The David Pakman Show - 11/28/22: Trump Dines With Kanye & Fuentes, Protests Erupt in China

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

-- On the Show: -- Producer Pat Ford fills in for David -- Donald Trump has an eventful dinner at Mar-a-Lago with well-known anti-Semites Kanye West and Nick Fuentes -- Democrats have only a few short weeks left to get legislation passed before Republicans take over the House -- President Biden delays student loan payments again as his debt relief plan remains held up in the courts -- Kevin McCarthy does not have an easy path to becoming the next Speaker of the House -- Protests erupt across China over harsh COVID-19 restrictions -- Right-wingers respond to the Club Q shooting by blaming the victims and asserting the shooter is non-binary -- Republican-created voter fraud task forces come up empty after the 2022 midterms -- Elon Musk will relaunch the Twitter verification system after making a series of mistakes since taking over the company -- Elon Musk is backing Ron DeSantis in the 2024 presidential election -- On the Bonus Show: Early voting begins in Georgia runoff, election deniers in Arizona not backing down, Colorado shooter's dad reacts to news, and much more... 🔊 Try Blinkist for FREE and get 25% off at http://www.blinkist.com/pakman 🔪 Kamikoto: Get an extra $50 OFF with code PAKMAN at https://kamikoto.com/pakman 🧪 MEL Science: Use code PAKMAN for 50% OFF at https://melscience.com/sBLN/ 💻 Private Internet Access: 82% OFF + 3 months free at https://www.piavpn.com/David 🍸 Shaker & Spoon: $20 OFF with code PAKMAN at https://thld.co/shakerandspoon_pakman_1122 🌿 Sunset Lake CBD: Get 20% OFF using code PAKMAN at https://sunsetlakecbd.com -- Become a Supporter: http://www.davidpakman.com/membership -- Subscribe on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/thedavidpakmanshow -- Subscribe to Pakman Live: https://www.youtube.com/pakmanlive -- Subscribe to Pakman Finance: https://www.youtube.com/pakmanfinance -- Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/davidpakmanshow -- Like us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/davidpakmanshow -- Leave us a message at The David Pakman Show Voicemail Line (219)-2DAVIDP

David Pakman Show David today as he is spending some time today on the studio redesign. You may know by now that we're coming out with a new studio for you guys in the next few, I don't know, weeks, months, something like that. And the panels are going right in the trash. No more panels. We're going to be doing something new. So he's working on that today. He'll be back with us tomorrow. I wanted to start things off today by talking about this big story we heard over the long holiday weekend here in the United States. And that is that Kanye West was seen with Nick Fuentes at an airport together, and it was confirmed that they were going to visit Donald Trump, the failed former president at Mar-a-Lago. Now, this is a big deal, of course, because Nick Fuentes is a flat out racist, anti-Semitic person, political

commentator. He's so far to the right that even other people on the right denounce him because, you know, he's just full mask off, right? He's a Holocaust denier. He wants Trump to be made dictator, like all the worst things that you can get on the right. Kanye West, of course, is the famous rapper who decided to throw his career away earlier this month and become a social pria, all so that he could, that he could publicly say these anti-semitic things and claim that he was going to go death con three on Jewish people so Trump thought that it would be a good idea to have

dinner with these two people and as you may imagine the Trump 2024 presidential campaign team is going absolutely ballistic over this they're in full on damage control mode because this is just not the right way to start off your campaign dining with a couple of out and out anti-Semites. So Trump put out a statement

about all this on Truth Social, and this is how it all got organized. According to him, he said, quote, This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends whom I knew nothing about. So Trump here being very much dismissive of the three people that Kanye brought with him to the dinner. He's trying to say, oh, well, I can't be guilty by association because I didn't even know these people. But really, just having Kanye over alone is enough to make you worthy of public scrutiny. It's a sign that you've gone too far, because he's just said some horrible things over the past few weeks that have rightfully got him cancelled, you know, all these things about,

you know, he's gonna go death con 3 on Jewish people, and all these anti-Semitic tropes that he repeats and repeats, and it's not like one of those things where you have a celebrity who says something dumb and then they apologize for it the next day. They say, oh, I was drunk when I wrote that. That's not how I really feel. And I'm going to make every effort to make amends. No, Kanye has just said horrible things and continued saying horrible things.

He keeps doubling down on these shows and on Twitter and all these different stuff. So, I mean, having Kanye over at this point, it's just completely toxic. You used to be able to trot him around in these right-wing circles, like Candace Owens would go around the country with him. And there was talk about how he's a Trump supporter and, you know, he'd go on Tucker Carlson show and all these different things. You really can't be associated with him anymore, even if you're on the right. So this excuse that Trump gives that, oh, I only knew Kanye. I didn't know the other visitors. Kanye is enough to make you look bad. There's also

a great amount of dispute over whether Trump actually didn't know the other three guests that Kanye brought with him since Karen Giorno was one of them. And she was Trump's campaign director in the state of Florida in 2016. He apparently knows her by name and sight. So if he lied about that, what else could he be lying about? I get the sense that he probably knew who Nick Fuentes was, even though he declares that he didn't know who Nick Fuentes was. Maybe he knew that Fuentes isn't the type of person you don't want to admit to knowing, but I do get the sense that Trump probably knew who he was. Fuentes was there, by the way, because he was advising Kanye West in Ye's 2024 presidential campaign, which we found out about last week, that that's a thing that Kanye is giving another shot at

becoming president. And he has people like Nick Fuentes and Milo Yiannopoulos working for him. As for the dinner, Trump had planned to dine privately with Kanye at Mar-a-Lago's library, but then they decided that they should all eat outside on the public patio. No word yet as to what they had for dinner. I don't know about the appetizer and entree selection, but who knows? Maybe we'll get some more updates on that. Kanye actually had the gall to ask Trump to be his running mate during this whole exchange so Kanye invited himself over effectively to Trump's house at least that's the theory that we have that's the story we're being told on this and he decided to tell Trump who he knows is running for president himself that he Kanye West is also running for president and may take some share of the Trump vote and then on top of that Kanye wants Trump to bend the knee to him at his own house and become his vice president. Like, how crazy is that? Kanye just full of arrogance here, not understanding that Trump is the alpha dog currently in Republican politics, and he's not just going to

back Kanye for no reason and become his VP. Just absolutely insane. You cannot make this stuff up, folks. And we actually have Kanye talking about his encounter with Trump. Let's cut to that now and listen to some of the other things that Kanye says went down at that dinner. I think the thing that Trump was most perturbed about, me asking him to be my vice president, I think that was like lower on the list of things that caught him off guard. Then he goes on to say that Kim is a d***. You could tell I said that and I was thinking like that's the mother of my children. Since we know and all the Christians in America that love Trump know that Trump is a conservative we're gonna demand that you hold all policies directly to the Bible. When Trump started basically screaming at me at the table,

telling me I was going to lose. I mean, has that ever worked for anyone in history? You're going to lose. Tell him he's going to lose. I'm like, well, hold on, hold on, hold on, Trump. You're talking to Ye. So there's that trademark arrogance on display with Kanye West. He thinks he can just show up to Trump's residence at Mar-a-Lago and ask him to be his VP and that Trump wouldn't get mad or anything like that. Of course, Trump got mad because he has this giant ego. And both of these people have crazy egos. Like if you put them in a room together, some wacky situation is going to stir up.

And in this case, it was not a room, but a back patio. But nonetheless, some crazy things resulted from it. Also pretty wild if we're to believe Kanye that Trump would attack Kim Kardashian for no apparent reason, no relevant reason anyway. And we also learned from this campaign ad we just watched that Kanye West wants to make America a theocratic nation, to be a Christian nation. And it's just added layers of what's a crazy story that we don't even have time to get into today. The fact that Trump apparently attacked Kim Kardashian and the fact that Kanye wants to make the U.S. a nationalist country or a Christian nationalist country, rather. So Trump is full on in damage control because his campaign must have gone to

him and said, you know, you really should not have had these people over. So he took to truth social yesterday to respond to some of the backlash about Kanye. And he couldn't even really do that properly because he brought up Kanye's race for no apparent reason. He said this quote, so I help a seriously troubled man who just happens to be black. Yay, Kanye West, who has been decimated in his business and virtually everything else. And he was always been good to me by allowing his request for a meeting at Mar-a-Lago alone so that I can give him very much needed advice. So Trump effectively here saying that he doesn't care that Kanye has said these horrible anti-Semitic things because he's been nice to Trump and that's all that matters in Trump's world. Now the other key takeaway from the dinner is that Trump was reportedly very much impressed with Nick Fuentes.

He said something like he really gets me and he seemed very much taken by Fuentes who was able to rattle off statistics and recall speeches, quotes from Trump's speeches going back to his 2016 presidential campaign. At one point, Trump asked Fuentes what he thought about his presidential announcement speech that he gave a couple of weeks ago. And Fuentes said that he should rely less on the teleprompter and he needed to be higher energy, which actually was true. Trump was very much low energy in that announcement speech. Fuentes also told Trump that he's going to crush the competition in the 2024 election, DeSantis included, which as you might imagine, Trump liked very much. But it all just adds a very strange layer of complexity to this because

Fuentes is supposedly there because he's advising Kanye West for Kanye's presidential campaign. So why is he giving Trump pointers and telling him he's going to crush the competition and all these different things? Like this is just a complete gong show here. Trump also asked if Fuentes was on Truth Social, which he said, Nick said that he is on Truth Social and a bunch of other social media sites had kicked him off for being too quote fringe.

So that all in all was the dinner there's still the question over how much the trump campaign is going to be affected by this like will republicans even care about this sort of thing because like trump will repeatedly routinely make these unforced errors do stuff like this where he shoots himself in the foot and he'll just be able to get beyond it like people forget about it after a few weeks or so. Every time we wonder, us on the left, like will this time be different? Will this be one of the things where Trump went too far and even Republicans turn on him? But it never happens.

It at least hasn't happened for the past six years. And there's been some crazy things going on in that six years, like coup attempts and these types of things. Will this be any different? My initial sense is no, but on the other hand, if there's a case to be made for this actually torpedoing Trump's early chances here of at least, you know, just drowning out the competition and having an easy road to the nomination, it's that he's already a wounded antelope. Like he had a disastrous midterm performance. So many of his candidates lost in their midterm bids. The Murdochs aren't supporting

him anymore. So he's not getting favorable coverage on midterm bids. The Murdochs aren't supporting him anymore. So he's not getting favorable coverage on places like Fox News. He is Ron DeSantis surging behind him in the polls and in the betting markets. Some polls and betting odds even have DeSantis up. And there's just not a lot of energy behind Trump's 2024 campaign. So there's the potential that in an environment like this, where Trump is already doing so poorly and has so many different things working against him, maybe this is the type of thing that can get a lot of attention and diminish his hopes of being able to make a lock on this thing, like to just completely secure the nomination for himself.

Any other politician, this would probably torpedo their chances, but we've seen Trump get beyond these types of things before, and ultimately he'll probably be able to do it again. All right. We're going to go to a break now. We'll be back with much more of The David Pakman Show right after this. never have enough time to read all the books that I want, which is why Blinkist has been such an important part of my life for years now. Our sponsor Blinkist is the app that takes thousands of nonfiction books, boils them down into an explainer that you can read or listen to in just 15 minutes, which includes all the most important takeaways from the book. With Blinkist. I can absorb the essence of 15 different books in an afternoon so I can quickly gather insights from all sorts of perspectives, make connections, have those kind of aha moments that don't happen so easily, which is why I feel enriched when I use Blinkist.

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Kami Kodo only uses steel from Japan. Each blade takes years to craft and goes through a rigorous 19 step inspection process with The David Pakman Show David Pakman dot com. of the Michelin star chefs all over the world using Kamikodo knives. My Kamikodo knives at home have been performing great for years. You really just can't beat the feel of a nice Japanese knife, perfectly balanced in your hand. And Kamikodo is now running a big Black Friday sale. My audience gets an extra fifty dollars off. Go to Kamikodo dot com slash Pacman and use the code Pacman. That's K-A-M-I-K-O-T-O dot com slash Pacman. Use code Pacman for an extra fifty dollars off. The info is in the podcast notes. We know that Republicans are going to be taking over the House of Representatives at the start of 2023. And so that means that for Democrats, there's not too many working days remaining on the congressional calendar to get the things that you want to get passed passed.

And it means that these next few weeks, we have to be all hands on deck to get these pieces of legislation through and get them signed into law. Luckily, we'll still have the Senate after the start of 2023, but we're not going to have the House anymore. And really, these opportunities where you have full control of government, the House, Senate and presidency don't happen too often. And so you have to make the best of the time where you have it all. We have a few more weeks. And so it's time to get busy. My hope is that with this added sense of urgency, we'll be able to get the votes we need on some of these things. And also you don't have to worry as much about some of these more vulnerable senators and congresspeople because they don't have to worry about an election for another couple of years at least.

So maybe you'll have more votes post midterms than you had pre midterms. Chuck Schumer is saying about this lame duck period, we are going to try to have as productive a lame duck session as possible. It's going to be heavy work, long hours to try and get something done let's hope he can deliver on this i anticipate that he's going to run into many of the same issues that we've had over these past couple of years is which is that you can't always get everyone on the exact same page because you have slim majorities to work with in the house and senate now in these next few weeks there's some must-dos in the agenda, some things that Democrats absolutely have to get done.

Like, for example, they're going to need to pass legislation to keep the government open and funded in order to avoid a government shutdown. They also have to pass the National Defense Authorization Act. That has to get passed so that the military can get funded. And you better bet that we're going to be able to find the money to do that because that is always a top priority in Washington. There's also this back and forth about raising the debt limit from its current thirty one point four trillion dollar cap. Republicans may try to hold this hostage in exchange for some concessions on spending cuts. To be honest, the debt ceiling talk and the government shutdown

talk, it doesn't interest me that much because these things happen like every couple of years, maybe even more frequently than that. And it's always the same discussion. We always know that they're going to do the right thing to keep the government open and so that we won't default on our debt and all these different things. But it's just this big charade that comes up. I'm more focused on the policy items that Democrats can get done in these next couple of weeks. Like for one, they still have to codify interracial marriage and same sex marriage. They had that preliminary vote on the topic and 12 Republicans in the Senate crossed over and voted along with the Democrats. But they still need to pass this thing one more time in the Senate. Hopefully that's a shoe in.

My sense is that it is. In terms of other priorities, they have to pass some legislation to clarify the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which became a point of interest when Trump was trying to overturn the 2020 election results. Democrats want to clarify the vice president's role as purely ceremonial when they count the electoral votes. Of course, it was believed for many, many years to be ceremonial. But then Trump decided to torpedo democracy and argued that Pence was able to overturn the election in his favor. And so Democrats want to make the text very much clear on how you count electoral votes so that a vice president can't just turn things over so that they win. This is what Trump interpreted to be vindication, by the way, because he was trying

to claim that the whole time Mike Pence had the authority to do this. And the fact that Democrats are changing the law now means that he was right, that Pence could have done this. And it doesn't really make any sense. But anyway, they're trying to do that. They're also looking at getting more aid approved for Ukraine, especially with the expectation that Kevin McCarthy is not going to be amenable to approving more aid funding for Ukraine once the Republicans take over. There's contingents on the right, these non-interventionalist types, also these people who think that we shouldn't help Ukraine at all in their fight against the Russian invasion for one reason or another, because they're OK with Putin's regime. They're not going to want to see aid going towards Ukraine.

So that's another thing that Democrats can try to do. One last ditch effort on that. They're also trying to get protections for dreamers with these final few weeks. Undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as minors, even though they didn't make the decision on their own to come here. They still have to deal with, you know, potential deportation, potentially going back to a country that they never knew because they weren't born here in the United States and aren't technically citizens. So that's another thing that Biden should try to do in these next few weeks. I think that personally, if you're going to go pedal to the metal on any of these issues, it should

probably be the dreamers because it's perhaps the most consequential, like the same sex marriage thing and interracial marriage bill that'll probably get done pretty easily. I'm also assuming we're going to be able to keep the government funded and, you know, raise the debt ceiling and all of those procedural types of things. But in terms of what you can actually do to make a material difference for the public and how you can sort of increase Democratic poll numbers and just do the most good with the time that you have left, I think that protecting the dreamers should be a high priority. I wish that there could be more things on this list, but we've known since the start of this Congress, the start of this presidency, that we were not going to be able to get done all the

progressive wishlist items that we wanted to get accomplished done because we just were never going to have the votes. We weren't able to repeal the filibuster and all this stuff. But that doesn't mean that you can't grab all these low hanging fruit. That's what we've been trying to do over these past couple of years. And hopefully with these final weeks, we'll be able to do more of it. Student loan payments have been suspended once again by the Biden administration as they have announced that they are going to push back when people will have to start making payments on their bills yet again. The moratorium started in spring of 2020, of course, with the COVID-19 pandemic. And the plan that President Biden unveiled earlier this year was that in exchange for the $10,000 of student loan forgiveness, more if you

got Pell Grants, that they would bring back the payments at the start of 2023. But then we learned that there were these Republican efforts to challenge Biden's executive order to forgive the debt, and two of the lawsuits ended up succeeding, at least for now, putting on halt the Biden debt relief plan and leaving millions of Americans in limbo. The Biden administration is saying that they will resume payments either halfway through 2023 or shortly after the courts ideally allow his executive order to stand. So depending on what the courts decide to do is when you may have to start making payments again, if that type of thing applies to you. Biden is rightfully playing politics with this, of course,

saying that if Republicans are going to tie up what is rightfully playing politics with this, of course, saying that if Republicans are going to tie up what he wants to do in the courts, he's going to use his power to make sure that at least for now, people with student loans are benefiting from his presidency. It would also be kind of strange, unfair if someone who has, let's say, $9,000 worth of student loan debt all of a sudden has to start making payments on that balance again, even though they thought that they wouldn't have to pay it at all. They thought it was all going to get forgiven. And now they still don't even know if it's going to ultimately get forgiven. As I mentioned, there are two cases holding up the debt relief. The first came to us on November 10th

after a right wing federal judge in Texas put a halt on the debt relief plan because they were going to hear out the case of two borrowers who didn't qualify for the debt relief. The plaintiffs were, of course, backed by conservative groups. And then shortly after that, we heard from the U.S. Court of Appeals in Missouri. They granted an injunction by six red states against the debt relief plan. That one has to do with whether Biden has the authority to do this as president or if he needs congressional approval. And I got to say, it pains me to say this, but there is a good chance, at least a decent chance, that the courts will end up striking this down outright because the legal justification that Biden is using to forgive the debt is kind of on shaky grounds. Like the basis is the 2003 Heroes

Act, which allows the education department leeway for rules surrounding student loans if there's a war or national emergency. In this case, the national emergency is being cited as COVID-19, which no doubt would have been successful maybe back in 2020, 2021, during the worst parts of the pandemic. But the courts, and especially these right-wing courts, may say that, okay, well, we're beyond COVID as an emergency. It's one thing to have a pause on payments during a crisis, especially when people can't work. It's a different thing altogether to forgive debt going forward. And so you really need Congress to pass this. The president can't do this on their own.

There's also the question about whether this will hurt Republicans if they're able to torpedo this thing, because you may imagine that there are going to be plenty of Republican constituents who would stand to benefit from student loan forgiveness. Maybe they'll look the other way. Maybe they'll say that they didn't want it in the first place and it was unfair or whatever. That type of thing happens. You never know with these Republican constituents. It's also a long time before they have to vote again. It's not going to be another two years before the 2024 election. So maybe there won't be another two years before the 2024 election. So maybe there won't be any sort of consequences. But hopefully it doesn't come to that.

Hopefully this debt relief plan is going to be able to stand up because $10,000 up to $20,000, that can really do a lot of good for a lot of people. But let me know what you think. Will this be allowed to stand up? And if it is struck down, will Republicans have to pay a political price for it? With Republicans taking over the House of Representatives, we expect that the current House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, is going to become the next Speaker of the House. In fact, he got the nomination of his party earlier this month by a wide margin, 188 to 31, getting many more times the votes that his challenger Andy Biggs got. But even so, McCarthy is going to have a tough time getting to that 218 vote threshold that you need to become speaker when that vote takes place on the House floor at the start of next year. And that's because he has a slim majority to work with.

Democrats are, of course, going to back Pelosi's successor, Hakeem Jeffries, but he's not going to have the 218 votes that he needs. Republicans are going to have to decide amongst themselves who the next Speaker of the House is. So McCarthy will need nearly all the votes from the Republican caucus to get him to that 218 threshold. He can only spare to have about four Republicans vote against him. That's the current projection based on how some of these elections are playing out and how big the majority is going to be for the Republicans. And that's going to be a tall task for McCarthy, getting those 31 Republicans who voted against him in the nomination process to vote for him to speaker on the House floor.

He can only afford to lose a few, and right now he's got to convince at least a few dozen of them. We already have a number of hard no's from Republican reps saying that they are not going to be backing McCarthy. Many of these hard no's come to us from the House Freedom Caucus. They include people like Matt Gaetz, Ralph Norman, Andy Biggs, Matt Rosendale, and Representative Bob Good. Interestingly enough, Marjorie Taylor Greene not on this list. You'd think that she's so fringe that, course she would back whoever is running against McCarthy, but maybe because she's being promised her committee assignments back, she is saying McCarthy is the person for the job right now. And even among these hard no's, are they actually

hard no's? Like they're probably just using this for leverage in a negotiation. The idea is that maybe they'll end up giving their votes to McCarthy in exchange for leverage in a negotiation. The idea is that maybe they'll end up giving their votes to McCarthy in exchange for some concessions. Like one thing that's being floated in particular is to institute a motion to vacate the chair, which would allow members of the house to kick out the current speaker of the house mid session. So if they got this in, potentially what would happen would be McCarthy gets elected speaker, he gets enough votes, and then after a short period of time, the Freedom Caucus gets upset with him and decides to oust him as their leader. He's apparently not in negotiations yet with the Freedom Caucus, but his hand is eventually going to be forced. He's going to have to come to the table and talk

to these people if he wants their votes. McCarthy, we know, has wanted the speakership for so long It's been his ultimate goal in his career and he nearly got it in 2015 when John Boehner decided to step down As the leader of the House Republicans stepped down as Speaker of the House But then it became clear that McCarthy was not going to get the votes that he needed to become speakers so in came Paul Ryan who was ushered in as someone who could represent like the Tea Party factions and the Freedom Caucus factions while still having appeal to like the broader Republican Party because he was Mitt Romney's VP candidate in 2012. And so he was the one guy everyone could agree on. There's talk about that type of situation happening again to McCarthy and instead someone like maybe Steve Scalise or Lee Stefanik or Jim Jordan coming in as the person that Republicans

can all coalesce around. Now, another thing that may damage McCarthy is that he seems unwilling to impeach Joe Biden, uh, because he kind of gets the political ramifications that could happen if they decide to impeach Biden for some absurd reason, especially because Biden hasn't really done anything impeachable over these past couple of years, especially, you know, relatively speaking, in terms of what you would impeach a president for. Some say that he should be impeached for pulling out of Afghanistan. Some on the right are saying that he should be impeached for inflation. Some say for Hunter Biden and the laptop from hell.

It's clear the base just wants to impeach Biden because of revenge. And they figure, OK, well, Trump got impeached twice. So we got to impeach Biden in the same way. But that could end up backfiring hugely for them if it's seen as being done for a nonsense reason. And I kind of get the sense that Kevin McCarthy understands that he wants to avoid avoid impeachment altogether if he's able to. But if people are saying from inside the House that you've got to do it, if the constituents, the Republican Party are saying you've got to do it, maybe his hand will be forced and he'll have to do that. So Kevin McCarthy in a giant mess. I don't envy his position right now. It's not a shoo in that he's going to become the next House speaker, but he's certainly vying for it.

And we'll see if it ends up happening. We're going to go to a break right now. We'll be back with much more of the David Pakman show after these commercial messages. enriching, but fun enough to keep them engaged. Every month, our sponsor Mel Science sends you a box with science experiments that combine hands on physical components with virtual and augmented reality. Learning science doesn't need to be boring. It doesn't need to be difficult. Many kids are hands on learners who absorb the most through activities like these. It's perfect for homeschooling ages five through high school, five different subscriptions to to the David Pakman Show at David Pakman dot com. from sugar and make a huge foam eruption in a flask. But you're actually learning about carbon dioxide and unstable carbonic acid. We had a ton of fun with it. The VR components are awesome, too. It is really clear how this helps kids tune into what they are learning. And my audience gets

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access for 82 percent off. That's just two dollars and 11 cents a month, plus three months free. Go to PIA VPN dot com slash David. The link is in the podcast notes. Protests have been boiling over in China against covid restrictions nearly three years into the covid-19 pandemic in Shanghai and in universities across the country, we're hearing of demonstrations, people chanting things like, step down, Xi Jinping, step down, Communist Party. Also chants like, we don't want COVID tests, we want freedom, and we don't want dictatorship, we want democracy. Police are arresting people at these protests, trying to send a message to people to stand down and stay home. And there are videos of police dragging away protesters, beating protesters.

I won't subject you to them now. Also, recently, a deadly fire at an apartment block in Xinjiang killed 10 people and injured nine. And what's being blamed for why so many people were killed and hurt by this was the COVID lockdown measures, which reportedly delayed firefighters from being able to reach the victims. So I'm sure everyone knows that China has maybe the strictest COVID restrictions. They have had those severe strict this entire time, easing up very little. Like we've seen these places like New Zealand and Australia, for example, that were strict on travel and these other things during much of 2020 and 2021. But then eventually their population was exposed to the virus once it became more manageable. China, on the other hand, has been sticking to COVID zero, aka dynamic COVID,

which includes everything from having negative tests required for people to enter a business or public place, to government supervised quarantines, to lockdowns when cases are detected in significant enough numbers. Even just this year, there were, of course, lockdowns in Shanghai. And there was also that shutdown that took place a few weeks ago at Disney World. It seems like just with all of these restrictions, with how long it's been going on, people are just reaching their boiling point. And certainly policies like these can last a lot longer in a place like China than they could in the United States.

I mean, here in the U.S., people threw a fit because they had to wear masks in public for longer than two weeks. It became more than just, you know, two weeks to slow the spread. So people went ballistic. Over in China, they've been dealing with this stuff for a lot longer and much more severe restrictions. People, I think, just ultimately only have so much patience for this. And the only the other problem that Xi Jinping has right now is that he has to ease up on restrictions to keep people happy, while at the same time not make it look like the Chinese government is changing its mind, because that could lower their credibility in terms of how they see it. Like, I would view this as like, OK, well well he's just looking at how covid has changed it's not killing as many people we have the tools to deal with it so it makes sense that the government

would switch their position but in china the sort of idea is that if he decides to back off of covid zero then it would suggest that he was wrong to institute it in the first place and so they have to stick with this zero tolerance approach to covid um even as it may end up looking like more and more of a failure and not sustainable anymore so xi jinping is backed into a corner the entire country has to respond by doing these protests i've seen people talk about how protests in china are common but long-lasting protests and protests in so many places throughout the country are much much less common and we'll see if this is able to stand up. In terms of the numbers, China is recording about 3000 new COVID

cases a day, which is a lot more than they were admitting to, at least, you know, earlier on in the pandemic, like there was times where there was this little surge at the beginning of this year. But during much of the time when the world was dealing with the most severe COVID outbreaks, China wasn't having too much of a problem with it, which is crazy to see because they have a population of 1.4 billion people. And they would say, oh, well, we only had 100 new cases today or 200 new cases today. And people either suspect that they were so strict with their lockdowns and COVID measures that they were able to achieve that. Other people say they were clearly fudging the numbers. But regardless of what they were doing before, now they're saying 3,000 is the number that they're getting just about every day.

It's hard to predict where this story is going to go next, especially because protests so often in China are short-lived. But at the same time, this COVID zero policy seems unsustainable. And it seems like COVID is not going to be completely eradicated, at least not anytime soon. And so the government of China will eventually have to adapt and bring about some changes. But the question is, will a bunch of people be jailed and maybe killed before that happens? Or will there be some sort of sensible policy change that comes to China in the near future. I'm rooting, of course, for some sort of peaceful ending to this all, to still take the virus very seriously, but to ease up on the restrictions because it seems like after three years, people are just not willing to deal with it anymore. We're learning more details about the Colorado Springs mass shooting that took place at an LGBT nightclub on November 19th.

And much of the conversation has been surrounding the shooter's motivations because it's being investigated as a hate crime. And on top of this being just a horribly tragic act, there's also this political component to it, this culture war component to it because of all the different issues that this overlaps with. It's not just gun safety. It's also right wing media, stochastic terrorism, LGBT rights and all these other issues. And so that's why there has been a lot of attention to this shooting in particular and also just sort of the updates as to what we know about it. This time it's maybe more necessary to discuss the motivations of the shooter than in other cases because it overlaps with all these different issues. There's also the concern that this specific type of mass shooting could happen in the future because the right is responding to it by stoking the fire, their fear-mongering even more about gender affirming care. For example, here's Tucker Carlson doing just that on his Fox News propaganda show. So these horrifying murders in Colorado over the weekend quickly became a pretext for yet more censorship of your speech. You are responsible for

this, they told you, because you said the wrong things. You are guilty of stochastic terrorism, inspiring violence by your beliefs. Anderson Lee Aldrich committed mass murder because you complained about the sexualizing of children. Every time you object to drag time story hour for fifth graders or point out that genital mutilation is being committed on minors, which it is, every time you say that, you are putting people's lives at risk. So Tucker here talking about the sexualizing of children and genital mutilation to rile up his audience, essentially. He acts like his audience is being under attack by these people who think that they're right-wing media hosts who are stochastic terrorists, and also this has to do with free speech somehow. Really well done in terms of propaganda by Tucker Carlson,

but not great in terms of lowering the temperature right now, especially after a mass shooting when we don't want to see this type of thing happen ever again. And then, as we discussed last week, there are other voices on the right who are taking the path of victim-blaming in terms of responding to this. Here's Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh saying that, oh, well, people should just stop dressing up in drag, I guess, if you want to avoid

mass shootings at nightclubs and this sort of thing. Let's take another listen to that. But why should we be the only ones explaining? Instead of asking why we oppose it so much, we should ask why they support it so much that according to them, they will keep doing it at the risk of life and limb. Why is it so important to you to cross-dress in front of children? Why is it so important? Why do you need to do it? Why? Is it worth the cost that you claim you're paying for it? Why do you have to do this? Why can't you just not do it? How is that? Would that be a fight? If it is really causing all this chaos again, that's your version. I don't agree with that. You're exaggerating, but according to you, that's what you're saying.

What is it? Why? Look, if only you didn't wear that dress in public, he wouldn't have been catcalled. That's basically the type of logic that Matt Walsh is applying here. He's blaming the victim. This is also coming from supposedly someone who is pro-freedom. He's so pro-freedom, I guess, that he doesn't want people to feel empowered to live their life the way that they want to live without risk of getting shot at by people who irrationally hate them. Now, to add another layer of complexity to this story, it was found out that late last week the perpetrator has told their attorneys that they are non-binary and immediately right-wingers ran with this story saying that look we're vindicated, the right had

nothing to do with this, the shooter was actually a member of the LGBT community, so therefore it can't be right-wing stochastic terrorism that led to this, when really there's a possibility that this person could just be trolling and they're only now coming out as non-binary when they lived their entire life as a male, and they're doing so either to avoid hate crime prosecution or to just troll and make a point to a right-wing audience. We just don't know the facts of it yet. But still, that hasn't stopped people like Tucker Carlson from going out there and saying, look, we're vindicated. This proves that there was nothing to be upset

with the right about. And let's take a look at it. Do you remember when Brandy Zedrosny told you several hundred times that the accused shooter, Anderson Aldrich was inspired by hatred for the non-binary community that he learned on this show? Do you remember that? Well, actually, it turns out, we discovered last night, that Anderson Lee Aldrich is, drumroll please, part of the non-binary community. He doesn't hate them. He is one. In a court filing, Aldrich's lawyers wrote this, quote, Anderson Aldrich is non-binary. They use they them pronouns. And for the purposes of all former filings will be addressed as Mix Aldrich. Mix Aldrich. That's the shooter, the non-binary shooter. Let that sink in.

So look at Tucker Carlson there, just believing this thing whole cloth saying that oh yeah the shooter could not have been a right wing person trying to commit an anti-LGBT hate crime because they themselves identify as non-binary. Now I'm not going to discount the possibility that this person legitimately is non-binary but it all seems very convenient that we're only hearing about this now from the person after they've committed this horrible act. And now that they're being investigated for potential hate crimes. Like this could easily just be the person trolling. And trying to get a rise out of these types of figures like Tucker and play into the culture war. And you best believe that it turns out if it turns out that this is a hoax. And this person really never was non-binary. Doesn't actually identify this way, well, Tucker won't really have all that much egg on his face because he just won't talk about this ever again. That's what we normally see happen with these types of things. see how messed up it is that anyone can just say that they are non-binary or just say that they're

a man or say that they're a woman and everyone else has to believe them even though that's not strictly speaking what the left's position is it's if you give a legitimate effort to live a certain way or another then you should be respected as whoever you identify as but it doesn't mean that you can shoot a bunch of people at a nightclub and then all of a sudden claim that you're non-binary and then everyone has to believe you at your word. I mean, clearly you can be skeptical about that sort of thing. But that's the latest on the right wing and their reaction to this Colorado Springs shooting. They are blaming the victims. They are saying more horrible things about gender affirming care.

They're talking about how the left wants to sexualize children. And they're claiming that, oh, we actually don't have anything to worry about on our side because clearly this person was part of the LGBT community. Just absolutely despicable what has been coming from the right on this issue in the past couple of weeks. It's part of the vodka based drinks. It uses herbed sage syrup and blood orange Meyer lemon ginger ale. Delicious, refreshing. I love how shaker and spoon includes everything you need, the ingredients, the instructions right in the box. The recipe is easy to follow. The blood and sage made for a very relaxing fall afternoon on the back deck. A lot of fun with shaker and spoon. You don't need to seek out hard to find cocktail ingredients or buy full size containers of

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unveiling some specific examples of voter fraud that supposedly happened across the U.S. in these 2022 midterms. And it's because they've been focusing on it nonstop as an issue for their party. They've also started a bunch of state-level law enforcement units that were set up to investigate specific voter fraud instances. And so one would think that with this being their first opportunity to unveil the truth about double voting by democrats and democrats voting for their dead grandma and people putting the wrong kind of sauce on the ballot and all these different things

you think that they would be talking about this stuff nonstop but actually they've been a very much hush hush and that's because in florida Georgia, and Virginia, where these election fraud agencies were created, all backed by Republicans, they just don't have the examples to put forward to people, and it shouldn't be much of a surprise that they're coming up short, because we know, and we've known this whole time, that voter fraud is incredibly rare in the United States. Every study that we have on this, the Brennan Center of Justice study, for example, show that it's like a handful of cases out of billions of votes cast across many,

many different election cycles that you have someone who's provably committed fraud. And many of the examples of voter fraud from the 2020 election were actually Republicans who were voting for Trump, thinking that they were making up the difference because the left was supposedly committing so much fraud. Surprise, surprise, they weren't, but the Trump people in some cases were. And of course, voting twice, voter fraud in general, is just rare because it's the type of thing that could get you sent to prison, and you're risking potential jail time for one vote that's probably not going to make the difference in an election. It's probably going to end up being inconsequential, so it just doesn't seem like a fair trade for the average person to want to make. That's why when DeSantis wanted to do his

voter fraud stunt earlier this year and find people to charge an arrest for voter fraud, he had to choose people who thought that they actually were able to legally vote, thought that they had their rights restored from the ballot measure in Florida back in 2018 on restoring felon voter rights. And it's only these fringe cases that you can really find to really make your case for how this is supposedly existing all across the country. There's just not that many cases of people willingly doing this, and so a special task force in all these states never really made sense,

but of course it was just to appeal to right-wing voters. But even so, they're not succeeding at doing that because they're not able to come up with at least just a couple of cases to parade out to people and say that this is systemic across the entire country. It's only been a couple weeks, so maybe we'll just have to give them more time. But sadly, Republican voters will just look at this all, and even if there's a lack of evidence, they'll say, oh, see, that means the Democrats have gotten especially good at rigging the elections

because they can cover their tracks so easily, and it means that we have to pour even more resources into trying to catch them. I will say, though, that the voter fraud thing does seem like it's calming down after this 2022 midterm cycle. The only person that's really trying to make it a focal point is Carrie Lake, who lost her election in Arizona. But these other Trumpian candidates like Doug Mastriano and Tudor Dixon in Michigan, they've just decided to concede.

So at least for now, the voter fraud lies are taking a break. But I do think that he'll be back in 2024 if Trump decides to run and if he ultimately ends up losing either the primary or the general. So they're taking a break from this narrative now. But you best believe it's probably going to come back. You know, I should really count up all the times that we've talked about Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter this year on the show and on the bonus show because it seems like every other day we've been talking about this whole saga because before the deal was made, there was all this back and forth. There were questions about whether Elon could actually buy Twitter and then if he could back out from the deal. And then ever since he's taken over, there's been all these updates as to what the hell is happening over at that company and I find it

important to provide the updates because it's one of these things where you have this high profile person the richest person on the planet taking control of one of the most important social media sites and he's been making a lot of mistakes and costing himself and the company a lot of money in the process. And there's this question now over whether Twitter will be able to survive. And it's turned into this total cesspool lately because of the low staff and low level of enforcement. Well, the latest story is that Twitter is going to be relaunching its verification program this week earlier this month you may remember that twitter changed from having those coveted blue checks verifying high profile figures being something that was instituted automatically for people with a big audience to something that you could pay eight dollars a month for even though

even if you're not some high profile figure yourself as long as you're willing to pay up you could get that highly coveted blue check. Now the first draft of this proposal failed miserably because with the rollout and the lack of moderation there was just a great deal of impersonation accounts with people paying for the blue check and it became clear you just wouldn't be able to trust anyone with this new system. You couldn't tell if people were actually who they say they were. Then Elon jumped in and said that impersonators and parody accounts would receive a permanent suspension with no warning. You had people impersonating Elon himself, and you had one account impersonating the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, which tweeted that insulin was free,

causing the company stock to take a nosedive. So it's all had some great consequences, and it's all been chaos. And even aside from all of this is the reality that's, you know, it's really taken the whole point of being verified if you can just pay for the service, because like, there's really not that much clout to being able to afford the $8 a month charge. And at the same time, like the point of verification is to, to, to know with certainty that people are who they are. You take that away if it's something that people can just pay for. And there's really no sense in just an average Joe being verified because who's trying to impersonate their account to begin with?

Nobody. So Elon has been making so many different mistakes. Now what he's trying to do is add this color-coded system for verification. He tweeted recently, Sorry for the delay. We're tentatively launching verified on Friday next week. Gold check for companies, gray check for government, blue for individuals, celebrity or not. And all verified accounts will be manually authenticated before check activates. Painful, but necessary.

So from that post, it's unclear how exactly their verification process is going to work. And if you're even improving anything from the first round that was a total disaster uh like maybe an individual user will no longer be able to pretend to be a company or a government agency but that doesn't help all that much because there's still plenty of celebrities that they can still impersonate because they will have the same color check as the people who were high profile. I think this idea altogether is a total mess. Like, I think you need a verification process so that news outlets and just everyday people can know that when they see someone is tweeting something,

that it's actually that person and not someone else. Another problem Twitter will continue to have is all these employees leaving. How are you going to have enough people to manually verify all these different counts it just sounds like a total nightmare uh... we know of course that you on school behind watching this paid service was to increase revenue over that the company because they've been having a difficulty doing that when you're subject to the whims of advertisers it means that you're not

well diversified as a cut as a company because you're just not all that recession proof. Like if companies have less money to advertise, then your revenue will plummet. And I'm certain that that probably happened this year with the scale down in the economy that took place in 2022. So maybe they want to just open up other streams of income so you can be a little bit more well balanced but it doesn't necessarily mean that this is the right way to go about doing it this never seemed to be the solution to me anyway paying for verification especially when you look into the numbers like there are apparently about 200 million twitter users and they say that that doesn't really include debt accounts

and accounts that people haven't used in a long time. But I think the realistic number is probably significantly less than that. And if you also have like a smaller portion of people who are willing to actually pay for the Twitter blue, how much money are you really going to be able to raise from this system? Is it going to be anything that compares to the $5 billion of revenue that you did in 2021? Is it going to make that much of a difference? And if so, does it make up for the lack of revenue that you did in 2021? Is it going to make that much of a difference? And if so, does it make up for the lack of credibility that you have, the sort of trustworthiness that you give up by changing this verification system over?

My sense is that it's probably not going to be worth it, but Elon is trying. He's trying to come up with innovative ideas to bring about an extra stream of revenue coming in, but this one seems to be a total disaster and it doesn't seem like it's working well and that people are open to it. And finally, another Elon Musk story to finish off today's program. Elon Musk has said that he will support Ron DeSantis for president in 2024 if the Florida governor decides to run for president. Earlier this year, Musk followed in the footsteps of people like Dave Rubin and Tulsi Gabbard, who were supposedly on the left before, but then drifted more and more

to the right for one reason or another. And people often question the genuineness of these transformations. Elon has now joined them. He's previously said that he's voting Republican and his followers should do the same because that would lead to divided government after the 2022 midterms to quote curb the worst excesses of both parties the real reason of course that billionaires like musk like divided government is because it provides some certainty that nothing is going to get done legislatively at least nothing major is going to get done and it's good for their stock prices because it just goes to show that the boat is not going to get rocked And it's good for their stock prices because it just goes to show that the boat is not going to get rocked. Elon was asked in a tweet whether he'd back DeSantis if he decides to run for president. And he said, yes, going on to say my preference for the 2024

presidency is someone sensible and centrist. I had hoped that would be the case for the Biden administration, but have been disappointed so far. So DeSantis is apparently sensible and centrist, or at least much more sensible and centrist than Joe Biden is. That's according to Elon Musk. I mean, how delusional is that? Like you have Ron DeSantis, who is at the center of every right-wing culture war issue from trans people to immigration to police to voter fraud. He's far right in all of these

things. And yet Biden, who was perhaps the most conservative option Democrats had in the 2020 primaries, who was, you know, centrist Barack Obama's vice president, he's too far left. Apparently, that's really trying to push the Overton window in a rightward direction. If you ask me, I don't think that Elon actually thinks this to be honest. I think that he recognizes that his fan base is mostly right wing and he fell victim to audience capture like so many people do. He's just telling his crowd what they want to hear and you know he just assesses that Republican control also will be good for his net worth at least for the short term so he's just pushing right wing figures like DeSantis. He also probably assesses, though,

that Trump may be past his prime and it's better for him to distance himself more and more from Trump, because at this point, you know, especially defending Trump is just becoming more and more untenable. So there you go. Elon Musk is falling squarely into the DeSantis camp, which a lot of Republicans have found themselves doing recently because many are trying to look more sensible. They're trying to pick the more decent option out there in someone like DeSantis, who has all of Trump's policy stances, but is presented a lot more neatly. And we'll have to see how the endorsements shake out, whether this cohort of people who choose DeSantis over Trump will end up making a difference, especially someone like Elon who has a cult-like following and many of his people will

decide to go the DeSantis route because Elon is doing it and it's definitely shaping up to be a battle for the ages, that's for sure Alright, that's going to do it for today's episode of the David Pakman show. For more content, be sure to check out today's bonus show.

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To become able to access the bonus show. We'll see you all there. And have a great day everybody.