just the inverse of what Republicans say. Well, you're right. A lot of Democrats don't say that the deficit is a problem. I would say they're certainly wrong, especially with the deficit of the Democrat. The deficit being $36 trillion and just paying off the debt is now more than paying off the military. So just in terms of how much capacity does the state have to fund worthwhile programs, like say, snap or the benefits you talked about, we're extremely diminished because we

11:49have a huge deficit. That aside, I want to get to some of your other ideas and we get back to deficit also. Yeah, yeah. I think we, and it's totally fine for us to disagree. I just think I disagree with much of the way you're framing it. What? Go ahead. Tell me what. Our ability to pay for food stamps is not diminished by the national debt. In fact, if we can find economically stimulative programs that generate growth, spending on the right stuff improves our ability to pay down the debt. I think that that's what that's kind of what I'm. Always stimulative growth is stimulus, always the right choice, no matter what the economic circumstances. Well, there's two options in terms of balancing, right? What's your cut spending or your increased revenue? Cutting spending, I researched for the book. I did not find a single example of a country in the last 150 years that cut spending in order to achieve prosperity.

12:50I found many examples, however. I tried to stick to what can I support empirically, regardless of my opinion. Estonia did, but that wasn't my question. It wasn't about spending and it wasn't about taxes. It was, is it always proper to try to stimulate the economy? So far, everything you've said about the deficit and what we should spend on should try to stimulate the economy. Is that always the proper move economically speaking? Depends on what you're trying to achieve. I mean, I don't think there's very few, it's sort of like, our tariffs good or bad. Well, it depends what you're trying to do. I think the question is to whether it's a good thing for governments to focus spending in economically stimulative ways. It depends what you want to do. Like we know, for example, if you don't care about stimulating the economy, you can give tax cuts to the rich, right? So like economic studies have found that that's a rule. That also does stimulate the economy, but it doesn't stimulate it as much as some other forms of spending. The multiplier isn't as high. That's exactly right. Yeah, that's the point I'm making. So we know that if what, if your concern is not what is the best use stimulatively of

13:53a dollar in government spending, there are many options. One of them, for example, would be tax cuts for the rich. If the goal is, let's grow the size of the economy, it would follow that using the tool of government spending to stimulate growth makes sense. It depends on what your goals are. Yeah, sometimes if the output gap is insufficient, it is poor government policy to stimulate the economy because that leads to inflation. And we saw that with, especially the last round of COVID spending. You talked a second ago about the right as a movement has no policy. I'm wondering if you see some of what's going on with the aggressive chainsaw themed cuts, has that convinced you you might not like the policy, but has that maybe pushed you off the idea that it has no policy? I see a policy. I see a ramshackle policy. I see a very inexact policy, but I definitely see a policy direction of trying to cut

14:55what they would call the administrative state. That might be bad for America. I think in a lot of ways it is, but isn't that a policy? Well, I think when I talk about policy in the book, I'm using a specific frame. I mean, certainly every administration has stuff that they do, executive orders that they sign. And you can sort of say, this is the policy. What I mean in the book when I talk about there's really no policy here, it's that we've been waiting for Trump's health care plan since August of 2020. He told Chris Wallace it was two weeks away. We still don't have it. The one thing that he used, what did he say? We have like parameters of a plan. What did he say? We have to see. He said during the presidential debate that he's getting to concepts for the plan. Concepts that. So, so when I think about what are the biggest umbrella areas where policy is needed in this country to help people, we'd be talking about health care, economics, tax policy, education, climate, foreign policy, infrastructure in those areas, even their stated principles,

16:02as I kind of was mentioning earlier, they go out the window once they become inconvenient. EVs were bad until Elon is my friend. Now EVs are good. That's what I mean by there's a lack of coherent policy. Certainly Trump's doing stuff, whether we call that coherent policy, I think is where I would drill down. I think in some areas it's incoherent. In some areas it's hypocritical. There's a lot of lying going on. So you can't just and that leads to the perception, the reality that it's hypocritical. But I think especially with you mentioned foreign affairs, there's a policy, maybe not for every sector of the world. But in general, Trump's policy is to pull back from, to pull back from helping Western Europe, to pull back from assisting democracies, to pull back from treaty organizations, and to view America as an island unto itself, making one-on-one deals in the interests as he sees them of America. I mean, that's his policy. You and I might not like it, but that's what's going on, right?

17:05I don't think so. It's certainly not what I'm seeing. I mean, I'll give you an example. The principal Trump ran on was he's the anti-war guy globally. You would agree with that. He said, I will, Hillary will start three wars. Harris would get us into three wars. I am the anti-war guy. Fair? Yeah, he said that. He said that. And we're, you know, 55 days in or something like that. We've just launched a new military initiative against the Houthis in Yemen. Trump has given the go ahead to Netanyahu to resume some of the larger offensives in Gaza. And I'm not even giving my opinion about these things. I'm just saying it contradicts the stated policy from the campaign. He is now at minimum playing coy with, if not welcoming Putin to say, oh, yeah, no, insist on keeping a bunch of Ukraine in any peace treaty. So again, I try to take my opinion out of it. It simply lets compare what he does to what he said.

18:06He ran on, I'm the anti-war guy. He has started new conflicts in his first 55 days. There's a conflict there to me. And like you said, Mike, people can evaluate if they like it. Maybe some people go, I don't want him to be the anti-war guy. I want him going into Yemen. Well, fine. But the question is, is it what he said he was going to do? Yes. So you're right as far as the word dimension. It is true that he always, he still had military incursions and uses of military applications in his first term. He killed Suleimanye. He killed the then leader of ISIS. Talked a lot about it. Talked tough about it. It also was very proud that it didn't commit to large-scale occupations or invasions of countries. I would say that there is a policy. I wouldn't say he has a coherent set of policies on war. He's not a guy who says I'll never use force. He's not a guy who says that he's certainly not a guy who says I'm going to go in and occupy countries like Neocons did. But on diplomacy and on the value of treaty organizations on going it alone versus going

19:13it together, he clearly has a policy of going it alone. And I think a lot of Americans like that policy. I don't think they should, but I do think it's a policy. Yeah. I mean, maybe I've not seen any polling that suggests Americans like it. I see concern over Trump's death. A lot of Americans. I don't know if more Americans like it or not, but there's a long history of isolation ism in the United States. Yeah. That exists. Yeah. Now, a couple other things I want to tease out. You say that Republican opposition to critical thinking is strategic, not accidental. What do you mean by that? Yeah. I mean, I just reviewed on my show today, very interesting interviews where just average voters were being asked questions like, what's the shape of the Pentagon? Or who did we declare independence from in the Revolutionary War, right? And a bunch of people just don't know kind of these basic answers. The first question is kind of implied in the question. Surprisingly, some people got it wrong. So what I mean by that's it's almost like what year did the war of 1812 take place?

20:16And yes, yeah. What I mean by the opposition to critical thinking curricula at state boards of education, especially in red states, is that if you have the ability to really analyze critically, media messages, am I watching news or opinion here? Am I looking at primary reporting or am I looking at someone rewriting original reporting, et cetera? If you're able to do that stuff on your own, you're not going to fall for a lot of this stuff, the right pushes like, for example, trickle down economics, trickle down economics is something they've been pushing for 50 years. It's generically the concept that you get the most economic benefit from cutting taxes for the very rich. No factual empirical evidence behind that. The less able to critically analyze that yourself that you are, the more likely you are to fall for it and support candidates who tell you that that's the world works. I'll give you another example. When we look at, for example, the debate around climate science, we can and should have

21:18a robust debate as to what should we do? What should the policy be? People can disagree on that for sure. But at this point, one of the things that corporate media does that I think is very dishonest is they'll do a seven minute debate with one person who says climate change is real and one person who says it's not. Which person gets three and a half minutes. It's what you call false balance. If you are unable to critically figure out what does the science really say? Because I got three and a half minutes from you side on CNN, right? What does the science really say? If you don't have those skills, you fall into a non-imperial understanding of the world around you. I do think it's strategic. What does critical thinking mean? I thought critical thinking meant something like applying reason, questioning assumptions, teasing out the logic of a statement. So where's the critical thinking element of trickle-down economics doesn't work? It's that there is a body of evidence that shows it doesn't work.

22:22That's right. And so, for example, pay attention or isn't exposed to it, but isn't that ignorance? If you don't know, well, ignorance would be ignorance of the facts. But I'm talking about is lacking the foundation with which to figure this stuff out and say, okay, here's what critical thinking is. But why would that apply to trickle-down economics? Which I don't hear. It's kind of been derided as a phrase. And I think we both might characterize a lot of what Republicans are doing, is inherently saying that there will be a trickle-down effect. That's right. They figured out that they don't want to use that phrase. But what they, you know, every day on Fox News, you've got people who are trying to work for Trump saying that the most pro-growth tax policy is one where you cut taxes for the rich and corporations. That's literally trickle-down economics. It's just not the phrase they use. Yeah. I just don't understand why it's critical thinking as opposed to this is a narrative that they've snuckered some people into believing. It's not like people are adult or the people who don't believe it are adult-brained. And if you gave them the information, there's no way they could attend to it just that

23:23they don't have the information. They have a certain narrative. No, I think it's more than that. I think it's more than that. Yeah. Yeah. I think if you're 45 years old, it may be, yes, that you are ignorant to some facts that would allow you to see the world more clearly. But if you've not built up this kind of framework I write about in the book of epistemology first of all, which is justification for my beliefs, critical thinking, which is a framework that I can apply to any topic to try to better inform myself. And then thirdly, media literacy, which is the ability to interpret and tease out the structure of media messages. Am I even watching news or opinion here? I think that that framework, if you're 45 and you don't have it, very, very difficult to really build that up. And we see that borne out in a lot of different public opinion studies when people are just asked, like, here's 10 statements, which are opinion, which are fact. So the assertion I make is that this really has to start probably when people are eight

24:30or 10, there's no political bias to it. These are just tools. It's sort of like saying, is a hammer good or bad? It's like, well, the point is understanding when the hammer is the right tool. And it's been scrapped from a curricula in all sorts of parts of the country. And I think it's really hard to recover from it if you get to age 40 and you don't know the stuff. How is knowledge of climate change? How is that critical thinking versus an understanding of the evidence and a certain deference to authorities? So I think that's what's going on. That some people just reject authorities and they shouldn't. It's not so much that when presented the evidence, they're too addol brain to understand what's going on. Yeah, no, I know. That was more or less your last question. Maybe I didn't do a good job. But I just took it. No, I took it with the other example. As applied to climate change, I think it's more of a media literacy issue and it's the following one and it's inextricably linked to critical thinking.

25:35Many people who don't have this framework turn on TV. It looks very professional. The anchors are wearing makeup. The lighting is good. This thing's spinning that says live. It looks as though this is a serious conversation. You see two talking heads pop up. Half the time you're hearing that climate change is real and half the time you're hearing that it's not. Without basic tools to discern what sort of programming this is and try to figure out how do I go through determining what the truth is, many people would say if these two messages are each getting equal time and placement on what looks like a very professional newsset, it must be that there is really a controversy here. We really must not know is climate change real or not because they're both getting 50% of the time. The instinct to say is one of these two people talking about facts and one is talking about opinion.

26:36That instinct is really tough to give to people when they're 45. It's much better to give people the tools when they're 10 to react in that skeptical way when they see the report. But what percentage of Americans say climate or global warming isn't happening? Right now I don't have updated information. I mean, I think the number is declining fortunately. The battle lines on that issue have sort of moved. They've moved to our humans impacting it. These are all live discussions that change over time. The battle lines right now are more about whether humans have a role to play in that. There was a point at which the debate was more over. Is it happening? Now it's more do humans have any impact on it? Right. The Center for Climate Change Communications says 13% believe global warming is not happening. 70% believe it's happening. 17% say I don't know. So if we didn't have, did we get critical thinking skills to move that number up from 50, 50 to 70? No. I mean, the truth is we had 45 years ago we actually already had the data. So the fact that it took this long even to get to that point, I don't have the numbers

27:39in front of me. But does it implicate critical thinking or does it implicate a whole lot of other things like our identity is tied up to our political party. And therefore, if our politicians tell people what they want, like a lot of people in coal producing states or whatever, they're going to believe what they want to believe. But eventually it gets through to me. It's a, we're setting up a situation that shows that Americans have critical thinking skills, maybe not the best, but they're able to form opinions, but there are a lot of other things, including cultural things, getting in the way of forming the correct opinions. Yeah. I mean, I think we're using very different language to talk about some of these things. Like for me, the concept of a correct opinion is by its nature and oxymoron. We're either talking about opinion or facts. Found it. Well found that opinion. You're right. I mean, but when I talk about believing that climate change is real, this is, I'm using the shorthand of correct opinion. So I agree. Yeah. It's even shorter to just call it fact. So I would think with that because it's so much clearer. I think one of the things that is really difficult is your right that motivated reasoning

28:43is a factor in people's beliefs. In addition to that, people are more likely to follow the political beliefs of their parents. People are more likely. So all of these things are true. The book can't be about everything. So I'm taking on education policy specifically, teaching critical thinking and media literacy to everybody when they're 10 wouldn't solve every problem. It wouldn't solve that people are still more likely to have the beliefs of their parents for example. But I think it's the best path to figuring out the truth about the world around us. And in a minute, we'll be back with David Pacman. He is the author of the echo machine. How right wing extremism created a post-truth America? And we're going to be talking about some things where the lack of truth is not necessarily and directly coming from the right David Pacman in about a minute. The 2026 primaries are taking shape and you could trade the biggest political races on

29:45CalShe. On CalShe, you could trade major primaries, election outcomes and the biggest political storylines as they happen. For instance, if you're asking yourself, well, who's going to win in Texas? It's going to be Pacson or Tel Rico. Well, CalShe has as of this recording in a bout of bucking decades long trends. Tel Rico, the Democrat, winning a statewide election. He's up 59, 58 to 41, 42. But the great thing about CalShe is, you don't have to, if you want to put money on Tel Rico, if you want to say that Tel Rico is going to win, but then you get wobbly and the market goes up, you can cash out along the way. Let's say you're more into the somewhat 50-50 right now. Slightly ahead, Chair Brown, Bruce John Hustead, Ohio, Race. You can put your money where your instincts are, but then change your mind and cash out of the market as one would sell a stock. That's really interesting and valuable thing that CalShe offers. Because on CalShe, you're trading against peers in a live market, meaning there's no

30:48house. And as the probability changes, you could buy in and out of your position. For a limited time, download the CalShe app and use code GIST to get $10 when you trade 10 KAL, SHI, CalShe, trade on anything. 18-plus restrictions and eligibility will require a mid-supply event contract trading. Envolves risk and may not be suitable for all investors, prices, values, and available markets made different from those mentioned. For more information, see CalShe.com slash regulatory. You might not think about oil and natural gas, but it's a big part of your daily routine. From the soap you use to your toothpaste, even your bed sheets. More than 6,000 everyday products are made using oil and natural gas. Companies like Energy Transfer work behind the scenes, safely transporting these resources across the country through a network of underground pipelines. Learn more at ittakesenergy.com. Here's what happened when one journalist reported on DEI programs.

31:51I decided to just focus on the University of Michigan. I obtained internal documents that showed that the school had spent about a quarter of a billion dollars on DEI programs. I spent two weeks in Ann Arbor talking to everybody I could find. The unintended consequences of these programs, they had sort of left everybody to satisfy. And this expensive machinery the school had built just imploded. If you're a journalist, you are not on anyone's team. All you're trying to do is figure out as many of the facts as you can gather. The facts are going to guide you to where the story lands. You're not taking sides. I'm Nick Confessori. I'm an Investigation's Reporter for the New York Times. Journalists like Nick follow the facts wherever they lead. They go where news breaks, get answers firsthand, and publish what they find. That's FactBase Reporting. Seek it out if you don't already. We're back with David Pakman, he's the author of the Echo Machine, how right-wing extremism

32:53created a post-truth America. So I have two main critiques of the book and I enjoyed going through it and hearing first of all, your prescriptions in terms of policy, but more importantly in terms of epistemology and how we come to our conclusions. These are things I think about a lot. But my two main problems are this. The Democrats do it a lot. I can see that it seems to me that the Republicans or right-leaning media is more likely to be in exact or misleading. But I don't know if the ratio is 5 to 1 or 3 to 1, but Democrats believe absolutely in the echo chamber misinformation has made its way into democratic thinking it's crossed. Whatever the ratio is, Republicans do it more, but among Democrats, it's crossed a critical threshold such that I would say you can't trust as a heuristic if the two sides disagree, simply disbelieve the Republicans. But what do you say to that?

33:55I agree with you 100% on that. I mean, listen, I'm not a Democrat. I've never been a Democrat. This book is not a defensive Democrats. The examples I give from six different countries about successful social democracy programs. In some countries, they don't even involve the equivalent of the Democratic Party. In those countries, many of those countries have seen those successes come on the heels of either a parliamentary, proportional representation system or other systems. I am, I mean, listen, it would not be critical thinking to say that you should just assume what Democrats in the U.S. tell you is right. I'm with you 100%. I have nothing to do with the Democratic Party. But the idea of the book is that Republicans have created an echo chamber and that Republicans have led us into poor ways of thinking that will mislead us. My thesis is the Democrats do that too in not equal measure, but enough of a measure that I don't know how useful it is to talk about the ways Republicans do it.

34:55How does it help me as a citizen for deciding who's right and who's wrong? Well, the devil really is in the details I feel like. I mean, I, maybe if you, if we could broach an issue on which you think the Democratic Party has deliberately spread misinformation that doesn't comport with the facts, it might help us to draw a contrast. Okay. Police killings of unarmed black men. Yes. So there's one polling shows. Yeah. No, I've covered that. I mean, listen, I'm with you on that. It's, I did a segment I was criticized for for pointing out that the degree, this is years ago now because this is really not a big, this is not a big battle line in national elections right now. But years ago, I did a story pointing out here is the story that's being told. About the racial, racially disproportionate killing of people in police encounters. Here's what the data say. And some people didn't like that I was doing that. But listen, I, I'm with you. I think the danger is, Mike, the proportionality of some of these arguments.

35:59And there's a phrase that I, I use called enlightened centrism, which is a little bit of a pejorative and it's the idea that to really rise above the fray, we should be able to equally criticize both sides or whatever. And I just, like you're saying, it's not equal. And that's the point I'm making. But on that issue, you're right. I think much more sort of substantively or maybe with bigger consequences, the lies we've been told by the Republican Party about the healthcare systems that best work. I think that that is far more pernicious, for example, than the example you just brought up. But I'm with you. The criticism is not bad. I mean, I think it's just brought up. I'm with you. I'm with you. Well, I think we differ on the impact of that. I mean, the summer of 2020 through 21, many, many cities burnt down. Democrats lost elections because of the perception that they were for defunding. And while they weren't or the vast majority of them weren't, they were identified with

37:02the incorrect idea, as perpetrated in the media, that more than a dozen to 17 unarmed black men are killed all the time. And the more liberal you were, according to a reliable polling, the more you thought that the number was close to a thousand. And to this day, even if that's maybe a small item, in cities, elections are built around this idea or this feeling about the unfairness of over-policing. And it also affects the reputation of the party overall. So that when people go to the polls, they look at Democrats as the party of defunding and the party who are not getting a very important question right, which is policing and safety. So I think there's a lot of ripple effects. Yeah. I mean, listen, it's great that we have a different opinion. It's great to engage with that. I think that a couple things, first of all, I can only defend what I believe. So you're telling me that there are people who believe XYZ. I can only defend what I believe and tell you the facts as I know them.

38:02The facts as I know them are this. Saying cities burnt down is deliberately inflammatory language. Was there looting? Yes, there was. Was there property crime that there was? And I immediately spoke out against it, period with no ifsans or butts. Some on the left said no. So when I say city broke down, I don't mean 50% of a city area, but Kenosha, much of Kenosha was on fire. The third precinct in Minneapolis is no more. It burnt down. So many structures in many cities experienced horrific rioting and destruction that they're still trying to build up. Okay. You did pull back the language about 80% on that, though, from cities plural burnt down. But let's not focus on that. I'm just recognizing that it's deliberately inflammatory language. In terms of defunding. So was setting fire to the third precinct. Which I'm against. Yeah, I don't know any. I'm not aware of anyone who's for that other than the people who did it. So in my audience, we didn't have people cheerleading that. Well, let me go further. During the entire defund the police thing, which the day it started, I came out with a 12 point plan for how I would fix policing that did not include blanket defunding of police.

39:06I immediately said, bad idea for Democrats, not a good idea for society either. Not a single member of the House or Senate supported defunding the police at that time. Now I can't speak to whether last year there were members who supported that. That's a different story. At the time, there was not a single national Democrat who was saying what we need to do is defund. So I think it's just important when Axios Ilan Omar defends ideas of dismantling Minneapolis police department CNN. There were members. There weren't many. There are. That's 20. 2020 hold on. It's got to be 2020 if it's Minneapolis. Sorry. Anyway, I don't know why it's. Listen, let's, I'll concede that maybe you. You found one fair, but, but I think we would both agree you were not hearing from Democratic leadership or people on the side of the Capitol that they were saying we need to defund. Is that fair? I, I'm saying 12 to 20 Democrats in Congress believed in defunding or they would use

40:12wiggle phrases like we need to reimagine how policing or funding and they committed to this when speaking to their people. This was a policy position. They held. I would want to fact check that. I would want to fact check that. It's not my recollection, but I think the big, the big takeaway for me is I think the path forward with policing is in some cases you might need more funding actually is the truth. And this is what I laid out because oftentimes limited funding leads to low effort policing, which is you just kind of patrol areas known for crime. And this often creates an environment that actually can even have effects that you don't want. Anyway, my policy is not blanket defunding. I certainly didn't support that. Is it a, was it a problem to be seen that way for Democrats at the time? Certainly that was a problem. Yeah, I found another one from 2020 CNN K file, Kamala Harris praised defund the police movement in June 2020 radio interview.

41:12So it was out there. I'm just saying it wasn't most, but it was out there. Another question, another issue, bigger issue. Do you think it was the Republican echo chamber? So my, I'm sorry to interrupt you. You've used the term echo chamber a couple times. I talk about the echo machine. Chamber is more of a passive thing. What I'm really describing here is a proactive thing. It's fine for you to say echo chamber. I just don't talk about one in the book. Okay. Was it the Republican echo machine that told us that Biden was too old and mentally degraded to be a successful presidential candidate or president? Was it the, was it the echo machine that told us Biden was too old? I guess I guess I get totally degraded. Okay. One, my thesis is that Democrats mislead as well. Democrats engage their own echo machines to often lead the public, mislead the public,

42:14disinformed the public. A major example of this was, I think a lot of people would point to, wait a minute, weren't Democrats being very misleading about Biden's mental ability to run for president and be president? So I'm asking you where that came from. Was it mostly a consequence of Republican misinformation that spread that idea? I mean, over a period of several years, there were a lot of sources about claims regarding Biden's health. I think that the echo machine certainly was making unfounded claims about Biden's health a long time before there seemed to be an issue. You know, I think one of the things I'm struggling with Mike is I'm not defending the Democratic party here and I also was not part of a bunch of the stuff that you're talking about. So I'm kind of like trying to put myself in the mindset and the time of what was going

43:15on. I was of the position that Biden should not run for reelection. I mean, I thought Biden and Trump were both tooled that we needed younger leadership. After the disastrous Biden debate performance, I said, this is very clearly the beginning of the end. He's going to be pushed out. He's going to have to step aside. I was reinvigorated in my belief that he was wrong to even run for reelection. So, you know, was it the echo machine? You know, Trump was saying stuff about Biden's health before any of this stuff seemed real. So to that extent, I guess, but I don't know. This isn't something I write about in the book. No, but on your show, you've talked about it. And when Biden was the president and candidate for president, you said that it was Republican misinformation and the inability of Republicans to accept the truth that was behind the claims that Biden was mentally deficient or had memory problems, especially as related to the

44:19investigation by Robert Herr. I don't know if you remember those segments, but I went back and watched. And this is what you said. You played tape and I did too. You played tape of a house investigation where they peppered her with questions. Peppered her. I thought you said H-E-R. Special counsel, Robert Herr was called in front of a House committee and peppered with questions from Democrats. And your conclusion was they just proved that Robert Herr was dishonest in describing Biden's memory issues. And you framed it as part of the what you would later in your book talk about as the Republican machine, the Republican echo machine. But to me, and I think in retrospect, it seems that Biden's memory issues were real and Robert Herr wasn't getting anything wrong. I think you mischaracterized that entire event by seeing things through the lens of Republicans are always trying to mislead us.

45:20That's not my recollection at all, Mike. My recollection is that from the beginning of Biden's presidency, I would, and I would specifically cite the difference between Biden in 2012 when he ran circles around Paul Ryan and Biden in the 2020 debates. And at every instance, I made clear that this is not the same Joe Biden of 2012. And I also stated many times that there were claims coming from people with no connection or insight whatsoever into the Biden White House that seemed to depart from what we knew. I also, I mean, listen, I didn't think that he should run again. I don't know. I think what you're referring to with Robert Herr specifically. And this was, this is years ago, so it's hard to remember exactly. I would have reviewed it if I had known. But I think that the issue with her was that there was a letter written before that testimony,

46:20which characterized her's opinion of Biden's testimony one way. And then her's testimony in and of itself did not include a lot of those same characterizations. And I think that's what I had a problem with. It wasn't a year ago. It was one year ago as March 2024. And what happened was Robert Herr put out a report that said that Joe Biden would be a bad witness because he would come across as a well intentioned but old man who had memory issues. And Democrats and you objected to that characterization. Then there was a hearing in front of Congress, which Robert Herr was not really given or didn't choose to answer fully that gave the impression that Robert Herr gave misleading accounts of Biden's memory. None of that's true. Well, when he was asked for a single example of something Biden couldn't remember, he couldn't provide him, right? No, he said that Biden couldn't remember the year of his son's death. Right, but the transcript rate later undercut that and it turned out to be a lot incorrect.

47:24He could not remember the year of his son's death. He could remember the month and date of his son's death, but he couldn't remember the year of his son's death. The entire reason it was an issue is that Joe Biden got mad about and said how dare he implicate my son. That was a whole example. This is the reason why I bring it up. I'm not nitpicking one thing that you said that turned out to be incorrect. But you have a book, you have a frame to let us know that Republicans are engaged in misinformation, actively engage in misinformation. You understand how that works. You're an arbiter of that. But I think that there are many instances where Democrats have been engaged in misinformation and you were carried along to this day. You didn't even know what Robert Herr got wrong. Maybe it's not important to you, but to me, it's not that it's not a credibility. I just don't get those wrong a lot for the same reason you're just priming it incorrectly right now. I do. You do. What do you think I got? I think that it was the claim that Biden was forgetful was undercut by the testimony and the transcript, but that's not accurate.

48:27He was forgetful. That's what Robert Herr's, you don't think what we know now that Joe Biden was forgetful. You, you think it's not plausible that in an extended interview that Joe Biden wouldn't have memory lapses? We saw Joe Biden have memory lapses right in front of us. It's just so weird that Robert Herr was unable to substantiate it. But again, you're, I think that maybe the problem here is and I don't know, I'm not familiar enough to know whether there's a desire to strike a false balance here or not. But one of the things is that I had said from the beginning and that numerous intermediary points, I don't think Biden should be running. But not for mental. There was certainly a right in time for policy issues or for mental incompetence issues. Sorry. What for policy reasons or mental incompetence reasons just too old and slowing down. Yeah, it had nothing to do with policy. Okay. Do you think that the right wing echo machine was behind, for instance,

49:34not for instance, specifically Joe Manchin, objecting to funding what would become the inflation reduction act to the amount that Bernie Sanders and other more left leaning members of the democratic party wanted? I have no idea that was not a major story in my universe. Manchin was always a right leaning Democrat and there was no particular. It didn't raise any red flag or I don't even remember that being a big story to be honest. Mike, I certainly was not covering it. Oh, yeah. No, I'm sure you talked about. It was the biggest story when they passed the inflation reduction act. This was the second biggest post COVID spend. Manchin didn't vote for it. Yeah. At first, he didn't and then he relented at a price tag about half of what Sanders did to me. Here's another example of when I would monitor the news. There was a right and left framing of the story and the left framing of the story.

50:38It was something like mansions are Republican. Republicans will always mislead us about the effect of stimulus. We under stimulated during the financial crisis. We can't do that again. Question the motives of Manchin and right leaning people when it comes to worry about the deficit. I think in retrospect, everything that Manchin was saying, everything that the more right leaning, the right leaning portions of that debate proved to be correct. So I'm trying to think if I went into it, having read the echo machine and thinking, all right, we know that Republicans tried to undercut critical thinking. We know that Republicans have always lied about these things. I would not help but say, well, on this debate, what would the effect of the Manchin version of stimulus, versus the Bernie Sanders version of stimulus, I have to be strongly suspicious if not outright reject the Manchin version of stimulus.

51:41But reality didn't play out that way. Yeah. I don't write about that in the book and it was not a big story on my show. So it's very difficult for me to speak to it. One of the things is I am really trying to do, apply an 80, 20 principle here and really think about what is the 20% of areas in which we could do 80% of the good, right? So, for example, I would look at, we are told by the right that the US is simply too large a country to do what other countries do on health care. It simply wouldn't work. We've got to have the system we have. I think that is damaging to tens of millions of people. And so that's an area of focus for me. Another example, when it comes to economics, repeated tax plans that are sold as good for the middle class, which really enrich the already extremely rich and corporations.

52:41I think that hurts tens of millions of people. So I'm really talking about what I consider to be the biggest, biggest stuff education, et cetera. The mansion vote on IRA, I just don't remember. I take your word for it that mansion and Bernie had different views. I'd have to analyze who was right. I don't know exactly whose position was what on that particular issue. IRA contained a bunch of stuff that I liked. I'm sure I could find things in it that I didn't like, but it just was not. It was not IRA was not part of the book or part of my analysis of the biggest areas where we could help people. David Pakman is the host of the David Pakman show. It's a YouTube show. It's a podcast and his new book is called The Echo Machine. Thank you, David. My pleasure. That's it for today's show. Cory Wara produces the gist. Astrid Green is in charge of our Instagram and social media.

53:43Michelle Pesca's CBSO of Peach Fish Productions. We're Progy Progy Progy Progy and thanks for listening.