The David Pakman Show - 1/20/25: The secret about Trump's policies, Tulsi RUNS AWAY (CLASSIC EPISODE FROM 12/11/24)

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY / CLASSIC EPISODE FROM DECEMBER 11, 2024 -- On the Show: -- Andrea Chalupa, host of the Gaslit Nation podcast, joins David to discuss effective ways to push back against authoritarianism, and much more -- The alleged assassin of United Healthcare CEO Brian Johnson has been identified as Luigi Mangione, who has been arrested, and his social media history is now a focus of attention -- 28 seconds of pure cognitive dissonance from Fox News about Luigi Mangione and Daniel Penny -- The secret about Donald Trump's policies that his followers appear to have no idea about -- Harmeet Dhillon has been nominated by Donald Trump to be Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, and this is a dangerous nomination that is getting very little attention -- Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump's nominee for Director of National Intelligence, runs away from questions about Bashar al-Assad after making a meaningless statement about her views on Assad's fleeing to Russia -- Donald Trump spits out a word salad when asked by NBC News' Kristen Welker whether he will raise the federal minimum wage as President -- A disoriented Trump puts up a bizarre Truth Social post about Democrats wanting to eliminate the popular vote -- Jason Miller, Donald Trump's press flunkie, appears to whitewash everything Trump said about imprisoning members of the January 6 House Committee -- On the Bonus Show: The danger of 3D printed ghost guns, only 22% support Biden pardoning Hunter, Trump chooses another family member for ambassador, and much more... 🛡️ Incogni lets you control your personal data! Get 60% off their annual plan: http://incogni.com/pakman ✉️ StartMail: Get 50% OFF a year subscription at https://startmail.com/pakman ☕ Beam melatonin hot cocoa: Code PAKMAN for up to 40% OFF at https://shopbeam.com/pakman -- Become a Member: https://davidpakman.com/membership -- Become a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/davidpakmanshow -- TDPS Subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/thedavidpakmanshow -- Pakman Discord: https://davidpakman.com/discord -- David on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/davidpakmanshow -- Leave a Voicemail: (219)-2DAVIDP

Hey, this is David Pakman inviting you to enjoy a classic episode of The David Pakman Show. Today, we will return with new shows before you know it. Welcome everybody. The believed assassin of United Healthcare CEO Brian Johnson has now been arrested. He was arrested at a McDonald's in Pennsylvania. His name is Luigi Mangione. And very quickly, we see both sides of the political aisle looking to ascribe politicized motive and beliefs to Luigi Mangione, the right saying that this is clearly a product of the left, the left saying that this is clearly a product of the right. Now, Mangione was denied bail

during his first appearance in court in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. He faces five charges, including felony counts of forgery and carrying a firearm without a license, in addition to charges for the killing itself. Now, everybody wants to make it something. I don't particularly care from the standpoint of figuring out what's wrong with the country. Why are people turning to violence? What are the problems with our health care system? None of those systemic questions, which are really the important questions are answered by saying, oh, Luigi Mangione was a right winger or a left winger. He seems like a disturbed, troubled guy with some really tough stuff in his past and his family's

past. But there is also a little bit of a breadcrumb trail that we can look at to sort of assess whether there are political motivations. Now, I'll tell you right now, there is some anti-capitalist stuff in Mangione's posting history. There is also a bunch of red pilled sort of anarcho-capitalist right-wing stuff in his social media history. I'll show you some of it and tell you where I'm coming down. And then we'll, we'll actually talk about whether it matters. So everybody now looking through the, the, the posting history of Mangione. He retweeted right wing hero Peter Thiel and seemed sort of partial to and into that kind of material. He reposted content about empires falling, referencing ancient Rome, and then talking about the lessons to learn today about the fall of Rome, he reposted a variety of

different Elon Musk material, including about the woke mind virus. That's certainly something that right wingers talk about. Reposted Tucker Carlson videos of Tucker doing his propaganda routine. We also are learning about his backstory with regard to, you know, the assumption was this seems like someone who was denied an insurance claim and now lashed out, but he seems to come from quite a wealthy family. So that really does not seem like a super plausible explanation. And it's also relevant to consider that someone can present as one thing at one point in their life. And then things occur, things happen. And months later, they snap and they become someone else. And there's a story being told about an injury that

this individual sustained. And then he kind of, quote quote went crazy was the term that was being used. I think if we zoom out a little bit here on the one hand, we can relatively safely say that someone willing to go and kind of wait around for hours in this way to commit a cold blooded assassination, something is not functioning correctly. But from a political standpoint, from everything I'm seeing, he does seem to be kind of this red pilled anarcho capitalist, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk type guy. And, uh, it doesn't really matter in terms of adjudicating the crimes that he's now accused of, but very quickly, both sides saying, here's one post, one retweet that tells us everything we need to know about this individual. And that seems extraordinarily short-sighted and myopic. Um, and I, I do think that if we want to zoom out and make a general assessment of this guy's

politics, it seems more right than left to me, but it is not at all, excuse me. It is not at all a scenario in which I'm inclined to say politics was the primary motivator here. We, someone can have political views, but then take a particular action not based necessarily on those political views. It doesn't really matter in terms of evaluating the crime he committed. However, it would be relevant if he was radicalized to violence by a certain political side. It's too early to say, including whether his political views influenced the assassination he chose to carry out. But on balance, the political views based on his online content do seem like a sort of red

pilled kind of guy. I have what may be the most incredible cognitively dissonant 28 seconds of Fox News that I've ever seen. It relates to two individuals who took the lives of another, allegedly. One is Luigi Mangione, the now arrested alleged assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Johnson. And the other is Daniel Penny, the New York City subway strangler who was acquitted yesterday in a court of law. I'm going to play for you 28 seconds here of Laura Ingraham from Fox News criticizing those who are celebrating Mangione's alleged assassination of the United Health Care CEO. And she says, this is terrible. These are nutbags, crazy people on the left.

And then she goes. And by the way, later, I'm going to tell you about all of the people that are really happy about Daniel Penny being acquitted. Does she not realize that these are two sides of the same coin? It's the celebration of someone who took the life of another. In one case, it's discordant with her political views. In another case, it's concordant with her political views. The only difference is her opinion. The principle is the same. Listen to this. This is just, do you think she gets it or not?

We'll dig into it later. The Instagram posts from nutbag people, which I was sent in the commercial break earlier. Crazy. Like he's cute. He's that and people celebrating this. This is a sickness. Honestly, it's so disappointing. But I guess we shouldn't be surprised. Gentlemen, thank you so much. And up next, the other big news out of New York, Daniel Penny. A lot of people think he's a hero. And tonight he's not guilty.

My take next. Nutbag posters are saying it's awesome that Mangione killed the United healthcare CEO. These are not bags. This is a sickness. And by the way, many people are very happy that Daniel Penny killed the subway, uh, uh, strangled the guy on the subway and now has been acquitted. Many people see him as a hero and that's completely reasonable. Those aren't not bags. The people who see Daniel Penny as a hero, those aren't crazy people with a sickness. No. What is the difference? Well, one difference is that a lot of the people cheering Daniel Penny's acquittal are politically on the right. Whereas a lot of the people cheering the assassination of the United healthcare CEO, I guess are on the left.

Although that's not even completely clear to me. Does Laura Ingram not realize that the fundamental difference here is just which side of the political spectrum you're on. There are those who believe that those, uh, uh, Titans of industry are never valid targets for killing, but a vigilante on the subway, strangling someone else else to death must be seen as a heroic protector of the public of women and children. Of course, I don't think that that's really the way the facts bear it out. And I certainly don't cheer agree with the assassination of the United healthcare CEO. In fact, I think that, uh, Tate, the, the, this sort of vigilante justice of all kinds is wrong. And I've said that before. I think most of my audience agrees,

although a couple of people got mad, mad at me. This is about Laura Ingram's complete and total cognitive dissonance. I don't know that I've seen a more dissonant 28 seconds of Fox news ever. Let me know the answer to this question. Is she genuinely blind to the double standard that she's espousing or is that sort of the point for her? All right. I want to talk about the secret of the policies that Donald Trump is threatening to usher in, in his forthcoming second term. You know, I was looking yesterday, I said, David, sir, uh, what policies has Donald Trump proposed or alluded to so far? And Trump of course, loves to play this. I've got the secret sauce routine. I know how to fix healthcare. I know how to fix healthcare.

I know how to fix trade. I know how to solve the Israeli Palestinian conflict. I know how to solve energy. And he has to a degree convinced his supporters that he wields these brilliant and powerful ideas, but here's what they don't realize. His big policy moves are not cutting edge strategies. They are recycled duds that economists and policy experts debunked decades ago. You look at the trickle down tax plans that never reach the working class. You look at slapping tariffs on imports, which only will jack up your grocery bill. Trump's policies that he has sold to his followers are all based on broken theories. You might be a disaffected Biden voter who feels that Biden hasn't done enough on the economy or on inflation or on whatever.

Fine. But if you believe Trump has the solutions, Trump's policies have been pre debunked by decades of research, history and facts. It's policies have been pre debunked by decades of research history and facts. It's not, well, maybe some of Trump's stuff will work and some won't. It can't work. Trump's ideas have been proven wrong again and again. Let's go through it. Trickle down economics, cutting regulations for businesses, slapping tariffs on foreign goods. These are all cons. And I'm going to show you exactly how each of these ideas fails and why his followers have no clue that they've been duped. Trump says and believes you give tax cuts to the wealthy and to big corporations and the prosperity

trickles down to everybody else. We've tried this. We've tried this since the Reagan era and the results are always wages stay flat. The big players pocket the cash and working people never see the promise benefits. It can't work. It doesn't work. It's never worked, but they've fallen for it again. Trump says that in the abstract, less regulation means more jobs and a stronger economy. Now I'm the first to tell you, if you show me a particular regulation that doesn't make sense, I will take out my guitar and sing Kumbaya and say, I agree. Let's get rid of this regulation. But deregulation in general lets companies pollute more, take shortcuts, not protect their workers. It doesn't create jobs to deregulate. It creates problem, unsafe workplaces, environmental disasters, which then lead to people getting

sick or hurt. They can't work. That's bad for the economy. Not good tariffs. We've talked about tariffs a lot. Trump says that slapping tariffs on foreign goods will bring back manufacturing jobs. It'll make things cheaper. It'll help the economy.

The reality is it's just a tax on imports. Tariffs raise the cost to American consumers and to American industries. Instead of cheaper goods, you get more expensive goods. Remember that the farmers during Trump's first term got hit so hard they needed massive bailouts. That's expensive for everybody. Trump says cracking down on immigrants, deporting every undocumented immigrant will protect jobs. It'll boost wages and it'll help the economy all while reducing crime.

But if you look at the data, we've gone through this before. Immigrants are critical to a number of industries, farming, agriculture, construction, healthcare, food service. Trump's immigration policies will create worker shortages. It will raise costs for businesses. It will make everything more expensive and it will hurt the economy. Trump has said about the overturning of Roe v. Wade. We're going to let states protect life and make policies that are better for women and families. What's really happening. States banning abortion are forcing women to carry pregnancies. They either don't want or can't afford. It creates economic hardship for families. It increases maternal death rates, especially for low income women. OBGYNs flee states like Texas and Florida.

That's the reality on crime. Trump says if we deport and ban immigrants, undocumented immigrants, et cetera, we will reduce crime and make America safer. Study after study finds that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, commit crime at lower rates than native born citizens. Trump's bans are about fear mongering, not safety. They don't work. They can't work. They've never worked. So the secret about Trump's policies is this, and you've got to hand it to him in his own pseudo charismatic way. He's come up with talking points that sound good to a lot of people, not half the country. Remember more than half of voters voted for someone else, but they sounded good to enough people so that they would vote for him. But the reality is that this

stuff doesn't work. Deporting immigrants doesn't help the economy, whether they're documented or undocumented. Banning abortion doesn't make life better for families. Slashing taxes on the rich and regulations doesn't create jobs, but Trump keeps selling it. The followers keep buying it, but they are the ones paying the price. It's just a scam. Like much of what Trump's offers much of what Trump offers. The only possibility is that Trump doesn't actually do some of the stuff, but says he did and that it worked. Now, if you want to take a deeper dive into how this sort of cultural environment was created, I have two whole chapters about it in my forthcoming book, the echo machine, which you can find

at David Pakman dot com slash book. We'll take a very quick break. I want to talk about a nominee that my bet is you've never heard of and she may be the most dangerous nominee yet. It's not tool C it's someone else. After this short break. Thank you so much for joining us. for you. Ship to your door. I took the quiz. I got the salicylic acid face wash, the tone control morning cream and retinol night cream. Easy. I love the results.

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painting legitimate vote counts as fraud now has announced that he will be nominating harm meat Dylan to the justice department's top civil rights position. This is not just bad, it's dangerously bad for the integrity of our voting system and this nomination is not getting the attention that it deserves. Harm meat Dylan. Who's that? Who cares? Well, this is one of the most dangerous nominations so far.

First Donald Trump's announcement where he said, quote, I am pleased to nominate Harmeet K Dillon as assistant attorney general for civil rights at the United States Department of Justice. Throughout her career, Harmeet has stood up consistently to protect our cherished civil liberties, including taking on big tech for censoring our free speech, representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID and suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers. Harmeet is one of the top election lawyers in the capital C country fighting to ensure that all and only legal votes are counted. She is a graduate of Dartmouth

college and the university of Virginia law school and clerked in the U S fourth circuit court of appeals. Harmeet is a respected member of the Sikh religious community. In her new role at the DOJ, Harmeet will be a tireless defender of our constitutional rights and will enforce our civil rights and election laws fairly and firmly. The assistant attorney general for civil rights is not a neutral figurehead role. This is the core office charged with enforcing federal laws that protect your right to vote and my right to vote your right to participate in democracy without intimidation, without discrimination, without suppression. Now, historically under more normal administrations, this is a division that has played an important role fighting discriminatory voter ID laws, cracking down on

gerrymandering schemes that are designed to dilute minority votes and ensuring that states don't just make up their own rules and push out groups of people from the voting booth. However, we have to look at Harmeet Dhillon's track record. She has cultivated a reputation in right wing legal circles as someone who will aggressively challenge how votes are counted over and over and over again. And it often echoes or supports the narrative that only legal votes should be counted. Now, that might sound innocuous. It's sort of like when people go, well, why shouldn't you have an ID to vote? Sounds innocuous. Doesn't sound like a big deal, but you have to understand the language and you have to decode what it really means in Trumpian terms. When the Trump people say only legal votes,

it's a shorthand for excluding votes from communities of color, targeting mail-in ballots disproportionately used by democratic, democratic leaning voters, challenging any expansion of ballot access, which would make it easier for everyday Americans, whether it's students or the elderly working class people who can't stand in line for hours to cast a legitimate ballot. And Dylan's entire public persona is intertwined with a faction of the Republican party that has tried to sow chaos in the 2020 election. Because remember that Trump's allies tried to get ballots thrown out on technicalities. They pushed these debunked conspiracy theories about mass voter fraud. They pushed these debunked conspiracy theories about

mass voter fraud. They wanted to give state legislatures the power to override election results that they didn't like. Dylan didn't just sit on the sidelines. She was actively part of this legal ecosystem, trying to champion the idea that we need constant, unprecedented scrutiny of suspicious votes. Of course, votes disproportionately cast by people who traditionally suffer discrimination at the ballot box. If Harmeet Dhillon is put in charge of the civil rights division, it will be an unfettered, unmitigated disaster because instead of fighting voter suppression, the DOJ will start looking the other way. When states pass laws that cut early voting or reduce polling places in diverse communities

or impose complicated ID requirements aimed at reducing turnout, the DOJ might stop challenging discriminatory redistricting maps. They might even start supporting these right wing legal challenges that make it harder to vote in the name of election integrity, basically reversing decades of progress. This is an appointment that would be a chilling signal to civil rights groups, to local election officials that are just saying, let's run a fair election. It will be a chilling message to minority communities who have historically depended on the DOJ to step in and say, you can't disenfranchise this entire group. You can't do

that. It's an intimidation tactic. And Trump is trying to put someone in who fundamentally doesn't believe in the DOJ playing a robust role in voter protection. This is exactly what I mean when I say it's not really about Trump. It is now with a lame duck Trump coming in. It is now about setting up an infrastructure, using Trump to establish an authoritarian infrastructure that they want to be during a durable for future elections. This changes the whole game in favor of voter suppression and in favor of minority rule. And that should alarm every American who believes that elections should be free, fair and accessible. This really is about the future of democracy. And as, as disheartening as it can be, as disturbing as it can be, we have to be

thinking about the future because if they get to do the things that they are clearly lining up to do, 2026 won't matter. 2028 won't matter. They are setting themselves up with nominations like this. We've got Tulsi Gabbard, once a Democrat, now Donald Trump's selection for director of national intelligence, trying to salvage her credibility. Questions are swirling about Tulsi, about her flirtations with pro Assad and pro Russian rhetoric stuff that wasn't really a secret, but has never really been scrutinized as much as it is now because she is on the verge of becoming one of the top intelligence officials in the United States. And suddenly it seems that even some hardcore Trump allies are a little bit wary of putting

Tulsi in charge of America's national Intel. It is classic Trump administration chaos, a figure once lionized by part of the MAGA base because she abandoned the left and saw the light. She is now being forced to explain years of questionable foreign policy takes. Now I'm going to play for you what she had to say. You know, when, when Assad fled Syria and went to seek asylum in Russia, which was granted by Vladimir Putin, immediately it was, oh, what is Tulsi going to say? Well, we should have expected a completely spineless response, which is I. I agree with Trump on everything. I just just everything Trump said. I'm full support of Trump, Trump is I, I agree with Trump on everything. I just, just everything Trump said,

I'm full support of Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. I have no independent opinion about Bashar al-Assad anymore, even though I spent years running cover for him. Here is Tulsi Gabbard making a statement about Assad. I stand in full support and wholeheartedly agree with the statements that president Trump has made over these last few days with regards to the developments in Syria. My own views and experiences have been shaped by my multiple deployments and seeing firsthand the cost of war and the threat of Islamist terrorism. This is the epitome of insincerity. We are now expected to believe, oh, she, she just agrees with Trump. Trump knows nothing about this stuff and she has had years of on the record documented softly pro Putin.

I'm sorry, softly pro Assad, less softly pro Putin views. And we've heard them again and again and again, reports that she loved RT and was just accepting the RT propaganda. And now I believe that Donald Trump is just absolutely right about this issue. Um, I completely stand by everything that Donald Trump said. And when she was actually, when a reporter tried to say, what about your relationship with Assad? She just walked away. She didn't want to hear about your relationship with Assad. Yeah. Off she goes. So there are two things that are going on here. On the one hand, we do have an incoming series of nominees, cabinet members, advisors, et cetera, that is arguably the softest on global authoritarianism that we have ever seen, you know, to, to, to their credit,

call it what you want. There were some people in Trump's first term cabinet who I would disagree with politically. I would disagree with about domestic issues like regulation, et cetera. But they understood we don't play coy with, we don't coddle global authoritarian strongman dictators towards the end of Donald Trump's first term that changed and you had a different sort of thing where they did start to coddle the global authoritarians. This term with Trump, if he gets his nominees, which we will see, um, is going to be the most overtly soft on global dictators, American cabinet, certainly in decades. You know, I, I try to stop short of being hyperbolic and say ever certainly in decades,

maybe in the modern American political era. And so what Tulsi is doing now is she kind of has to play that stuff down because she knows it could jeopardize her confirmation. Have her views changed? Well, if you believe her, they've already changed. She went from Democrat to now Trump supporting MAGA. So if you believe that, unless you believe it was just a grift all along, which it may be, I mean, we just don't know if you believe that her views have already changed, but now we are being told, oh, they're changing again. So now she just matches up with Trump's foreign policy views.

Some of these views must be made up, but her immediate walking away and Trump, yes, Trump, sir, he's right about everything. It's all about self preservation and preservation of her nomination. Will it work? We'll find out at this point. I don't know. Staying motivated and eating healthy during the holidays can be a challenge. That's why I love our sponsor, AG1. I don't always carefully plan every single meal, so I know I'm getting the exact right amount of every vitamin and nutrient every day. That's why I start the morning with a scoop of AG one before my cappuccino. I mix AG one into a glass of cold water. That's it tastes good. One scoop. I get an entire day's worth of 75 high

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even after you delete them. Companies use the data to know everything about you and show you ads, even your most personal communications. That's why I recommend you check out start mail. Unlike free email services, our sponsor start mail never scans or tracks your emails. It also blocks tracking pixels, which companies and hackers use to capture your IP address. And when you delete Thank you, David. accounts for team members. That's S T a R T mail.com slash Pacman for 50% off. The link is in the podcast notes. Today we're going to be speaking with Andrea Chalupa, host of the gaslit nation podcast, wrote and produced the journalistic thriller, Mr Jones about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine, recently adapted into the graphic novel

in the shadow of Stalin. Now, Andre, I'm so glad to have you on today. I think that you're perfectly suited to addressing a reality among my audience, which is a growing feeling of despondency, checking out the belief that maybe there is no way to resist what may be coming in the United States. We see the nominees. We see the authoritarian ideas of jailing the January 6th committee members, militarized mass deportations, all of it. Right. You know what the audience knows it. How should we just like as a general entry into this topic is the despondency rational, but more importantly, from a tactical perspective, are there things that we can do over the next two and four years? Yeah, I'm actually this. All of us have to personally make the commitment that so many who have fought this fight before us have had to made have had to make. And that is quite simply, you have to commit to making the coming years some of the most productive and creative years of your life. And I know that sounds very far-fetched, but one of the things I've been doing to prepare

for this time, because it was always a possibility that Trump would come back. We had Merrick Garland and the DOJ not holding him accountable, wasting a lot of precious time and on and on the list goes and the media increasingly becoming oligarch owned and normalizing Trump and his fascism and so on. And we can do like a whole series on how we got to this point. And I have on Gaslit Nation. But when I saw this coming, I started telling my audience, like, you need to find your historical mentor. So I have several historical mentors. And one of them is J.R.R. Tolkien, who lost several of his close college friends in the Great War. The Great War was pure carnage. It just fields of Europe littered with bodies, littered with dead horses. It was like the mouth

of hell opened up across Europe. And in that despair, being so lost in that dark time, J.R.R. Tolkien could have just succumbed to that darkness like so many did. Instead, he began writing the works that would become Lord of the Rings and all of his other classics that are getting us through the times that we're now in today and so you don't have to be a great novelist you don't have to be a poet like he was but you do have to have that something inside of you that maybe you felt as a child maybe it's a very private part of yourself a part that gets you out of the bed in the morning like some larger dream that you have maybe it's a dream that you don't even dare speak to those closest to you it could be even you know you out of bed in the morning, like some larger dream that you have. Maybe it's a dream that you don't even dare speak to those closest to you. It could be even, you know,

you dream of doing comedy, you dream of doing standup, you dream of traveling, whatever your inner dream is. We need that from you now more than ever, because we are up against a confederacy of trolls. They're going to be deliberately trying to, um, psyops us, basically demoralize us. They're going to threaten us with lawsuits. Bannon already is coming out with threats against lower level MSNBC producers. Like, I'm going to go after all of you. I'm going to make you, you know, force you back in the homes with your families. You're going to be broke.

They're going to be doing that against all of us across the board because they get off on it. And so the anecdote to that, the way to push back is find your historical mentors, find your creative projects, and commit to building something of lasting value in these coming years. During the first Trump regime, I made my film, Mr. Jones. I figured out how to build a team, find a director, raise $10 million. I produced the very first screenplay that I ever wrote during the first Trump years. I hardly ever listened to podcasts. I built Gaslit Nation during the first Trump years. I've never organized a march before. I got the March for Truth off the ground. I figured all this stuff out as I was going along. And I found a lot of incredible allies, a lot of brilliant partners along the way. So the first era of Trump, which

was a devastating one, especially for me and my family. I don't know if you know this, but my sister was personally targeted by Trump, by the Kremlin. And they made her a target of Trump's first impeachment case. Devin Nunes said my sister's name dozens of times. My sister is Alexander Chalupa, the independent DNC contractor who risked her life and career to point out the obvious fact that if longtime Kremlin operative Paul Manafort, who brought Ukrainian Trump, Viktor Yanukovych to power, and he was now running Trump's campaign for free, that meant the Kremlin was running Trump's campaign. And that meant the Kremlin was trying to basically install its puppet and do a corruption state capture like it's done in countries like Georgia and Ukraine.

Yanukovych, by the way, was overthrown in a popular uprising, and he's still in Russia to this day. And he's just been joined by Assad, who was just overthrown in a grassroots rebellion uprising led by Syrians and, yes, backed by US and Turkish forces. So that's a lesson to all the kleptocrats that we're up against today, is that you're not inevitable, as much as you want to convince us that you are, your regimes will play out, like usually through self destruction, as history shows us. And there's a lot that we can do in the meantime, to build resistance to you and to build creative projects, capturing the history as it's happening. So we leave a historical truth, a historical record. And what that does ultimately

is it leaves legal cases that we could bring to international criminal courts because it's not just the laws they're going to use against us here. It's the laws that we can use internationally to hold them accountable and keep them in check. When it comes to legislatively, it seems that we are spread really thin right now with Republicans taking the House, the Senate, the White House, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel controlling Department of Justice, Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence. Like this feels palpably different than the first Trump term in some critical ways at the state level. A lot of state legislatures passing, you know, everything Texas is going, they want to ban THC. We're talking about abortion and women's rights and all of these different things. When people are spread so thin, it feels overwhelming. Some say, well, just pick

one thing. Is that a good approach? That so absolutely. So we cannot go back to how it was during the first Trump term where you would wake up first thing in the morning and you check your phone and you go to bed reading your phone and your nervous system would be attached to Twitter. And because when you do that, you're wasting a lot of precious time, and they're overwhelming you with that chaos on purpose to demoralize you. So the best thing you can do is to stay grounded. As I said before, find your project, pick your project, whatever that project is, because that's going to inoculate you against demoralization. The second thing is,

adopt groups that are on the front lines of fighting for our democracy. That's not the democratic party establishment, right? They spent this entire election telling us that Trump's going to come in and he's going to be Hitler. And then when the election came and they lost it, they just disappeared. Right. And they're not, they're not talking to us with that same plain spoken language saying, okay, folks, this is what we now need to be doing. They're not talking to us with that same plain spoken language saying, OK, folks, this is what we now need to be doing. They're not leading us. They just went on vacation. They took trips. And so the Democratic Party establishment is not it. It was never it.

It's always been the grassroots in Ukraine. What overthrew Yanukovych was a diverse grassroots coalition in Ukraine. And they have a political party called Self-Reliance. and that's the model we have to follow here at home. It's self reliance. So there's a lot of brilliantly self reliant groups that have been doing incredible work in some of these Republican hostage states. to fight. The whole history against authoritarianism in America has been led by Black people, namely Black women. And then we have a wonderful organization called Run for Something, which helps progressives, young people get into the system to become the new leaders. That did not exist when I was coming up in the world. My first job out of college as a community organizer, I was told to go stand in the streets and register people to vote. Today, coming out of college, I could be recruited to run for office. That's new. That's a political sea change in America. So setting up

automated donations to groups like Black Voters Matter and run for something, doing that now, $5, $10, whatever you can give a month, just setting it, that is going to allow those organizations to build their funds so they can start staffing up now for the fights ahead. The other thing you want to do, because the news cycle is going to be devastating. Every day, it's going to be like six scandals, and they'll all get forgotten the next day by all new scandals. And that, again, is deliberate to demoralize us and to wear us down. So we just give up and just go along with our business. That's what the Russian opposition did. The Russian opposition succumbed to that nihilism. Well, there's nothing we can do. We marched, they arrested some of us. We tried. And where did that get us? Russia just grew more and more

powerful and started invading their neighbors. And so we cannot go down that path of nihilism. We have to be more like the Ukrainian model, fight, believe, be relentless. And so another thing I'm calling on people to do on Gaslight Nation is adopt a kleptocrat. There's going, become a historian of their crimes, of rolling back life-saving regulations and so on. Amplify what they're doing. Just become an expert in that one person. Why does that matter? Because number one, that'll scare the hell out of them

if we're that organized and that focused. Number two, by amplifying their crimes, you'll also be amplifying the groups trying to stop them and building power and visibility for those groups that in turn turn into donations. So my whole point is, get organized now for what's coming. Prepare yourself now for what's coming. Set realistic goals now for what's coming. And understand that we're not the first group of people ever in human history to have to face off with this. And so find your historical mentors. I'm leaning heavily right now, as I mentioned on J.R.R. Tolkien, I'm reading a great

biography on him right now. I've been reading the original works of Albert Camus, a great Algerian French writer who during the darkest hours of Nazi occupation of France wrote a brilliant series called Letters to a German Friend, where he wrote to this mythical German saying, you think you're winning? You think you're winning? I'm letting you know that you've already lost because we're on the side of truth. We are on the side of life and life is stubborn. So Camus, during the darkest hours of France, was telling the French people, we've already won. We've got this. And they were right. So that's the kind of attitude you have to encompass and live now. You cannot allow them to be scared. Bannon is a disgusting human being. He physically looks decrepit. Like who he is on the inside is

rotting him from the outside. Do not let that kind of person win and keep you up at night, right? Monsters are real. We know from Assad, we know from Putin, we know from Bannon and Trump, but the biggest power that the monsters have is to scare you. Do not let them scare you. Focus on being creative, focus of building something lasting value, focus on making the years, these years, the most productive years of your life. Because if you don't, if you surrender in advance, if you choose the path of nihilism, like the Russians did, then think about how awful we'll be in the planet will be in 10 years, 20 years from now. We still right now in the short window of time we have left

stand a fighting chance. And I'm telling you this as the daughter of refugees, my parents spent the first five or so years of their lives in a world war II refugee camp. They came to America with whatever they could carry. Both of my grandmothers were hotel maids. They, they had to build from the ground up. And in my family survival for us was always being defiant against the great odds, always being creative in the face of all this oppression. And so I'm not just coming from you from some like, you know, comfortable suburb. I'm coming from you from my own personal family history that we've we've gone through these dark chapters before and we have no choice but to get through it again.

You mentioned the kind of fire hose of chaos and the six daily scandals supplanted by six new scandals the next day. From a tactical standpoint, there's this kind of reality where if everything is an existential crisis or a massive scandal, then kind of nothing is. And at the same time, every single day, I mean, you know, or today I was talking about her meet Dylan being nominated to run civil rights at DOJ for Trump. That is a, a scandal when it comes to voting

rights. We know Dylan's past. That is a major problem. At the same time, we've got RFK who wants to reinvigorate the search for vaccines causing autism and raw milk. And I mean, the all of these things are genuinely huge, but also you get desensitized when everything is huge. What do you do about that? And who who does what about that? Well, you have to pick your battles because otherwise you'll become emotionally exhausted and you have to build with solidarity with the groups that are most aligned with yours. So I've mentioned Syrians because as a Ukrainian- American, my battle has been democracy for Ukraine, fighting corruption in Ukraine, including Kremlin-backed corruption. I was very early

in pointing out that what the Kremlin did in Ukraine, they're now doing through Trump, right, through this weaponized corruption. And people thought I had some, you know, psychic powers. I'm like, no, because Ukraine is my lane. So I picked my battle. I picked my lane. I stayed in my lane. And I worked in solidarity with organizations that overlapped with my lane. So when Putin's total invasion broke out, a wonderful group of Syrians, I reached out to them and I had them on Gaslit Nation.

And I translated their lessons for Ukrainians from fighting a total war with Russians into Russian and Ukrainian circulated that in Ukraine. So you have to find the groups that you choose your lane, stay in your lane, and then build together with groups that overlap with your lane. And you have to have something in your pocket, something ready to say to yourself when the news overwhelms you. It's a totally normal human reaction to want to just catch your breath, maybe stay in bed a little bit longer that morning, kind of zone out a bit. But then you have to take a shower, dust yourself off, have something to say to yourself when those moments

get dark. For me, what I have ready is Gerard Tolkien. As I mentioned, I have that image of him as a young soldier, having lost some of his closest friends who were helping him find his own voice as an artist. And now they're gone. Imagine the talent, the potential that we lost with those young men, those they could have been other Jared Tolkien's themselves and they're gone. And so imagine that, that grief and devastation that he came out with. And after all the carnage that he saw and how he himself was almost killed. All right. And he continued to be, to, to build, to work, to bring beauty out into the world. And so you have to have that historical mentor, that something, that quote in your pocket

that you're going to breathe in like a deep breath for your soul to sort of stay grounded and just pick your battles, find your lane, stay in your lane, work in solidarity with those who overlap with your lane and be sure again, just get yourself organized. Now set up your automated donations to black voters matter, run for something and, you know, be on their list,

get their emails, volunteer a couple hours, find the mutual aid societies where you live locally that are, you know, soup kitchens, helping asylum seekers get the hell out of America safely, whatever that might be. So find the mutual aid societies locally where you live, because they're going to be the eyes and ears of your community, the early warning system of what's coming. And don't accept what's coming, because right now we are in a lull of this quiet Biden time. People are settling down for the holidays, but as they come in to power, they're going to make a very big show of it because that's who Trump is. He's a showman and fascists love that pageantry. And they're going to shock and awe us in those early weeks, early months. And you yourself, no matter how prepared you might be for it, you might feel despondent. You might have a moment of feeling completely rocked by it. It's going to pass because you're ready. You prepared,

you did the work and you need to prepare and do the work now. So you can be stronger for those who aren't prepared for it, who might have some sort of reaction, like, you know, prepare for an uptick of fights. Cause when people get stressed and scared, they start fighting with each other, including a lot of fights happening online. And those early weeks and months, I've seen it again and again of a lot of good resistance movements, cannibalizing each other when they get scared, when uncertainty hits. But if you have your list of meaningful actions that you can take, if you have your commitment that no matter how dark it gets, you know who you are, you know what your values are. You are committed to staying

human no matter what you are committed to being brave, no are. You are committed to staying human no matter what. You are committed to being brave no matter what, just like your mentors who came before you in history. Okay. Just know who you are. That's number one. And you will not lose that. Hold on to that humanity. And I'm telling you, as someone who has studied a lot of dictatorships past and present, we in the United States still live in a luxurious situation as far as our rights go. I know it doesn't feel that way because we've lost so much since the Reagan revolution in this country and the income inequality has exploded. And that is what has contributed to the rise in fascism. There's three things, three factors that contribute to the rise in fascism,

massive income inequality, political instability, which we saw with January 6th, and Republicans having an all-out assault on voting rights across this country, and rampant disinformation, as we're seeing with the rise of social media and oligarch consolidation of media like David Zaslav and so on. And so the bottom line is this. We have so much working for us that we have to not take for granted. We have a luxurious situation as far as Ukrainians are concerned. We don't have missiles lobbying over our heads every night. OK, we can go to bed and not have to be woken up in the middle of the night by the sirens telling us we need to get into the basement right now. There is a massive sleep deprivation crisis across

Ukraine right now, which Putin initially creates to terrorize that country into submission. And they refuse to submit. They refuse to hand over their country because it's their country. And so what I'm telling you is just part of our resistance, part of our strategy is to take stock of what we do have, what strengths we do still have, and take full advantage of those while we have them. I personally, from what I've seen all these years, I'm not worried about the next coming years. I'm worried about the next 10, 20 years, right? If we give them ground now, if we don't do the work, if we don't amplify the organizations that need our help through our

donations and through our volunteer hours, if we don't do that work, plant those seeds of change, it's going to be game over 10, 15, 20 years from now. We still have a fighting chance right now. And I'm calling on all of you not to take that for granted. Yep. Yes. And that's exactly the point I've been making to much of my audience as well.

We've been speaking with Andrea Chalupa, host of the Gaslit Nation podcast. So great to talk to you. And we will be listening. Thank you so much. Many of us have struggled with sleep at one point or another. A sleep aid many turn to is melatonin because it's a non-pharmaceutical remedy, clinically proven to work without the side effects you might get with antihistamines or prescription meds.

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so much better. Keep dream powder nearby to soothe you to sleep when you need it. Get 40% off for a limited time when you go to shopbeam.com slash Pacman and use the code Pacman. to the Let's dig into the minimum wage a little bit. As many of you know, the federal minimum wage is $7 and 25 cents an hour does not cover cost of living in any state with a 40 hour work week. It needs to come up. And Donald Trump was indeed asked about this during his interview with Kristen Welker. Let's take a look and then discuss. The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009. There are 20 states that still have the federal minimum wage at $7.25. And I actually have a map.

19 of these states actually voted for you, sir. And you can see it right here. I don't know if you remember this, but during the debate in 2020, I asked you if you would raise the minimum wage. You said you would consider it. And so my question for you is now that you are going back to the White House for these 19 states that voted for you, are you going to raise the federal minimum wage? It's a very low number. I will agree. It's a very

low number. Let me give you. Okay. So first Trump acknowledges it is very low. He knows he has to give that red meat, but then the word salad continues. The downside though, in California, they raised it up to a very high number and your restaurants are going out of business all over the place. Now he has to sort of say a high minimum wage is bad too. It is true that some restaurants in California did close. One might argue, are they really viable restaurants if they can't adjust to a slightly higher minimum wage? The population is shrinking. It's had a very negative impact, but there is a level at which you could do it, absolutely.

What is that level? I don't know. I mean, I really don't know. I can say this. You have a lot of businesses that are open and thriving because of the lower minimum wage. If you raise it too much, and you understand this, if California went crazy, they went crazy.

And people, the restaurants are closing all of them. Many more people are hurt. Now, what you have to understand is that there's another side to that. Trump says the businesses are doing really well because the minimum wage is low, but there's a counter to that and it's the demand side and this is just basic economics. When the minimum wage is really low, there aren't as many people in the community that can afford to buy whatever product or service you are selling.

So this really goes both ways. And I hope that I'm explaining it clearly. If you have a community with a seven 25 minimum wage, some percentage of that community can afford to come in and buy what you are selling. If the minimum wage goes from seven 25 to 10 25, all of a sudden more people in the community can afford your product or service. Might your product or service have to go up in price a little bit to account for the cost of wages increase? Yes, but wages are only part of total costs. But think about the number of new customers that you now would have. They never mentioned that when they talk about this.

So I hear you saying similarly to sort of what you said in 2020, will you consider this as something you're going to look at? I'd want to speak to the governors. And the other thing that's very complicated about minimum wages is places are so different. Mississippi and Alabama and great places are very different than New York or California. I mean, in terms of the cost of living and other things. Now, this is, of course, true, but they use it as a red herring. It is absolutely the case that Los Angeles, California and rural Pennsylvania have dramatically different costs of living. What is a viable living wage in rural Mississippi

versus Seattle, Washington are two different things, but we're so far outside of that with a seven 25 minimum wage. I have seen data that suggests on average, the living minimum wage is probably 18 bucks an hour. However, there are parts of the country where it has to be 26. And there are parts of the country where 13 technically is okay based on cost of living, but none of it is seven 25. And so this is a red Herring they love to use. So it would be nice to have just a minimum wage for the whole country, but it wouldn't work because you have places where it's very inexpensive to live, where a minimum wage, which is eight or nine dollars, might be, you know, might have very much, very little effect.

Yeah. So nine bucks is not going to cut it. But Trump is absolutely right. That cost of living is so drastically different that there may not be one right minimum wage. Here's the bottom line. When Trump is asked, will you raise the minimum wage? I don't have a plan. I don't know that I'll do anything. I acknowledge seven 25 is absurdly low. So I've got to pay a little bit of lip service to that. But I also have to say high minimum wages are bad because that's what my friends want me to say. And honestly, I'm just going to make it seem so complicated that I'll probably end up doing nothing. As many of you know, I will applaud any president who does the right thing. And it is the right thing for the minimum wage to come up from seven 25. If Trump does it, I will say he did it. Now, if it goes up 25 cents, of course, I'll say this is symbolic and essentially meaningless. And he did it just Now, if it goes up 25 cents, of course, I'll say this is symbolic and essentially

meaningless. And he did it just to check a box while not actually making the lives of working people any better. But if Trump does it, I will give praise where praise is due. I had to read a Trump troth post five times before I realized he has no idea what he's talking about. Donald Trump posted the following to truth social. Hold on. Where's my button? Truth central quote, the Democrats are fighting hard to get rid of the popular vote in future elections. They want all future presidential elections to be based exclusively on the electoral college. This is completely backwards. We have been fighting to get rid of the electoral college, not to get rid of the popular vote.

What does it even mean to get rid of the popular vote? We have a popular vote, Democrats, the left, anybody who wants a truly representative democracy, we've been trying to ditch the electoral college, not the popular vote. Trump's got it entirely backwards. It's like he thinks that the left is so desperate to rig the rules at any given moment that we'll just pick whichever system helps us right this second. But that's projection, pure and simple. That's what they do when, when mail-in ballots are bad for them, they want to ban them. When mail-in ballots are good for them, they say, vote by mail and do whatever we have been consistent. We believe in the principle of one person, one vote. That's the point of our system where it should be. The electoral college distorts that principle. It gives way more sway

to a voter in Wyoming than to one in California based on electoral votes per population. It gives more power to Pennsylvanians than to people. What is it? If you live in Connecticut, Connecticut's a national popular vote would just even the field, no matter the year, no matter the outcome. If you vote in California or in Miami or in Tulsa or wherever you have the exact same relative power. We want a national popular vote. Still, we had a 2024 election where Trump won the popular vote and the electoral college. Great. I still want the same principle. I want the most democratic possible system. This isn't about what's best lately. This is about moving toward a democratic system that respects every individual vote equally. We don't have that right now. The fact that Trump

can't even keep track of where each party stands is a reminder that he has no idea whatsoever what he is talking about. Again, once again, I'll remind you the most direct path toward, um, a national popular vote seems to be the national popular vote interstate compact. Uh, Google that NPVIC. If it sounds interesting, Trump just confused and disoriented once again, and the decline continues. All right. this is so funny and pathetic and this is a preview of what we are to expect over the next four years. Recently in that total bonkers interview with Kristen Welker on NBC News, Donald Trump didn't say I want accountability for the January 6th committee.

He didn't say I want fairness for the January 6th committee. He didn't say I want fairness for the January 6th committee. Trump said, I believe the members of the January 6th committee should be in prison, not for breaking laws, but for daring to investigate Trump. That is straight out of a dictatorial playbook. If you oppose me, I'm going to put you in prison. Jason Miller, Trump's press flunky now wants us to believe that jail them is a euphemism of some kind. Trump didn't mean it. It's law and order. So let me remind you, here is what Trump said on NBC news over the weekend. And Cheney was behind it. So was Benny Thompson and everybody on that committee. We're going to for what they did.

Yeah. Honestly, they should go to jail. So you think Liz Cheney should go to jail? For what? Everyone on the committee. I think everybody, anybody that voted in favor. Are you going to direct your FBI director and your attorney general to send them to jail? Not at all. I think that they'll have to look at that.

But I'm not going to. I'm going to focus on drill, drill. So that is pretty damn clear. And now Jason Miller, Trump's press flunky wants us to believe that that's not really what Trump meant. Jail them is a euphemism. Um, here is Jason Miller on CNN insisting when Trump said it on a meet the press, I'm sorry, when Trump said it on NBC news, he wants us to believe on meet the press that he wants the fair and equitable application of the law on what planet does put them in jail mean? I want fair and equitable application of the law. Look, Liz Cheney is someone who lost her primary, who got bounced out by a very good Republican who's been bitter and attacking President Trump ever since. I think

Liz Cheney, quite frankly, for what she did, I have my own personal opinions about Liz Cheney. But what President Trump said, if you listen to the entire Meet the Press interview, is he wants everyone who he puts in the key positions of leadership, again, whether that's Pam Bondi as the AG, Kash Patel at FBI, or anybody else, to apply the law equally to everybody. Again, whether that's Pam Bondi is the AG, Kash Patel, FBI or anybody else to apply the law equally to everybody. Now, that means if you're somebody who's committed some very serious crimes, who's committed very serious felonies, who's, for example, leaked confidential information in direct violation of laws that are in place. Well, then obviously that sets you up for different things. But but as far as the politics aspect, if you listen to the entire interview with President

Trump, he said he's going to leave that up to the law enforcement agents in charge, including Pam Bondi and Kash Patel. Now, that is what we know is a total cop out. Trump doesn't, you know, as I said, when we when we did the analysis of the Sunday interview, when Trump says, no, I'm not going to tell them to do it. He's hiring people that already know what to do. Now, of course, being on a house committee is neither a crime nor a felony. We know that Trump is famously all about equal application of the law, right? I mean,

look at Michael Cohen and Cassidy Hutchinson or anyone who has dared to say anything mildly critical of Trump being on a house committee and investigating the president's actions, especially a president who stoked an insurrection to cling, cling to power. That's not a felony. It's called oversight. It's part of what Congress is supposed to do, but Trump wants vengeance. And when he's cornered or when he's threatened, his go-to strategy is to escalate, threaten the prosecutors, threaten the judges, declare that lawmakers should be jailed for doing

their part. And the alarming part is that people like Jason Miller are more than happy to sanitize it all and, and sane wash and whitewash it all. We can't let them do it. Trump is telling us exactly what he wants to do. When he said the January 6th committee members should go to jail. It's not a metaphor. It's not hyperbole. He is broadcasting his plan to weaponize the justice system. It doesn't a metaphor. It's not hyperbole. He is broadcasting his plan to weaponize the justice system. It doesn't require him to say, go after Liz Cheney. It's only put in place. Pam Bondi and Kashat Patel, who we know because they've said it

will do it themselves. He won't have to tell them he chose them because they don't need to be told. We have a fantastic bonus show for you today. I hope that I will see you on the bonus show. You can sign up at join pacman.com. Remember to preorder my forthcoming book, the echo machine. It's available everywhere. It's almost too available. Quite frankly, see you on the bonus show.

What a show. you you