Modern Wisdom - #388 - David Pakman - Moving Politics Past Identity

Episode Date: October 23, 2021

David Pakman is a political commentator and host of The David Pakman Show. The Left and The Right really aren't talking very well at the moment. It feels like if people don't have the same political leaning, they see the world in an entirely different way, whether that's disagreements on identity, health, policy, priorities or babymaking. Expect to learn David Pakman's explanation for why communication from Left to Right seems so strained, whether identity politics really takes up as much focus among the Left as it seems, whether Donald Trump is an own goal for Conservatives, the biggest problems with political commentators refusing to communicate and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://puresportcbd.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out David's website - https://davidpakman.com/ Subscribe to David on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvixJtaXuNdMPUGdOPcY8Ag Follow David on Twitter - https://twitter.com/dpakman  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is David Pakman, he's a political commentator and host of the David Pakman show. The left and the right really aren't talking very well at the moment. It feels like if people don't have the same political leaning, they see the world in an entirely different way. Whether that's disagreements on identity, health, policy, priorities, or baby making, there's not much talking going on at the moment.

Expect to learn, David's explanation for why communication from left to right seems so strained, whether identity politics really takes up as much focus among the left as it seems, whether Donald Trump is an own goal for conservatives, the biggest problems with political commentators refusing to communicate, and much more. I wanted to bring David on to get an understanding of the internal dynamics of what's going on in the left. If you are someone that sits on the left-hand side of the aisle, what does it feel like for most of the attention online being taken up by libs of TikTok videos and crazy people with purple

hair glowing their breasts to the street. Like what does that feel like and how representative is that of the left overall? It says a lot that I need to actually ask someone whether or not the stuff that I'm seeing on the internet is genuinely true or representative and David does a good job today. Whether you agree with his points or not, it's really interesting to get an insight from someone who really is in the thick of it talking about these sort of issues every single day. But now it's time to learn about the internal politics of the left with David Pacman. I wanted to bring you on to kind of try and get an idea of the landscape between left

and right at the moment and get an idea of the landscape between left and right at the moment and get an understanding of the internal situation on the left. I know you're someone who talked across the aisle quite a bit. So I figured you'd be a good candidate to try and help me work out what's going on. Sure. I mean, I guess it would be good to know maybe a little more specifically which which aspects of it. I know that even what is considered to be the landscape of the left would differ depending on one's perspective as to what's part of the left and what are the goals and priorities. Yeah, so my understanding is that there's a movement on the left away from a focus on identity and some left-leaning thinkers are sort of grappling and working through the challenges that are associated

with that. Do you have any sense of this? I think that the idea that it's a move away from it is maybe not the right framing. I think that there's been a contingent of the left that I think is actually really the bulk of it, which I consider myself a part that has never been about identity politics, etc. There's this kind of package that follows. I think that the voices that were in favor of focusing on things like identity politics and oppression, Olympics, etc. And I understand that's a perjured term, but I think we all sort of understand what I mean.

I think they were overrepresented for a period and appeared to be far bigger than they were. Reasonable people can disagree for sure. I know that whenever I make a commentary like this, there will be people from the right who say, you're completely wrong. The left has been completely taken over by that. And I say, no, no, you think that because of what I'm describing. But I think that particularly, I think the 2020 primary on the Democratic Party in the US was actually a really important signal to a lot of people that looking at Twitter and looking at Reddit certainly would make one believe that that wing is far bigger and far more powerful than it actually is. And for all of the great things that I've said about Bernie Sanders for a long time and supported him in primaries.

I was suspecting that his level of support was much higher online than in reality. I think the 2020 primary really showed that it was not by a little bit at Joe Biden won. And for a lot of people on the left, that started to open their eyes to the fact that the left is a little bit different than what it seems when you look at Reddit. Well, the internet would tell you. Yeah, yeah. And I think I see it as a healthy thing actually

because no matter what you want the left to be, if you don't understand what it is, it's unlikely you'll be able to have meaningful conversations until like you'll be able to affect the change you want. Even if you and I don't agree about the change we want to see, if we don't accurately assess what it is, it'll be tough to go further. We saw this in the UK, if you looked before the last general election at Twitter and the internet at large, you just thought this is going to be a complete landslide for labor

and they lost by the biggest, basically the biggest margin in recent history. And yeah, it's so you realize the asymmetry in terms of the loudest people online and where the biggest chunk of the voter base is, like normal people. What's affecting normal people? Yeah, and one of the things that's kind of a bummer about, I did this segment on my YouTube channel a couple months ago called I effing hate politics or why I effing hate politics or something like that. And what I explained was everything now has to be sort of like a toxic conflict. And even the things I've said so far to you, which to many people will sound just sort of like we're just kind of establishing a basis for the conversation that's to follow. People will write to me and say, you gleefully cheered that Bernie didn't

win the Democratic primary. Like in this interview that you and I are having right now. And it's like, no, I didn't do that. I expressed a fact, which was there was a sense among many that that wing was much larger than what it really was. That's all I'm saying. And it's so toxic that it becomes hard to even say some of these things. Yeah, I mean, this not picking is something that I really want to try and get into because you get misrepresentations from both sides. The right will pick the most outrageous outlandish story that it can't like anything that's on the right will pick the most outrageous, outlandish story

that it can't, like anything that's on lips of TikTok. Right, and then just, there you go, there's your content for the week. You can just react to that, or if you're on the left sometimes, there's selections that occur from the point at which, like the Dave Rubin Clips fails channel or the whatever, like this ridiculous idea

from some creator on the right might be. Like you end up having the most unrepresented elements or the worst showings of both sides, you know, the interview that someone does where they just get it wrong. They just get the wrong thing out there, but this is representative of the entire movement at large and the same thing goes with lips of TikTok as like a small microcosm that you can extrapolate out

to the entire movement of the left. Yeah, I think that there's a degree to which that's true. What I want to, at the first opportunity to get this on the record, I will take it. I am not like a both sides, ism type guy where I'm going to say, okay, there's extremism on both sides and there's bad faith actors on both sides and everything's the same. I think that what's happening with the American right wing is dystopianly horrible. I mean truly and I think that you're you're right in that there are people who just get facts wrong on both sides There's no question about that

but I mean particularly in light of the pandemic We've seen the American right, which is the right I'm most familiar with. Different countries have different things going on. We've seen the American right go into something that even many Republicans don't recognize because it's so divorced, not only from reality, but from morality and from even their stated desires for freedom and liberty and to straight up authoritarianism. And I'm glad to talk about that. How would you want to do what some of the things that you're referring to that?

I mean, we could start with the pandemic, right? Actually, I think let's maybe even go back. One of my critiques of the American right for some period of time has been that there is a sort of obsessive stated focus on principles, but they don't really care about the principles. They care about the principles in so far as they help to justify the policy that they already want. It's a sort of confirmation bias of principles. And very quickly when the principles start to contradict with the policy that they want,

they abandon the principles by saying, well, this is different in this way. So we can look at the pandemic to give us some examples. The idea of businesses should be allowed to essentially regulate themselves. Government should stay out of the way of business, business by virtue of markets determining what consumers want, should mostly be able to do whatever they want. And if they do the wrong thing, they'll be punished by consumers. Consumers will say,

we're not going to do business with this organization or that organization. Great. Many businesses decided we are going to make all of our employees be vaccinated or be vaccinated or have to get a weekly test or as Fox News has done, be vaccinated or get a daily test or we are going to say our customers must be or whoa, we need laws, dozens of laws in order to prevent businesses from doing that. Well, hold on a second, guys. I thought your principle was, let businesses do it. As long as it's not illegal, and it doesn't appear to be illegal for businesses to require vaccination of workers or customers, as long as it's not illegal, let the market sort it out. If the people really don't like a business as vaccine policy, they'll go somewhere else, right?

They've abandoned that principle. Why? Well, because they only cared about the principle when they saw it as a conduit to the policy and behavior that they wanted. This is one example. We can talk, you know, there's many others, but this is the gist of what I'm talking about.

Yeah, I get that. Going back to the identity politics point for a moment, do you think that that was a strategic error on the left to allow that to be the, how would you say, part of the dominant messaging at least online for a while? But the goal here is to try and bring more people on board and working people identity politics isn't necessarily applicable to many or all of them. So is that something that people need to get past in order to be able to bring more people into the fold of the left? I sort of find your framing with total peace and love, I say, is not completely accurate in terms of what happened.

I mean, I'm glad to give you my view on identity politics. I don't ever think it was the dominant thing. I think that for many of these attack the left venues on the right, they were acting as though it was the thing. And there's no question that, I mean, listen, I was a big critic of the women's march, for example, and the way in which they used identity, I felt as a cudgel, for as an example, saying,

Jewish women are privileged, and so they can't be in the leadership. That to me seemed like a microcosm of the worst of the worst of identity politics. I was very, very critical of that. The Jewish women weren't intersectional enough, for example. That stuff, I think, is terrible. It's terrible. And I've been a critic of it since day one. But it never really has been.

I mean, for me, in my circle, which is a pretty, you stop at socialists and you come back to the center a little bit. That's a big swath, not socialist, but left. It's economic policy, it's environmental policy, it's sensible taxation, sensible business regulation, not regulating more than is necessary, but recognizing that some regulation is necessary. It was never the big thing. It was quite frankly an annoyance all along. So you would say over the last year that the focus hasn't been on identity through the Black Lives Matter riots and some of the reckoning that we've seen with regards to sort of gender

identity and these crazy stories because what you're showing is your, not necessarily your echo chamber, it's your job to be outside of your echo chamber, but I'm certainly showing mine. I'm certainly showing my perspective of what I get fed, which is often second hand, delivered to me perhaps by creators from the right. Well, I've never heard the term, the Black Lives Matter riots before, other than on platforms like OAN and Newsmax, which are sort of like conspiracy, like so that is interesting that you would call it that. I remember them as, when I think about the riots

over the last year, I think of January 6th. That's real, those are the riots really I remember. Black Lives Matter protests, I recall that there were no doubt some instances of destruction of property which I wholeheartedly condemn and believe people should be punished for, right? Because I'm a law-biting citizen. But I've never even heard them describe this Black Lives Matter riots. They were overwhelmingly peaceful compared to, for example, January 6th. So I think as you're saying, that may be reflective of where you're...

Some of the messages. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting one. I guess to maybe go back, if it's interesting, I can tell you my view on the whole, I don't identify politics. Yeah, very much so. So my view is that we have to recognize anybody who understands even a little bit about culture and society and economics and all shaped by identity. So for example, if there's a discussion about anti-semitism amongst 10 people and nine of them are not Jewish and I'm there,

right, and I'm the 10th and I'm Jewish, it seems reasonable to me that my experiences with anti-semitism as a Jewish person would be relevant to the conversation. It would be hard to argue that they're not, particularly if nobody else really has any personal experience to add, right? That seems very reasonable to me. I think where it goes too far and where I've been critical of it is,

if I use my identity to silence the other nine people, to say that their opinions don't matter, shouldn't be considered or fundamentally flawed and to suppress others on the basis of asserting my identity. That's what I think is destructive about identity politics. But to simply say identity is what affects our experiences in the world. To say it's of no relevant seems like a hard case to argue. I think what's interesting here is like we were talking about seeing online and presuming that a particular vote may go one way or the other based on an asymmetry of how we've seen things, I think that perhaps there is an asymmetry of how I have seen the left. If this is, if you're providing an accurate representation here,

that it has still been about economic policy and trying to bring people out of poverty and so on and so forth, like fundamental left leaning ideas, right? To do with class inequality. Like, if that's been the case, that's just being completely whitewashed, almost entirely whitewashed from what I've seen. Yeah, I mean, you know, this is one of those things where I don't speak for the left.

And there will be many people who will say, David, you can't speak for the left because you're not a socialist, for example, for some on the left, the litmus test for whether you're truly a leftist is whether you want socialism, right? So I fail that test. I feel like that's, so I think it's very tough. I don't even pretend to speak for the left. What I can tell you is kind of where I am. And as reflected by my audience, most of my audience is in a similar kind of place. There's socialists in my audience as well.

There's Marxists in my audience as well. There's people more to the center. But shows like mine and similar shows don't really have like the full-on identity politics, communist socialist audience that sometimes caricatured. So yeah, I mean, it's just, I guess I'm a little bit struggling because my view is just my view. And it's not meant to say, I represent what the left is, you know. I think you've got a good perspective of what it is though. I think if there was an overwhelming identity politics slant to what fundamentally people on the left are trying to achieve, then it seems like you're not seeing it from your

position at least. No, I think, I mean, listen, if you said, where am I seeing it most, right? I would say, I agree that in higher ed and academia, that's an area where it's much more prevalent. But in the left-leaning union and blue collar employment sort of area. You know, Union steel workers in Michigan who mostly vote for Democrats and consider themselves to be on the left and they want represent democratization of the workplace and they want benefits and a fair wage and collective bargaining. They're not big on identity politics, they're not big on critical race theory, they're not, you know, so it really depends on where you're looking. And I do think that these things do exist, they exist online, they exist in real life in some academic circles, etc. I don't think there's, I have no interest in denying that.

But I think the degree to which they're really guiding democratic party policy in any serious way is minimal. So would you say that one of the characterizations from the right is that a focus or an obsession with identity politics is causing the left to lose touch with working class, normal working class people. This was one of the criticisms in the UK to do with the general election that there were these red walls that typically had been labor strong holds and they were lost and there were very working class areas. And the argument, the justification from the right was an obsession with identity politics and intersectionality has lost them. It's this bourgeois academic movement. Is that what's your sort of view on

that characterization? I think that that characterization would be completely accurate if only applied to those to whom it really applies. And I think that's an overwhelming, you know, overwhelmingly small share of the, I mean, these, these issues have, you know, a couple of years ago, these were much bigger issues even on my show. But at this point, it's just, it's just not even really coming up. I used to have talked much more about identity politics, etc. Interestingly, right now, identity politics is coming up far more when we look at what the American right wing is doing. I mean, these movements around

they want to the white replacement, which even Tucker Carlson on Fox News has recently kind of toyed and played coy with. Immigrants are making us poorer and dirtier and they want to replace us. That is extreme right wing identity politics, which arguably starts to border on white nationalism. That's on the right. That's a form of identity politics. The Christian oppression movement under Obama, there was no Mary Christmas, but under Trump

it came back, but under Biden it's gone. None of this stuff is true, but it's all based on Christian identity. It's identity politics. It's just that on, we on the left, if we on the left wanted to do with that, what the right has done for so many years, we could talk about it all day. It's just very boring to me, but a lot of these movements are fundamentally right-wing identity politics movements. It's interesting. The framing that I had coming in here was, maybe I'm ahead of the curve here, maybe this identity politics stuff that I'm continually seeing, maybe that's, it's on the way out and I'm going to kind of

get my way in, but it seems like you're saying that's already, that horse is sort of already gone, that identity politics from your perspective has now been downregulated from where it was what, two years ago, when was it? It's peak. The thing that's tough about this is I don't know that it was ever really at a determined peak. It was just the discussion of it was getting more attention. And I think in the aftermath of the 2020 Democratic primary, as the focus became,

hey, you know, what Joe Biden won and won by a lot. And now what most of the left wants to do is defeat Donald Trump. It's the discussion of it has just become very secondary and tertiary. I don't really know that as an issue, it's gotten better or worse. You know, you get these stories of certain people aren't allowed at the Latino student union. Because it's supposed to be, you know, it's like, okay, and then we talk about that, and then we have like the same conversation that becomes very popular among the usual suspects online and like, do we resolve, do we ever really resolve anything?

I don't know, maybe, like, certainly those things are still going on, but at this point, it's not really a serious part of the movement for getting people access to healthcare, figuring out what makes sense to do with the minimum wage, what do we have to do about all of the different issues that are facing us right now. I find them to be a distraction. I would agree. I think that it's an own goal for both sides, or whoever is on the left that is focusing on this, whether this be a fringe or representative, very vocal majority, and what it's doing is it's capturing the right. So any cultural

commentator on the right hasn't had to create their own content for a long time, at least two years, because all that you've needed to do is just find whatever the craziest story of the week is or the day, and then you do a reaction to this. And you say, look, this is how ridiculous and crazy this is what they're trying to push to our pick group. Children, families, workplaces, sports teams, heritage, whatever. And I think that it's not tremendously good for either because it's just this kind of endless groundhog day cycle, where nothing actually gets achieved. The people on the right spend so much time reacting that they don't get anything push forward and they never engage properly as it would seem with the talking points that the left

is genuinely focused on at the moment. Yeah, just this morning before we did this interview, I saw a screen cap from Fox Business, not even Fox News, Fox Business, and there was a 13-year-old girl being interviewed. And the subject at the bottom of the screen it said, 13-year-old speaks out against critical race theory. And it's sort of like, you know, there's five or six different things that are wrong with this, but it is certainly low hanging through. And I think this is a difference between the left and right. You know, I've just pointed out a lot of the right at this point is doing their own version of identity politics,

but just endlessly reporting on it, the way the right does critical race theory this, mask mandate that, vaccine mandate is, it wouldn't titillate the left, the way it would titulate the right because these stories create fear among the right and more so than identity politics and critical race theory the last six months for the right have been anytime masks are required or vaccines are required go full in on it's unitutional, its authoritarian, etc.

That's been kind of the low effort content generation machine for the right for the last six months or so, more so than identity politics even. Yeah, I would agree. You went on Rogan not too long ago. Did you get any backlash from the left for that? Because I think Bernie did, which feels sort of strangely, and no, like self-defeating given that the game is to not only hold onto the existing

voter base, but to try and actually reach new people. And Rogan's not a traffic one. I did get any backlash. I went on, I think it was like April or May in 2020. So at the time, this was before the more anti-vax sympathetic stuff started with Rogan. So I think maybe if I were to go on now, it would be different. I don't know that he would have me back on. He may be upset with me for all I know for some of the coverage I've done of the things he said about vaccines. He may also not have seen it. I have no idea. But no, when I went on, I didn't get any, my audience understands what I'm doing. I've done, you know, Jesse Lee Peterson's another extreme right-winger

whose program I've done. And my audience gets what I'm doing there. I don't think I've ever contacted someone on Skype and had as many contacts in common as I do with you. Oh, interesting. 13 neutral contacts when I went to ring you early on. And all I use this for is the show. So it's not like we happen to have like some anti

that were like half related to. We surprised about the Bernie thing, about the fact that when Bernie went on, he did get a bit of pushback. No, I wasn't surprised. I mean, again, I don't remember that, I remember the big story from when Bernie went on being that Rogan agreed with him on almost everything.

And it raised this question of Rogan as, what are Rogan's political views or is he a political chameleon or whatever, things that are kind of very personal and kind of gossipy in nature. But no, I mean, it's not surprising that there would be a little pushback, but I don't remember it being like the big story. And obviously it made sense for Bernie to do, given what was going on at the time running a campaign. Yeah. Has there been a sense of the no platforming or the, what we've talked about here is that the left and the right seem to be existing

in two different worlds, at least narratively, that the right is focused on something that you think the majority of the left isn't focused on. I'm not sure about your opinion for most of the left being focused on the right. But recently we've seen Ben Shapiro and Anna Kasparian do a debate. I'm aware that it's a little bit like a WWE match.

It wasn't just them going out for dinner and having a chat about something. It was a big event and broadcast and so on and so forth. But are we any closer to turning a corner to actually have some more well-meaning good faith communication between the sides? Well, the thing about it is, the communication between the sides is really easy when you restrict the subject matter to that on which most people would just agree, right? So I think this early on was one of the big reasons that the intellectual dark web, so called, caught on, which was there was essentially a focus on the areas in which those left and right wingers agreed, mostly on the lines of supporting

free speech, opposing restrictions on speech, supporting the idea of conversations that cross ideological and party lines. And that's great. The difficulty is when it becomes untenable to maintain that. And I think one of the reasons that the intellectual dark web, and you look at search traffic for it and all these different metrics, the reason that it's declined, I think, is that once the pandemic started, and you saw this

completely off the rails departure from the right on a lot of basic public health things, it became untenable to get together and be like, we're just all about speech. It was like an elephant in the room, so to speak. It was untenable and it started to become kind of weird. Like, we're not going to talk about these things. So I think that it's very easy to do that when you restrict your conversation in a way that prevents the major disagreements. I'm not saying you can't have major disagreements politely.

Of course you can. But the gist of bringing everybody together in harmony, I think, becomes much more difficult when you really get to such fundamental ideological differences. It's great to try, of course, it's a worthy effort. That's a really, really interesting point. To think about the fact that one of the reasons perhaps that the IDW worked for a while was that the guardrails had been brought in on what was going to be spoken about, that there are potentially some fundamental disagreements that people aren't going to get past, but if we leave those off the table, then we actually can,

we can have like a performative agreement almost. And then when some things come in that stress tested that beyond breaking, maybe it doesn't quite work so much. Yeah, I mean, it's like, you know, we've had these, I hope I don't get any of these examples wrong because I don't follow it super closely, but in thinking over the last year and a half or two, for example, Dave Rubin straight up went, I'm voting Trump and I think that came just like as a kind of shock to some on more of the left-leaning side of the IDW.

And then you had Brett Weinstein go very much in on controversial COVID-related stuff about the vaccine is toxic and Ivermectin and different things and that has led Sam Harris to be very critical. So, you know, I think that these have served as stress. I hope I'm getting them right, but these are the sorts of examples that serve as these stress tests, and it's become much more difficult for it to remain a cohesive group. And also, it may be that the appetite for that group's continued dialogue has declined as well, I don't know. Yeah, people only have so many novel points of view.

John Peterson has talked about this before where he says that he gets bored of his own voice. And after a little while, you actually need to go away and do some thinking and come back with something novel and different because everyone's heard what you've got to say. Yeah. Yeah, that may be, I mean, I think, yeah, I don't know that I have more to say on that,

but I don't disagree with that. How would you characterize the view of the right from yourself at the moment? I think that the right has gone in a very dangerous direction. Over the weekend, this past or previous weekend, depending on when this airs. Donald Trump did another one of these rallies this time in Iowa, which is an important state for the presidential election in the United States. And he still did all the same things he always does. He told lies about the pandemic. He told lies about his presidency, he told lies about communism, he told lies about socialism, he had black people from a group called blacks for Trump placed right on stage behind him.

You know, everything that's done at every single one of these rallies. But there was an interesting difference, which was after everything that happened with January 6th and Trump being president when Republicans lost the House of Representatives in 2018 and then lost the Senate in 2020 and lost the White House. Mainstream prominent Iowa Republicans like Senator Chuck Grassley were there supporting Trump. And it sort of seemed to me now that we're just over a year from the midterm elections. Like if they still have not said, this is too much, Trump still is in control of that party. And to me, that's very scary, because the few voices

in the Republican Party that are willing to say, I want low taxes, and I don't like regulation. I'm not big on gay marriage. You know, like all the normal stuff from like the Bush era, which was bad enough, but it seems relatively, it seems comparatively milk toast, although I don't want to minimize it. Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, etc. They've been pushed to the margins of the Republican party, ostracized woman in an airport went up to Mitt Romney and said, I don't even think you won your election fairly, which is a very dangerous thing now to say to anyone you don't like, you cheated and you didn't really win. That's very, very dangerous. I think it's pretty bad right

now. And I think one of the good things, depending on where you live in the United States, is that for better and worse, the higher education, higher income, higher standard of living blue states in the US, have standards of living that are similar to Norway and Denmark and these places that have robust social democracy. And so those people will probably be mostly okay, no matter what happens at the federal level, barring, you know, something really even crazier than what we've seen. But for a lot of these folks in the states that have very poor financial situations, etc, etc. The standards of living there are equivalent to developing

countries, but it's the United States. I mean, in some of those areas. Okay, so I don't want to get any wrong, but on education and health care, Mississippi, and Alabama are disasters. The information's easily accessible, and I recently did it. People can Google standard of living. There's actually something very interesting, which is the human development index, which is normally applied to countries.

There's an interesting page, which does it for US states states and finds an equivalent country. And what you see is that all these blue states in the US have stand HDI levels similar to the social democracies of Northern Europe and New Zealand, etc. And then you see the opposite for the red state. So the information is available there. I think it's really a scary situation for large parts of the country if there were to be a Trump part two, whether it's Trump himself or someone like Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, etc. We're sort of lucky he

only had four years and wasn't able to do a lot of the things he wanted to do. Do you think Trump is an own goal for the right? Remains to be seen. I think a couple of data points are Trump got elected in 2016. 2018 Republicans lose the House of Representatives. 2020 Republicans lose the Senate and Trump becomes a one-term president, which is relatively hard to do. I mean, I think there have been eight or nine one-term presidents in the U.S. who ran for reelection. Typically presidents get reelected. So that's not good. He didn't build the wall, pay down the debt, all the things he promised to do,

right? So in terms of whether they accomplished things, I don't know, I don't even know if they know they didn't accomplish them. So so far, it's not been great, but it's created a movement that at least for now seems to be, it continues to exist. The rallies are still very full, and most Republican electives are falling in line. Like I said, with Chuck Grassley over the weekend. So I think we need more data. I think 2022 and 2024 will give us some of that data.

Yeah, it'll be an interesting one to see whether Rhondis Antis does step up to the plate with that. I think it definitely seems like that maybe in the wings, if Trump gets decided to be the, you say, the unacceptable face of the right, it seems like Ron Desandes might be the person that steps in. Yeah, I mean, with no special insight, just looking at the straw poll data, it seems as though right now, if it's not Trump, DeSantis is the guy that Republicans seem to have more

of an interest in. But I think that without seeing what happens in 2022, it's really tough to make any real predictions. There's something that I've noticed. I want to see if you can, if you've seen this as well. What it seems to me online when it comes to left wing and right wing commentators, content creators, it feels to me like people that are on the right

tend to react to stories that appear within the culture so are racially segregated graduation ceremony or a lips of TikTok video or something like that, but very rarely actually react to content creators on the left. Whereas I see far more content creators on the left people like yourself or a Kyle Kalinsky or a Sam Seder actually doing reaction videos to content creators from the right whether that be a Rubin or a Shapiro or whatever. Do you sort of see this a symmetry at all or if I'm I incorrect here. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I mean, I guess if that were the case, what relevance would it have? I guess we've been my question. I just think it have? I guess we'd be in my question.

I just think it's an interesting asymmetry. Why would it be perhaps that the left sees, or some content creators on the left, find it interesting to react to some of the talking points that are coming out from creators on the right, but that doesn't appear to happen in reverse. I just thought that was something I'd potentially seen online and was maybe interesting. One idea, and I'm just thinking of this now, is that over the last, certainly three, probably more like since the Obama era started, the Republican Party has increasingly abandoned policy and talking about policy. It's been more about, don't let Obama do anything or undo what Obama did, right?

With Obamacare voting 63 times in the house to repeal it even though it was clearly going nowhere. This type of thing, it's obstruction and opposition. Because they're doing so little actual policy making or proposing a policy ideas. What we really have to point to to explain to our audiences what they're up to are the things that individuals say. Because they're not actually doing the stuff, right? I mean, Trump's build the wall. It would be the full US Mexico border, Mexico would pay for it, etc. Nothing was actually happening. There was nothing actually taking place.

It was Trump's talk about it and then using it to become xenophobic and all these different things. So in a sense, because they've abandoned actual policy, what we have to look at is the things they say they would like to do. And that involves looking at the personalities. That strikes me as maybe at least part of the explanation. Definitely feels like it. Yeah, I think that would align with what I've seen online. I mentioned it earlier on that it always seems to be a reaction from the right to something that's occurred on the left, but very rarely is a proposal. You know, you listen to a lot of right-wing commentators, and it is often, here is my opinion on a story that I'm talking about, as opposed to here is an actual proposal that moves things forward. And I see this, right? I see this in the UK as well, that

it traps the right within this constant desire to be reactionary to, let's say it's identity politics, let's say it's intersectionality or whatever the next sort of outlandish story is, that doesn't actually ever get progress. It's a story that they think is so outrageous that it's worthy of their attention. And if we don't battle back then they're going to win and this is a problem because it's worthy of their attention. And if we don't battle back then, they're going to win. And this is a problem because it's fundamentally taking apart whatever it is that we care about. But that doesn't allow you to progress your constantly playing defense, constantly playing defense, and never actually proposing anything. Yeah, I think that the exceptions would be things like the incredibly restrictive abortion bills, sometimes they're called like heartbeat bills

or whatever the case may be, those do put the left in a position to really have to activate including through the court system and in other ways because that really has like a tangible immediate impact on people right away in the real world. But with that as an exception, I tend to think that you're mostly right. Usually the left would be quite averse to Big Farmer. Typically, I think, and yet we've seen them, they're aligned because of the requirement,

the view that there is a requirement for people to get vaccinated. Are you surprised by this at all? Are you surprised by the fact that Big Farmer at the moment is sort of an acceptable? How's it seen? Is it an acceptable evil? How's it working? No, my view on this is that you're sort of mixing two different things. So first, there's the perception of big pharma, which I don't see as having changed at all from the left. But remember, the vaccine requirements don't come from big pharma. So really we're talking about two different things here. When it comes to big pharma, my view is that there is no question that the profit motive plays a major role in this industry. How could it not? Of course it does. That's very different than there would be any reason

to profit from a vaccine that doesn't work, that harms people, that, right? So these are sort of two different things. A lot of money was made from developing the vaccines. But is that the worst thing in the world, assuming people get access to a vaccine that works? I mean, when we think about the things people can make money for, you know, there's this couple from Biontech that developed the vaccine, Turkish immigrants to Germany, that ultimately became what we know as the Pfizer vaccine. And sometimes people will point out, do you really want that vaccine? Those people made a ton of money. Well, they did an amazing thing, didn't they? I mean, if anybody deserves to be well compensated, wouldn't it be someone who develops a vaccine in this period of time that helps us dramatically reduce the risk of serious illness and death? So for me,

it's not about the analysis of big pharma. We know the limitations of big pharma. We understand the FDA and the FDA mostly getting it right and occasionally getting it wrong and on all these different things. I see that as separate from the requirement or mandate issue, which is primarily not actually about the vaccine. I mean, remember, a third of the vaccine hesitant before the approval of the Pfizer vaccine,

so as soon as it's approved fully, I'll go and get it. And at the time I said, no, they're lying. They're gonna move the goalpost to something else. Once it's approved, they'll say, now the approval isn't trustworthy. Couple months ago, FDA issued a full approval. That's exactly what they did. I mean, within hours, Fox News was saying,

was this vaccine approved too quickly? Was the process rushed by the FDA for political reasons? So I see these as two separate things and I don't see the mandates or requirements really connected to one's opinion of big farm at large. What's the vaccine rate in the US at the moment? You know, I think for fully vaccinated, it's somewhere between 55 and 58 percent, I think. Not a lot, then, if you have. No, no, I mean, really, at this point, I think last among what would be called wealthy

countries and behind many not wealthy countries as well, it's really humiliating, quite frankly. I think where 80 in the 80s, maybe even 87% in the UK. That may be for first dose, not for full course. It would be worth checking. Sometimes one is reported, sometimes the other is reported. But there's no question that the numbers are way higher in the UK without a doubt. Yeah, it's crazy.

Another thing I was listening to your episode with Rogen a little while ago, and on it, this was the one from 2020. So no concerns, real concerns about vaccine hesitancy yet, so it was enough vaccine. And in it, you were talking about the potential of Trump having another term and repealing Roe vs Wade, and one of the things that came up there was removing bodily autonomy from people and restricting bodily autonomy, I can do what I want with my body. I should be able to have the choice.

But with this year and vaccine mandates, it seems like that's a little bit of a pivot. Is that something at all that you've, a circle that you've been able to square? So it's speak like, is that a continuous line of thought that you can a circle that you've been able to square. So it's speak like is that a continuous line of thought that you can see there? Yeah, no, there's no controversy whatsoever in my mind.

If you don't want to get vaccinated in just about every case, you can opt out and be tested instead. There are some organizations that are under the purview of the federal government or in specific situations where the employer has said, we don't want to deal with the opt-out testing. So, if you want to work here, you have to be vaccinated. And you have the choice as to whether you want to work there or not. The only real exception is the military.

And you can still leave the military. But the military has a long history of these are the vaccines you get when you is the military. And you can still leave the military. But the military has a long history of, these are the vaccines you get when you join the military. And they've added the COVID-19 vaccine in addition to like six to 10 others or something like that. And even then you could leave the military. So no, I mean, nobody's being forced, the very same right that loves to say,

employers should have freedom to organize employment however they want and employees have the freedom to accept or not accept a job based on anything. Do they like the hours? Do they like their boss? Do they like their office? Do they like the vaccine requirements? Everybody can make the choices that they want and I don't see any issue whatsoever. Who or what do you think are the biggest problems on the left at the moment? If you were able to wave a magic wand and get people to focus less on certain things and focus more on other things? I think the way I would generally call it would be just the perfect becoming the enemy of the better. And I'm not the one who has come up with that idea,

but it's sometimes narrow disagreements within the left, distracting or spending political capital and preventing any progress at all, seeding ground to the right, or even giving the opportunity to the right to get things done or to prevent the left from doing things because the left can't be totally on the same page. Lit mistests on the left, I think sometimes can be problematic where if we agree on nine things but not this 10th thing, we can't even work on the nine things we do agree on. I think that type of ideology is problematic.

I don't, I wouldn't be able to name people that are problematic on the left. If I see someone on the left that's problematic, I just kind of don't follow them and do my own thing. There's just so much to read and pay attention to that I try not to waste my time with that. But yeah, I think the inability sometimes to say, here's an area where we agree, and we all agree as to something that would be better than what the right ones. Let's get it done.

Oh no, but we disagree on this other thing that's not really an issue here. That doesn't seem good. That seems like a problem. Does that always be in the case, or is that a new phenomenon? I don't know that it's been, it's always been the case to some degree.

I mean, even back in the progressive era of the late 19th century into the 1915s, 10, 1920s, there was some degree of that in the new deal era, there under FDR, there was some of that. It feels as though it's worse right now, but that's not based on anything empirical that it researched deeply. Yeah, it's a, it's a strange one to think about that. One of the things that keeps on coming up are these sort of two narratives that are existing online at the moment, where one person sees one view. For instance, I was listening to one of your episodes or a segment that you did on a teacher who was at home, hadn't gone into school and had told everybody why she wasn't going into school and it was because there was a mandate to get vaccinated

and she wasn't going to. Or be tested as an important detail. She could have just said no vaccine, but I'm going to be tested. She was refusing that as well. And then she brought signs to way through a bunch of research that she'd done herself and so on and so forth. And yet, if I was to watch a show from the right, I would also see examples of teachers that were forcing children to have masks or screaming at a girl or there's a girl that's in detention. I saw a girl handcuffed in her school whole way the other day because she wasn't wearing.

So again, this isn't just about the social media, the, how would you say, the fragmentary nature of social media, but just the fact that there are such different worlds that people exist in at the moment. So for someone that's trying to make sense of both sides, it doesn't surprise me that it's difficult. It doesn't surprise me that I'm coming to you and asking basic, bitch questions, because I'm like, I see, I can see two completely polar opposite. And both of these are true, but they both

appear to be true. So, meshing those together is a function of how big your country is, which is massive. So, you're always going to have tons and tons of outliers on both sides. But it's very difficult to work out some sort of a middle ground. Like, how do you zero off that set of accounts? I can see a girl who's been handcuffed because, like a young girl who's been handcuffed because she hasn't worn her mask in school. And then there's this teacher that's saying that the vaccines got blah, blah, blah spike proteins in it that are dangerous. Like it's really confusing. It's a very confusing landscape to exist in. It's confusing, but I think it's not accurate to mesh all these things together equally.

So let's see if we can disaggregate some of them. The girl getting handcuffed, police in schools and the school to prison pipeline is a major issue in the United States about which the right has mostly not cared about for decades until it started to have to do with masks and vaccines. So I find the right rights view on police doing, I'm with them. Shouldn't be handcuffing a little girl.

Shouldn't be handcuffing a 12-year-old in school. We have these stories all the time. I care about all of them because of the presence of police in schools and how that seems to be a very negative experience and influence for children. The right hasn't cared about that for decades until right now, I find their view on it very, very, very cynical. Now let's get to the other examples. You've got the video of the teacher who says, I'm not in school because they're trying to get vaccinated and I'm not going to do it. Or they need me to get tested. And I'm also not going to do that.

And air, which is what she said, she says, oxygen cures coronavirus. On the other hand, a teacher trying to enforce the rule that the school has, which is you got to wear a mask, and getting frustrated and yelling. I don't like that the teacher got frustrated. I don't like that the teacher yelled.. I don't like that the teacher yelled, but there's no equivalency to a teacher spreading obvious, dangerous,

disinformation about oxygen curing the virus and no one needing to be vaccinated or be tested. So I just don't see them as equivalent. No, I would agree. I mean, there's tons and tons of videos, whether it's that really disturbing video of a toddler that kept on having the mask pulled down over their face, which almost seemed performative to me. That almost seemed like it was staged. That was a little child's three years old, four years old, but to presume that it's some sort of daycare on nursery that needed to have a mask on. And then the child kept pulling it off and someone, an adult, kept forcibly pulling it down. And it was like a, it's a 60 second video of constantly this child being pulled out.

It's obviously in distress. Obviously doesn't want it. And it was so sort of flagrant that it genuinely was, I was like really skeptical about whether or not that was legit. It's quite uncomfortable to watch. And that's, that may be, I guess the question when I see a video like that is, okay, so there's a

kid struggling to put a mask on and that's sad. And I'm sure if I saw the video, I wouldn't like the way the kids be. If it's the way the kids got the mask on and then wants to pull it off. So the kid pulls it down and then continues to be to have it to put back on, presumably the narrative is that it needs to have it on. I'm sure my reaction to that video would be the same as your reaction or any kind of reasonable, empathetic person. I think the question is sort of like on the basis of that video, does that tell us anything about

in general what policy should be? And I think that that's where it can get kind of dangerous where people will use that video to say any number of different things. Like what we know is absent being able to be vaccinated and ventilation and all these different things, the schools that are requiring masks have lower rates of spread. Do we think that it's worth it then? That's a question for everybody to kind of judge, but I think where it can get dicey is,

okay, there's a horrible video of this kid who doesn't want to wear the mask. Okay, but so what does this mean about policy? The masks still do reduce the spread, absent vaccination, we probably should be using them in school. So I think what we extrapolate from it is where we open up ourselves to sort of fallacious thinking. And this is the problem of having the most thinking. And this is the problem of having the most gregarious, ridiculous or eye-catching content that gets the most reach. Like that's something that's difficult for people to ignore because it's quite an uncomfortable watch. But as you say, it doesn't actually necessarily contribute to moving a conversation forward, not in a productive way. So is there anything at the moment, what's your view moving forward?

Now you are, for better or worse, sort of close to the eye of the storm when it comes to content creation and being online and sort of swimming through these waters. Do you think that there's going to be an improvement in ability to communicate? Is it going to get worse? Any ideas? It could go either way and, you know, predictions are worth very, very little in my mind. My focus will continue to be just explaining what the facts are and also explaining what count as facts. So this is like an epistemic problem in the US.

If we say here is the science of what vaccines do and here someone who says, I have a different opinion about what vaccines do. That's not equivalent. And unfortunately, there's a group of people that think it is equivalent. So it's not even about the disagreement. It's about the idea that both types of statements are statements to be compared. So I'm going to do everything I can to communicate what the facts are with an interest in getting past this pandemic, of course, but more generally about the conversations. I'm not super optimistic. Maybe on a different day, I'm having more of a pessimistic day today, another day would be more optimistic, but no, I mean, having spoken to experts in conspiracism, cult-like thinking, radicalization, etc. It's really, really tough to get people out of this type of thinking. And some people use the

term deprogram. We don't have to use that word. It can take over months building a relationship one-on-one with people. And might work as a small numbers type of thing, but that's not really going to get you the big cultural awareness shift that we would need to, for example, get everybody vaccinated. That's where my lack of optimism comes from. Man, thank you. I really, really enjoyed this. There's certainly some interesting mental models that I've taken away. The lack of equivalency or there's not always two equal sides to one story is

definitely something that I think I'll use to try and be more effectively skeptical. Certainly also thinking about the fact that then what you see online isn't always representative, especially when what you're seeing is second-hand passed to you by other creators. I think both of those are really important sort of sense-making tools. And you had a quote talking about Richard Spencer, you said, it's not about who you have on, it's how you treat them. And I think that it's not necessarily about just the stuff that you consume, it's about how you can filter that through. And I think that that sort of those sense-making tools can be pretty useful. If people want to keep up to date with what you do and catch more of your content, why should they go?

Yeah, DavidPackman.com links out to everything we've got. We've got the YouTube channel. We're on TikTok now, Twitter, all the different things, but DavidPackman.com is the great place and just one other idea just to build on what you said about the two sides thing. Sometimes people get mixed up through no fault of their own, between neutrality and objectivity. And these are two very different things. And often there's the idea that it's neutral, for example, to bring on one person who accepts the science of climate and one person who denies it. And it's neutral. We're representing both sides equally. But there's nothing objective about that in terms of how it relates to what's known.

And so I think, in the same, whenever we're thinking about these equivalencies and sides, neutrality and objectivity are two very different things and just because something looks or appears neutral or we have an instinct to want to find neutral ground, we should ask whether we're actually being objective in doing so because sometimes the facts are just on one side and being neutral is not objective in any way. That's an interesting point to dig into that a little bit more. One of the challenges that everybody has and that's everyone that's an audience member and also a content creator is that every choice you make is an editorial decision. Every single word that mean you have said to each other throughout this entire

conversation has been an editorial decision. Do I want to continue to chase you down about one particular branch of that tree or do I want to come back toward the main thrust of the conversation and keep going down? A lot of the time, we will both be criticized for not pushing back against one particular thing, but if you were to push back against every single element of a conversation, it would be so fractured that you wouldn't get anywhere and it would be a disgusting thing to listen to.

So every single time you do that, the same thing goes for, let's say that we're talking about climate scientists. So for instance, good example, I had a guy called Patrick Moron, who used to be the president of Greenpeace, and he is a climate scientist, but he is very skeptical. In two months' time, I have Richard Betts, who is the head of the UK government's international, into governmental panel on climate change, the IPCC. I have both of those guys on. I am not a climate scientist.

Should I not have this conversation until I'm able to assess both of their levels of science up to a degree where I can know exactly what's going on? Well, that's going to take me years and years and years to be able to do. So again, that's an editorial decision that is constrained by the fallibility of being humans. It's a challenge. I think in that case, I think responsible platforming is what I advocate for. So obviously, it would be unreasonable to expect you to have the same level of expertise as

all of your guests in every topic. It's an impossibility. But I think what would apply would be being able to responsibly push back against what maybe bad arguments being spread by some of these folks. Like when I interviewed Richard Spencer versus when others did, I made every effort to be ready to responsibly rebut the claims that he would make. No, I don't think you need to be an expert in those fields, but certainly if it were me, so that I don't get snowed by these folks with bad science or bad ideas. Or non-science would be to know what they're likely to say and to understand what the rebuttals are at minimum, as a bare minimum. Yeah, I agree, man. I really appreciate the work that you do in this space.

I think that being someone that is genuinely coming across in a good faith way and trying to remain objective and also as a good role model for people to think, okay, this is a way that you can have a conversation with someone where you can perhaps bring on people with differing points of views or points of views that your audience may disagree with or struggle with. And then using that as an opportunity to stress test that. And also I'm sure it's an enjoyable experience for yourself as well to go, right, okay, but I'm going to test my metal. I'm going to put my ideas, my counter ideas up against this person's ideas. Yeah, I think it's it's good work, man. I really appreciate talking to you today.

Thank you. I really appreciate you having me on.