The David Pakman Show - 12/1/22: Biden on 4 More, Trump's Taxes Released

Episode Date: December 1, 2022

-- On the Show: -- Adam Rogers, Senior Tech Correspondent at Insider, joins David to discuss his recent article about social media deepening polarization in America, but maybe not in the way that most people would assume -- Joe Biden possibly responds to a shout from the audience of "four more years" with what might be "I don't know about that" -- Failed former President Donald Trump's tax returns have finally been released to the House committee investigating him -- Democratic Congressman Hakeem Jeffries will replace Nancy Pelosi as the leader of Democrats in the House of Representatives -- Failed Arizona Republican Gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake says she wants supporters willing to go to jail for her -- Former Vice President Mike Pence appears on Fox News in an interview so absurd, it rivals some of Donald Trump's worst interviews -- Donald Trump explodes in anger at Kanye West over the recent dinner fiasco at Mar-a-Lago -- Donald Trump once again loses it in a middle-of-the-night rant on Truth Socia -- Voicemail caller warns David that his judgment day is coming -- On the Bonus Show: Republicans with unlimited sick days vote against time off for rail workers, parents refuse use of vaccinated blood in baby surgery, Iranian man shot dead for celebrating Iran's World Cup loss, much more... ⚠️ You can use Ground News for FREE at http://ground.news/pakman 🔊 Try Blinkist for FREE and get 25% off at http://www.blinkist.com/pakman ❄️ ChiliSleep by SleepMe: Get 25% OFF your bed-cooling system at https://chilisleep.com/pakman 👍 Get 20% off an Allform sofa or armchair at https://allform.com/pakman 💪 Athletic Greens is offering FREE year-supply of Vitamin D at https://athleticgreens.com/pakman -- 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

Speaker 1 much is being made, particularly by right wing media, about an utterance that President Joe Biden made yesterday, which some are saying is a sign that he is not planning to run for reelection in twenty twenty four. Now, there's been a lot of attention on the Republican side over the last several weeks. The reason for that attention has been that failed former President Donald Trump announced he's running again. Despite that, Ron DeSantis, the recently reelected governor of Florida, is polling really well, even though he hasn't actually announced that he's running for anything, the Republican Civil War, etc.

So there have been a lot of reasons why the focus has been on the Republican side. But there's another element to this, which is that the suspicion that Joe Biden is not really interested in running for reelection has been to some degree supplanted by the growing belief that Joe Biden will run for reelection and polling that looks pretty OK for Joe Biden. And suddenly headlines like this one appeared yesterday, for example, in the right leaning Washington Examiner. I don't know about that. Biden casts doubt on 2024 run. So what exactly happened? Well, let's just look at the video. What you are going to see here is Joe Biden delivering a statement at the White House

Tribal Nations Summit. And as he is wrapping up, someone from the crowd seems to shout out four more years and Joe Biden seems to respond. I don't know about that. That's the best assessment that we have, although it's not totally clear. Let's take a look at it and then discuss. And as my grandfather, Finnegan would say, that's the Irish of it. Thank you all very much. Thanks. Speaker 1 OK, four more years.

I don't know about that. So is that what was said? It seems to be. I mean, I think I heard four more years and then I don't know about that. Let's listen to it one more time. Speaker 2 You would say that's the Irish of it. Thank you all very much. Thanks.

Oh, I don it would say that's the Irish of it. Thank you all very much. Thanks. Oh, I don't know about that. Is too much being made of this? I think so. I don't have any special insight into whether Joe Biden is or isn't going to run. If you had asked me nine months ago, I would have said I think Joe Biden is definitely not running for reelection today. I think it's much more likely that he will run for reelection. And part of this has to do with legislative achievements, approval rating recovery, circumstantial elements to this. There's a lot of different reasons, but I'm separating my opinion from what we saw there. I think it is just as likely as what Joe Biden meant was this isn't the venue in which we're going to talk about my campaign because we're here for the Tribal Nations Summit. That would be consistent with Joe Biden's personality and his

kind of modus operandi. I think it's just as likely that it's that as it is Joe Biden saying, I don't know that I'm going to be running. And in fact, when you really think about it, is it likely that Joe Biden would let slip arguably for the first time in a more formal capacity that he might not run in response to an utterance from the crowd at an event about something completely different? I don't think so. If Joe Biden is going to tell us, I don't know that I'm running in 24. I don't think it's going to be in a venue like this in reaction to something yelled out from the crowd. Now, when it comes to the polling question, it is interesting to take a look at some of the relatively new polling that we have seen for 2024. These are, of course, hypothetical polls, and it's really a pretty mixed bag here. You see

that an Emerson College poll that's an A minus rated pollster has it as Biden DeSantis DeSantis plus four. But in Biden versus Trump, it has it even. On the other hand, you look at the Marquette University Law School poll. Also, that's an A.B. rated pollster. Pretty good. They have Biden even with DeSantis in one poll, DeSantis slightly ahead in a different poll and then Biden well ahead of Donald Trump. And then you go back to a premise poll, not a rated pollster at all. They have DeSantis plus four over Biden, but Biden plus six over Trump. So the gist of the polling right now contains two pieces of important data. Number one, against Trump, Biden seems to poll pretty well. And against DeSantis,

Biden polls less. Well, that's the trend. And depending on which poll you look at, the specific numbers differ. We are going to have to wait and see. I don't know what Biden heard in the moment. I don't 100 percent know what Biden said, but I don't believe Biden would reveal possibly not running in that sort of venue and in that sort of format. Well, ladies and gentlemen, we got him. The IRS has released Donald Trump's tax returns, in fact, six years worth of tax returns to the House committee that is involved in that investigation. It has taken three years, but it has finally happened. And now this becomes a matter of watching for leaks. And of course, I would never tell anyone to leak anything or to disclose sensitive information

or to do anything wrong. I would just never do that. But I also understand from an objective standpoint that the possibility of a leak here is significant and we are going to be watching for that. CNBC reports IRS gives Trump tax returns to House committee after three year legal battle. The final straw was the Supreme Court saying we're not going to block the release of these tax returns. The article points out the House Ways and Means Committee has obtained years worth of

federal income tax returns for former President Donald Trump just a week after the Supreme Court rejected his effort to block that Democratic controlled panel from getting those records from the IRS. The committee has been seek had been seeking Trump's tax returns since 2019 when he was still president. Trump broke decades of tradition by refusing to publicly release his tax returns. Now, remember that for a very long time, Trump was insisting as soon as my audits are done and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I'm going to go ahead and release everything. And the goalposts kept moving and moving and moving. Here's just a little

bit of a reminder of that. This is more recent. Speaker 2 just said you spoke to your accountant about potentially releasing your taxes. Did he tell you when you can release them? Do you have a deadline for when you're going to release? I get treated worse than the Tea Party got treated because I have a lot of people in there deep down in the IRS. They treat me horribly. We made a deal. It was all settled until I decide to run for president. I get treated very badly by the IRS, very unfairly. But we had a deal all done as soon as we're completed with the deal. I want to release it. But it says you just said you spoke to. Yeah, he didn't really intend to release those tax returns. And quite frankly, once it became clear that his followers didn't really

care, I understand why he didn't release them. And we'll get in a moment to what we believe would be in there. A few other notes here from the CNBC report. A Treasury Department spokesperson told NBC News, quote, Treasury has complied with last week's court decision. The Treasury Department is the parent of the IRS. The Ways and Means Committee has said it wanted copies of Trump's tax returns and the tax returns of Trump legal entities for an inquiry into how the IRS audits presidential tax returns. By law, the tax agency audits the returns of a sitting president every year. So it's a leak watch. Now, what is most likely in those tax returns? I we've been building and sort of tweaking our belief about this based on what has become

publicly available information over time. I think the most likely revelations from Trump's taxes would all be things that we suspect or to some degree know already. Number one, Trump is not as rich as he claims to be. It's hard to imagine Trump being richer than he claims to be. And based on what people like Michael Cohen and others have told us, Donald Trump has postured to be higher on the Forbes richest list using all sorts of different methods. And more than likely, his taxes would show he's not actually

as rich as he has claimed to be. Number two, Trump lies and that we know we know Trump lies. He's the most dishonest president in the modern political era. Number three, Trump probably has debts that we might call sketchier debts, shadier debts to entities or individuals that he likely would not want us to know and which may potentially present a national security risk even greater than that, which we already believe based on publicly available information. And I think that that would be the those would be the main revelations from Donald Trump's tax returns. Now, one interesting other note I want to mention, Donald Trump, as you know, exhausted just about every he exhausted every means available to him to try to block the release of these tax returns, including going to the Supreme Court. And it ultimately did not work.

Now we can colloquially say, would someone who has nothing to hide work this hard to hide their tax returns? Well, I don't know. A lot of it could just be ego. Trump doesn't want the world to know beyond any doubt that he's not as rich as he claims to be. But one of the arguments that through his lawyers, Donald Trump made to the Supreme Court was that no Congress has ever wielded its legislative powers to demand a president's

tax returns. And that continues to be a theme. This has no president has ever had his home raided by the FBI. Trump said that after the search warrant was executed in Mar-a-Lago, these things haven't happened before because we've never needed to see them happen before Donald Trump. Donald Trump so flouted the norms of the presidency that when you get unprecedented inputs, you end up with unprecedented outputs, outputs. And it's really that simple. Do Republicans even care? I don't think so. I don't know that they ever really cared if they cared. They might not have voted for Donald Trump

to begin with when he didn't release his tax returns and made it clear he didn't really plan to. And the audit story was completely made up. So the House Ways and Means Committee has Trump's taxes six years worth. We now will wait very patiently to see out of genuine curiosity whether those tax returns leak. We're going to take a very quick break and be back right after this. You know how tough it can be to navigate the online news constantly being thrown at us. And that's why I love our sponsor, Ground News, which is an app and website that allows you to easily compare how any individual story is being covered by different sources. Every story comes with a bias bar showing the distribution

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Go to ground dot news slash Pacman. Try it for free or subscribe to get unlimited access to all of their news analysis tools. That's ground dot news slash Pacman. The link is in the podcast notes. I love reading. I read every day, no matter how I arrange my schedule. I 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.

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The link is in the podcast notes. Last week, we reported to you that a speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, would be stepping down from leadership of the Democratic Party. Democrats, of course, poised to become the minority party in the House of Representatives based on the November 8th election results in the 2022 midterms. Nancy Pelosi stepping down, but will stay in Congress. And Democrats have now decided that it is Hakeem Jeffries, a former guest of this program, who will become minority leader for Democrats in the House of Representatives. The New York Times reporting in a show of unity,

House Democrats elect Hakeem Jeffries, minority leader, a new trio, including Representatives Catherine Clark of Massachusetts as number two and Pete Aguilar of California as number three, will take the reins in January, replacing Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her team. Jeffries is 52 years old. Clark is 59 and Aguilar is 43, certainly moving in the direction of younger, which is something that many Democrats have been calling for. Now, it shouldn't surprise anyone if you've been following American politics for any period of time, to know that the right is immediately framing and attacking Hakeem Jeffries as some kind of extreme radical. Of course, the reality is that he is nothing of the sort. And I would encourage you, if you really just

want to see the way that he presents himself and talks about issues and thinks through issues, check out my interview with Hakeem Jeffries from some years ago. The topics will be less relevant to 2022, but it is, of course, still the same Hakeem Jeffries. Here is Newsmax with a commentary on Hakeem Jeffries. They're saying much of the decision was motivated simply by race and the fact that Hakeem Jeffries is not white. And they say a lot of the exact things that we would expect. But it's important to remember they would be saying this no matter who was chosen. All right. Other news tonight. Democrats picked to replace Nancy Pelosi indicates that their party has no intention of veering away from the squad's favorite brand of politics. Hakeem Jeffries is an

anti-U.S. oil rabid defender of the pro-abortion death cult. He's an election denier. He's a pretty radical New York congressman. He tweeted numerous times following the 2016 election at one point writing, the more we learn about the 2016 election, the more illegitimate it becomes. Now, you need to understand they love to play this game. So first of all, some of the things that that this Newsmax host says, well, he's part of the pro abortion, pro pro death machine, abortion, whatever

he like most Americans supports abortion rights. That's not super controversial, but everything has to be framed as completely outrageous on Newsmax when you are perpetuating this brand of fear and outrage politics that has completely supplanted policy for the American right wing. This issue of election denier, you know, when people on the left questioned the legitimacy of Trump's presidency, they were not literally saying it was stolen in the way that Trump has said about 2020. There were sort of two meanings to Trump is illegitimate as president. One meaning was that Trump rose to the presidency on the shoulders of foreign support from Russia. And of course, that's been demonstrated. Now, of course, it has

not been demonstrated that Trump and Putin got together and ate frogs legs while plotting exactly how Putin would do it. But we know Russia had a preference for Trump over Hillary and used social media and other influence avenues to try to make it so that Trump would win and not Hillary Clinton. It's not do the election over its people were swayed by propaganda that came from a foreign adversary. OK, very, very different. And then number two, Trump was illegitimate in the colloquial sense in that he had no business being president of the United States, had no idea what was going on, didn't know up from down, was completely clueless. It is not fair to say that those are election deniers in the way that people are going around like Marjorie Taylor Greene literally saying, oh, more people actually tried to vote for Trump.

But Joe Biden manipulated the machines or whatever the case may be, not even remotely comparable. And it's important to understand that when they pull that line out. Let's listen to a little bit more of this. And now this man leads leads the House Democrats. So you see the road that that party is going down. Republican strategist Erin Perrini joins me now to talk more about this. Good to see you, Erin. It's a pretty radical choice. I'm not surprised because you knew it wasn't going to be a white guy. I

think we all knew that. But it's a very extreme choice. It is an extreme choice. And Democrats like to use this adage, right? Show me your budget and I'll show you your values. Well, show me your leader and I'll show you your party. They have picked an election denier, you know, the Green New Deal loving champion of Russian disinformation, Hakeem Jeffries to lead. And of course, that's completely inaccurate. And there is really nothing at all radical about Hakeem Jeffries. I think that Jeffries does have a very difficult position and timing. He is entering leadership of the Democratic Party as Democrats have lost control of the House, number one, and number two, as Republicans are particularly incentivized to make the next two years about,

you know, Hunter Biden and maybe even Hillary Clinton's emails, if you can imagine. So a difficult time to become part of Democratic leadership, but an interesting choice. Brilliant guy. Check out his interview with me some years ago. You know, one of the things about a cult is that the cult leader will expect, if not demand, absolute and total sacrifice and loyalty from the cult followers and failed Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Carrie Lake is doing exactly that. She wants supporters who are willing to go to jail for her. The delusions of grandeur are getting worse and worse for Carrie Lake. Here she is saying these.

Listen, you should be willing to go and sit in jail for the movement or whatever. But really, she means for her. Check this out. I wish that somebody would say, you know what? Arrest me then. I don't care. We need people with courage to say class what felony? Go ahead. Go for it. Arrest me because this is a botched election and you're disenfranchising. Tell me it's a felony to be out here doing what I'm doing and arrest me because Carrie Lake really won, even though she didn't. Folks in Mojave County, when you allow this kind of an election in Maricopa County to stand. Yeah, I like this clip because it confirms very openly and clearly what we've suspected for a long time, which is that this is a cult. You're willing to go to jail for me, right? Because I'm that important to you. Has she

offered them a pardon on state charges when she's installed as governor, as Donald Trump demanded that she be on Troth Central in the middle of the night earlier this week? Like, if she's really that confident she's ultimately going to overturn this. Why not make that offer when I finally ascend to the governorship? I'm going to pardon every single one of you. Truly a person with not a single redeeming quality about her. Carrie Lake. She also, by the way, did the globalist thing. And it's so tired at this point. But here she pulls that out as well, saying it's bigger than her that in this this is another cult thing. Even though I need you to go to jail for me, it's really bigger than me. In this case, it's about the globalists.

We feel very confident in our case, and I have not given up one scintilla of the fight I have in me. Somebody said, Carrie, you're fearless. And I said, you know, I guess I'm fearless right now in this difficult time because what I fear most of all is what happens if we don't step forward and act with courage right now. What we're left with. We will have a shell of our country. We look at what's happening in Brazil and what's happening in China. We'll be looking a lot like China. And I'm not talking about the protests happening now. I'm talking about we'll be enslaved by a globalist system if we don't stand up right now.

This is our moment. This is our true moment right now in our history. Now understand that if you went to Carrie Lake and said, what exactly do you mean by globalism and what are the parameters of the globalist system? She probably couldn't answer. Maybe she'd come up with some passing thing, but she wouldn't be able to really answer. If you go to Carrie Lake supporters and many of them are Trump supporters as well, and you ask them, what is globalism? What do you what do you mean by when you talk about globalism

and globalists? If you're lucky, they'll be able to rattle off the names of a few Jewish men, but they are not even understanding what it is that is being fed to them. So reminder, Carrie Lake didn't win. Carrie Lake will not be the governor of Arizona. Don't send her any money if you want to, you know, fool in their money or soon parted. It's all a scam. She's she didn't win and she's not going to be the governor. But now she's saying this is about fighting globalists and you should be willing to go to jail for me. It is a cult, ladies and gentlemen. Former President Mike Pence has been doing the rounds mostly to sell his book and maybe to kind of softly prod at the possibility of a 2024 presidential run.

And he appeared on a Fox News program called Outnumbered. The gag with Outnumbered is that it's for female hosts and they invite on a man each show and the man is outnumbered. OK, that's the idea. Check out. So context, this interview that Pence gave is almost as bad as some of Trump's worst interviews. It's really something to see. Check out how dynamic and funny and clever and charismatic Mike Pence is right off the bat. And of course, I'm kidding. He's none of those

things. Speaker 1 Hello, everyone. This is outnumbered. I'm Emily Campagno and joining me today, Carly Shimkus, Martha McCallum and Ainsley Earhart. And we are honored to have on the former vice president of the United States, Mike Pence. It is his first time on outnumbered. And sir, we are thrilled and honored to have you here with us today. Oh, it's great to be here, although I do feel outnumbered. You know, it's it's great to be here, Carly Shimkus, but I do feel outnumbered, just charisma dripping off of this guy, reeking of charisma. And of course, we're all cringing very, very hard. Now, there were some interesting questions posed to Pence. More interesting was was the way that he answered

these questions. He was asked, do you want to be the president of the United States? Speaker 4 We don't have a lot of time. So, you know, I think one of the first ones I want to ask you is what is on everyone's mind? Because this is a foundation for people understanding you and your life. We often see books come out from people who are saying, I want to be president of the United States. So my first question is, do you want to be president of the United States? Well, Martha, I would say no more and no less than any other kid that grew up with a cornfield in his backyard. So is that a yes or a no? You know, I can tell you the dream of public service animated my youth as I write about in his backyard. So is that a yes or a no? You know, I can tell you the dream of public

service animated my youth as I write about in the book, the opportunity I had to represent my hometown in Congress, to be governor of Indiana, and ultimately to serve as your vice president. It's deeply humbling to me. But Karen and I are going to take time over the holidays. You know, we have two in the military. So between deployments, our kids have not all been back in Indiana for the last three years together. So we'll take time to reflect, deliberate, talk to the kids. And we're going to we're going to make a decision about what our next calling is. But I promise to keep you posted. But when you do that, when you. Yeah. Let me interpret this answer for you in, you know, standard Republican speak and to some degree, politicians speak. I don't know if I'd have a shot at winning right now, Martha.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring in consultants and pollsters to figure out, do I have a shot? And if I do have a shot, I'm going to probably try to go for it, particularly if I believe that even in losing, it might raise my profile or somehow be advantageous to me in some way, shape or form. Now, one of the things that is a little bit different is that as a former VP, it's one thing to lose the general election for president as a former VP happened to Al Gore, for example, but to lose the Republican primary as a former VP and in particular to run against the president you served under, that's a little bit different. And that I don't I don't know.

Has that happened in history? I don't know off the top of my head, but that's sort of a different thing in a different different consideration. A couple other clips here citing absolutely no evidence whatsoever. He starts talking about how Twitter and Elon Musk are being targeted by Biden because of something related to the Hunter Biden story. Check this out. The suggestion that that the president of the United States is keeping a close eye on on any element of the media is deeply offensive to me. It's it's it's your job in the media to keep a close eye on elected officials.

I've lived in that world for 20 years as a congressman, as a governor and as your vice president. And but I do think, as you suggest, I think it may well be because Elon Musk, who I came to know very well during the four years of the Trump Pence administration. Yeah, I think it's because he is preparing to release information finally about the suppression of the Hunter Biden story. So this is like two layers of stuff. First of all, there's no evidence that anything that's going on has to do with the Hunter Biden story. But again, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail must be related to Hunter Biden. That's number one. But the funniest and honestly, the scariest part of this is Pence saying, you know, a White House keeping an eye on the media. Trump had a hit list of media people that he didn't like. Trump wanted to kick people out of the press room. Trump did kick some people out of the press room like Jim Acosta from CNN

briefly, although he eventually went back. He says it's chilling or whatever phraseology he used for an administration to be keeping an eye on the media. The Trump administration was maybe the modern administration most adversarial and hostile to journalism and to the media and to a free press. It's absolutely bonkers. Now one last clip here. I won't even introduce this one. Just listen.

Oh, I want to ask you a question about your faith because we share the same faith. But how do you know that that is God calling you? Because everywhere you go, people love you. How even Democrats love you because you're just a nice, wholesome, good person who does the right thing. And and you're honest, you're honest, but they might not like your politics, but they like who you are and your character. So I love that. First of all, everybody loves you. Democrats love you.

Listen, Democrats don't love them. And the MAGA people wanted him killed on January 6th. So I don't know what on earth Ainsley Earhart is talking about, but I love the question. How do you know that that's God really speaking to you? It's sort of like one of these things where Bush said he spoke to God and God told him to invade Iraq. And then, you know, all these stories that are told. I checked with God and God said to go ahead and do it or God chose this party. Was it maybe just indigestion and God not really speaking to you? I just absolutely love that. How do you know it really is God speaking to you? And of course, the question has its own internal

logic for those who believe God speaks to them or might or speaks to some people. How do you know that that's really God speaking to you is a very logical question. They never have an actual good answer. But it's just so funny to hear Ainsley Earhart say, how do you know? And also just everyone loves you. No, no, that's not true. The Democrats don't love him and half of the Republicans don't love him. And some of that half wanted him killed on January 6th. Unbelievable stuff. And Pence seems to be in the running for interviews as absurd as those that we have

seen from Donald Trump. We'll have all these Pence clips on our Instagram, which you can find at David Pakman show. And remember, you've got to be subscribed on YouTube. Subscribe to the David Pakman show YouTube channel if you watch the clips. But that subscribe button is enabled. Hit that button. It is free. All you're saying when you hit subscribe is I affirm the David Pakman show. You're not paying anything. You're not committed to anything. You're just saying I affirm this. I affirm the content. Affirm away. Hit that subscribe button. We're going to take a quick break and be back right after this.

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com slash Pacman. That's A.L.L. F.O.R.M. dot com slash Pacman. The link is in the podcast notes. It's great to welcome to the program today, Adam Rogers, who's a senior tech correspondent at Insider and also author of the book Full Spectrum. One of his recent articles is going to be the

catalyst for our conversation today called Sure, Twitter and Facebook have deepened polarization, just not in the way you think. Adam, really great having you on today. I appreciate your time. Oh, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. So, OK, I mean, let's let's kind of go right to the punch line and then maybe we'll work backwards from there. So it's common to think social media has made polarization worse. I think there's a number of ways that people would assume that that's the case. Filter bubbles and echo chambers probably is one. And, you know, we can kind of list others. What is the way in which you believe social media platforms have deepened American political polarization? Well, I'll tell you a couple of things that surprised me in the reporting for this,

and this is why I wanted to do this story. The first thing is that, well, I think I would have said before I started calling people that the problem was an echo chamber, a filter bubble, epistemic closure, right? Was that, oh, we get on social media and then we somehow in some way tend to assort with people who have the same political and views as we do, and then maybe the same cultural views as we do. And then we don't hear anything outside that. And I think that was fairly commonly accepted. It turns out that among social scientists, it's actually not the case. Social scientists have not found evidence for that. And as one of them said to me, like there's, there are worse echo chambers in real life, you know, IRL, we tend to assert that way and we don't turn into a political freak show, you know, in real life particularly. Um, so if it's not filter bubbles, it's not an echo chamber. I would have said, Oh, well obviously it's the reverse, right? You would

say, Oh, it's a, it's that you, we go online and then we're exposed to like repugnant views or views that are repugnant to us. And we think, oh, that guy is terrible. Like, I don't want anything to do with whatever that person is saying and anything that they believe in any of the stuff that they have in the background of their, you know, chat window or whatever. But that doesn't happen either. When you actually do tests, when researchers do tests on this, people don't experience those kind of feelings. And we can talk about what some of the studies say in those experiences. So the question then is, all right, what happens if we accept that polarization is increasing? And that does seem to be true. And if we accept that polarization is something that's kind of independent of like, no, some one political group And you and I might disagree about what those things are,

but you could say something like, how does something like climate change become political? How does something like what car you drive or what if you drive a car or what your favorite drink is, whether it's alcoholic or not, how did those things become political or polarizing? And yet they do.

So, okay, that's a long run up by way of saying that this is a researcher. He's a computational social scientist named Petter Tornberg. He's also trained as a physicist and he's interested in complexity theory. So the way that small things turn into big things, basically. And what he says is if you model digitally people in a large social network, all it takes is really two conditions to get real serious bad polarization. All you have to do, first of all, is make sure

that people are connecting with non-local connections. So that means strangers, people at a distance, people they wouldn't ordinarily connect with, distant from themselves, both in terms of their demographic characteristics and also literally like geographic distance. And then you kind of turn up our tendency to distrust things that are unfamiliar to us, or the positive way to say that is trust things that are familiar. All you have to do is make those two dials happen and you start to see the people, the little digital sims inside this world begin to polarize on things that are not just political, but things that are cultural as well. What researchers call affective polarization, very different than ideological polarization, red-blue divide. This is stuff like if you drive an F-150 or a Prius, choices that have political

components but are not themselves political choices, if you see what I mean. And that kind of that affective polarization and the demonization, the attendant demonization of people who are not in your effectively polarized group are the things that researchers worry the most about. It seems that context must matter to some degree, though, because there are situations that people find themselves in where they encounter those who at least exist generally in very disparate places. They maybe come together for a conference or for travel or whatever the case may be. So you can you can kind of make that a reality and you can kind of put these components together and they don't seem to

explode in the same way that often takes place on social media. Is that something about the disinhibiting context of social media that maybe is an additional factor? Yeah, so that's a really good point. All of us have had the experience of being, of having a, a perfectly pleasant meal with somebody who's political, with whose political views you find repugnant. Obviously that has its limits. If there's somebody who wants to, you know, put you in a camp, maybe you don't want to be sitting at the same dinner table with them, but, but you see what I mean? Yes. So yes, that context matters a lot. Um, and, and there is the factor that social media has an anonymizing effect. Even if you have your real identity on there, you're at a distance. It's a little bit like shouting at a television screen and the television screen shouts back, you know.

But there's also the fact of the way the social networks themselves work. These are these are by and large, depending on what you're on and what you're using for profit networks. And and what they depend on is our attention and engagement because they're trying to use our identities to sell ads against. And so in addition to the factors that Thornburg came up with, like how does polarization happen in groups who are exposed to each other in these particular network, with these particular kinds of network effects, the social networks themselves turn up their own dial for linking our identities to our posts. So they ask, you know, who you are essentially with everything that you look at and everything that you post and then privileging the loudest voices because those be the most extreme. So you know, again, we've all had the experience of tootling along on Twitter or on Facebook and then seeing something that was just astonishingly terrible. Right. And your first instinct is to want to be like, that's astonishingly terrible, which plays right into the way that the economics of this thing work.

And that increases polarization. Right. It increases our our sense that everything that we're doing has a political component. There are some like, for example, Jonathan Haidt comes to mind who has a sort of maybe different diagnosis for what's going on than you. But one of his suggestions is you can have an anonymous handle on social media, but the platform should know exactly who you are. So like, for example, if I want to operate on Twitter as, you know, anonymous elephant to six five five, I can do that. But when I create the account, I have to provide Twitter with my driver's license or

whatever, proving that I really am who I say I am and that that would reduce the disinhibiting nature of social media to some degree. Do you agree with that? Yeah. Um, I have the, there's a Hemingway line. Isn't it pretty to think so? I mean, there, first of all, I have concerns.

Look, I'm not as much of an expert as Jonathan is, but I have some concerns about having identity be an escrow in these four for these for profit companies as well. I don't, I don't think that they're trusted actors here. I would say that the internet could have gone a very different way in the mid-2000s, let's say, right? Where the companies that turned into ad agencies effectively and could have instead said, we are going to, first of all, create a way to build identity into the base layer of the internet in the same way that the Usenet and email were built into the base layer of the internet. We forget, I think, that Twitter and Facebook and Google are websites. Fundamentally, they're just websites. They're huge. They're complicated. They're vast. They're transnational,

but they're just websites. And what the people who designed and built the internet chose not to do because they chose a more profit-oriented motive was not was to not build identity into that base layer to not build ways for all of us to be able to control our own identity and our own self-expression on the internet and this is something i sound uh i've gone um i've gone very like boing boing on this i i think um to to say a thing like what was what was supposed to happen was that we were supposed to have tools to make it easy to have a website and RSS feed. And if you want to have a what we used to call a blog and you now might call a sub stack or medium or whatever, if you want to have that, you can have that. If you want to sell stuff from your own little shop,

here are some here's machinery where you can do that retailing and fulfillment. But instead, we seeded all of that stuff to these big transnational companies. So, you know, so I'm not sure that they're, they are not who I would trust to, um, to be the arbiters as we've seen, to be good arbiter, good faith arbiters of, of political or other kinds of conversation online. Although, and so I'll, I'll, I'll contradict myself just very briefly and say the, the, um, I think another experience that has become shared in common is we might all have small, you know, chat groups, right, like group chats or small groups that were where you're in the DMs on Twitter or invitation only very tightly moderated groups on Facebook. Those kind of smaller groups, sometimes grouped by affinity, sometimes grouped by social connections that are not on the Internet, sometimes that are those become very positive. Those are those are where my meaningful social connections that are, those become very positive. Those are where my meaningful social connections are at this point in a way. And sometimes they're arbited through

the big social networks, through a Twitter or through a Facebook or whatever, and sometimes they're not. But because of their size and because they are more tightly controlled, not for like affective ideological engagement, but for some kind of emotional engagement that's more meaningful, they tend to be more positive spaces. When it comes to you mentioned these these companies, platforms, websites as the arbiters here, it seems pretty clear at this point that the platforms generally benefit from the entire way that they have operated, including boosting the voices that as you talk about, increase the polarization, loud voices, et cetera.

We kind of understand that. Is it fair to say that because of that, they simply can't be counted on to try to work on this problem? Is it that flat out or are there ways to incentivize Facebook and Twitter or whoever to actually try to fix this problem rather than profit from it? Yeah, I don't know. That's such a good question. And we see it going on right now. I mean, that's at the heart of what is happening with Elon Musk and Twitter, for example, right? He's clearly interested in elevating voices from the right, he's engaging with them himself.

And so the question is, well, like, how do you deal with that? If you know that a lot of those voices are also, you know, trolls are also going to, uh, going to potentially hurt people, you know, send out sort of stochastic terrorism against trans people or against Jews or against all the people who sort of are, are, are the like, uh, targets of the day, you know, horribly so. And, and, and so what are we, so the response to that has been like, essentially weirdly to me, let the market deal with it, right? Well, he's going to lose all his advertisers if he does that. That's sort of our response. And, and, and that may happen, right? That could, or the advertisers could then pressure him and say, you can't do

that or we won't advertise. So it becomes the, the, what we trust as a society is that the, the, the same profit motives that got us here will get us out. And, uh, you know, that's a thing that we could all perhaps be polarized online about whether we believe will happen or not. Yeah. I mean, I guess I would say I'm depressed. I don't have solid evidence to think that that's exactly the way it would work absent some kind of countervailing force, but probably a conversation for for the next conversation. We've been speaking with Adam Rogers, who's a senior tech correspondent at Insider, also author of the book Full Spectrum. And we're going to link to the article that's been the source for today's conversation. Adam, really appreciate your time today. Thank you.

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daily nutrients and vitamins you likely want. Vitamin A, C, E, magnesium, zinc, potassium in one simple scoop. You keep your body nourished. You'll also get a free year supply of vitamin D, which I take in the winter, plus five free travel packs at athletic greens dot com slash Pacman. That's athletic greens dot com slash Pacman. The link is in the podcast notes. A new report from inside failed former President Donald Trump's inner circle shows that Donald Trump is now furious with Kanye West and is claiming that West tried to F him. This is going from crazy to even crazier. And it all relates to this white supremacist dinner, as it is now being called. Think of that term now being part of the news cycle for days. Trump's white supremacist dinner,

now the subject and triggering factor for his ire against Kanye West, as well as Nick Fuentes and others. Article from NBC News lays it out quite interestingly. The article is called The Inside Story of Trump's Explosive Dinner with Ye and Nick Fuentes. What was supposed to be a private dinner ended up being a political nightmare. Now, I want to be clear and make sure people know some of the things that are in this article, which seems well enough sourced, let's put it that way, are being denied by Nick Fuentes. But I actually believe that that doesn't mean that much because Fuentes may not even be privy to some of what is here. The narrative is

compelling. I encourage you to read it and we're linking to it. It's by Mark Caputo. And it says just two days before Thanksgiving, Trump was planning to have a private, uneventful dinner with an old friend, Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. They arranged to have dinner Tuesday night at Mar-a-Lago after some phone conversations. But Trump may have been walking into a trap. Trump has said he didn't know Fuentes, the white nationalist and anti-Semite, or his background that West said, hey, he wants to come in and have dinner with us as well. There is a damage control campaign now being put together that the NBC News article explains. But the most interesting part of this comes under this section.

The master got trolled, the headline grabbing attention on his guests and therefore the subsequent fallout were all but ensured by Trump before the dinner when he made a grand entrance at 8 p.m. on November 22nd. Understand that at Mar-a-Lago, there's a table reserved for Trump and his guests. It's in full view of everybody, so it can have all the pomp and circumstance that a narcissist like Donald Trump would want. So there was no question that everybody was going to see who was there, but it ended up not being a happy photo op.

Ye criticized Trump for not doing enough to help the Trump riders. He told Trump he might run for president and that Trump should be his running mate, which infuriated Trump reportedly, who then attacked Kim Kardashian, Ye's ex-wife. Ye later put out a video saying Trump is really impressed with Nick Fuentes. Fuentes says he praised Trump as my hero and criticized DeSantis. And then the advisor that spoke to NBC characterizes the entire thing as the master troll got trolled. Kanye punked Trump. And there is a section about Milo Yiannopoulos, who I believe may have actually really been the orchestrator of this entire thing. And the most interesting paragraph maybe of the article, Trump fumed afterward that Ye had betrayed

him by ambushing him. Quote, He tried to F me. He's crazy. He can't beat me, Trump said, according to one confidant who then relayed the conversation to NBC News. Trump was totally blindsided. The source said it was a setup. Supposedly, some in Trump's orbit warned him don't have dinner with Kanye, who's already under fire

for anti-Semitism. The inclusion of Fuentes making it all the more volatile. So first of all, none of this is the picture of stability. Kanye is not stable. Trump is certainly not stable. Nobody involved in this thing is even remotely stable. Now, Nick Fuentes is denying that this was overtly a setup. But the truth is that Fuentes may have simply been a pawn in the setup rather than a participant. For all we know, this sort of thing has Milo Yiannopoulos fingerprints all over it, quite frankly. And as you know, I've been in touch with Milo over the years. It's been years since he agreed to come on the program. Multiple times I've invited Milo to

come on. He has rejected the offer. He's welcome to come on any time. And I would love to talk to him about this. But there's a few different things that are important to understand. One, seemingly nothing is below the office of the president at this point in time. OK, consider how much American politics has changed in 2004. Democratic primary candidate for President Howard Dean screamed about we're going to go to Iowa. You know, he made a noise. He screamed. It ended his campaign.

It seems so quaint at this point in time where Trump is having Kanye West at dinner and he's surprised that Kanye is even crazier. And then Kanye has a white nationalist in tow and Milo Yiannopoulos is involved and they're having this dinner in a public setting where everybody could see. So politics has changed dramatically in the United States. That's for sure. And by the way, imagine being Trump and ending up surprised that Kanye is even crazier than you are. Like it's sort of like a race to the bottom here that's going on. So who set up whom? It's not completely clear at this point in time. But what does seem very clear is that, you know, Trump never had a great team around him. His 2016 team wasn't a great team. They did end up getting him elected when

we have to give them credit for that. Trump's 2020 team was even worse. They failed to get him elected. I don't know who's around Trump at this point in time for what is a very early start to his 2024 campaign. But either it's a disastrous team or Trump simply doesn't listen to them, which would be pretty on brand with what we've learned about Donald Trump. Wacky, wacky times. And I don't think these types of stories are going to go away. And we have to devote just a couple of minutes to the continued middle of the night rantings from Donald Trump. Let's talk about that momentarily at one thirty in the morning this morning or last night or very early this morning. Once again, Donald Trump took not to Twitter, where he is now unbanned, but to his own platform, Truth Social, Truth Central. And once again, he started ranting and raving. The level of instability

that these rants are projecting is really something else. And it seems that with every bad news cycle, the most recent one being this entire Kanye white nationalist, Nick Fuentes dinner, Trump goes more and more bonkers on truth central. There's always a feeling of sort of like, what is he going to become obsessed with next? And at one thirty in the morning, Trump started by re trothing his own earlier truth, saying, quote, Rhino Karl Rove is a Fox News loser, a pompous fool with bad political instincts. In other words, he loses a lot, only good at taking people's money and wasting it. I was 12 and 0 against him in Senate endorsements, not something I'm proud of, but something people, especially candidates, should know.

Trump then continuing with another one of his fixations, his endorsement record, also 12 and 0 in Senate endorsements against the broken old crow, Mitch McConnell, who is, by the way, a 6 percent approval rating. Not exactly great news for the Republican Party. Now, I don't know exactly what he's talking about there. You know, Mehmet Oz lost. It seems that's at least one in Trump's loss column. It's always very confusing.

And he's sort of like the Trump will often limit his endorsement record to, for example, like endorsements made on even days of the month when it was sunny among that group. He's four and oh, for example, you know, it's sort of like with baseball statistics. Trump continuing this morning, quote, The Manhattan D.A.'s office has not tried a murder case since 2015, despite the fact that violent crime in New York City is at an all time high. Remember, a violent crime is higher in Oklahoma City than it is in New York City. Trump continuing that six years ago. And yet after. By the way, it's not six years ago. It's almost eight. But OK, but maybe math not a strong suit that six years ago. And yet after years of investigation, millions of dollars spent and the costly and laborious inspection of almost 10 million pages

of documents, we are in the second week of a fringe benefits case over an executive's use of a company car, a company apartment and his grandchildren's education. No such case has ever been tried before. Sad. This is Trump furious that his former CFO is in legal trouble because of things that he did. Quite frankly, Trump then continuing on the crime spree, as we might call it, saying, quote, mothers and families of victims of violent crime. And by the way, mothers is with an apostrophe. It's just crazy. Mothers and families of victims of violent crime, which is breaking all capital R records in New York City, are furious that the

criminals who killed their loved ones haven't been given a trial in many years, while millions of dollars and years of work has been spent on a ridiculous fringe benefits case, the likes of which has never been prosecuted before in our capital C County's history. I think he means country. It is a continuation of the greatest capital W witch hunt of all time. The D.A.'s office should focus on capital M murders. That's not lowercase M murders. It's capital M and violent crime, not B.S.. And then lastly, and as you might see, Trump's grammar and spelling degenerating the longer this rant continues, quote, despite producing tens of thousands of jobs in such important and lasting structures in New York City.

It is said that I will never be able to get a fair trial there. Now it's unclear whether Trump means it is sad or whether he is saying other people are saying. It's just also unclear. Well we will soon see because this case against two companies is a disgrace that should never have been brought and has been totally disproven. Even prosecutors quit the DA's office because they thought it was unfair. Now, that's a lie. Prosecutors quit the

DA's office because they realized we're doing all this work investigating Trump and he's not going to be prosecuted. They're not going to indict him. And our work is for nothing. That's why they quit. One last line from Trump here. Such a case has never even been brought. Exclamation point before, period. I've never seen grammar like this before. Justice in America. This man is unhinged, ladies and gentlemen. I have not ever seen we've never seen any president do the things Donald Trump has done. These types of randomly capitalized, misgrammar stream of consciousness, sentence fragments and run on sentences. You see both sentence fragments and run on sentences.

We've never seen anything like this from any president. And the humiliation continues to grow. I think if we want to find a silver lining here, the silver lining is because Trump is posting this stuff to truth central rather than to Twitter. Fewer people are seeing it. We have a voicemail number. That number is two one nine two. David P. Here is a Trump is caller who is furious and is warning me. My judgment day is coming. I seriously hope that people get to sue you for calling them mentally ill. Well, that's their prerogative. Seventy four million people are mentally ill.

No, remember, I didn't say seventy four million people are mentally ill. We have talked with cult experts and mental health experts. There are some Trumpists who are just selfish people, but they are what we would call sane. They saw Trump's policies as being good for them personally, financially. That's one group. There's another group of people who are simply brainwashed. Those are more like the cult people. They're not mentally ill in the sense we normally mean. They're just brainwashed. There's another group that's just ignorant. They've fallen for lies that they don't know are lies. And then, yes,

there's a group that's mentally ill. We've interviewed some of them at the rallies, but I've never said 74 million people who voted for Trump are mentally ill. Criticize me for things I've said, please. That what it is, pal. You know what? When you stand before your maker at the end on judgment day, you're going to be one sorry dude. Understand me? The election was stolen, cheating, fraud, you name it. Demon rat. Demon rat. I guess he stays on the phone for a while. I don't know if you can hear the static. Sounds like a car drove by. Well listen, when I stand before and face judgment at the end, maybe I will be sorry.

We'll have to wait and see if that happens. But the election was not stolen. Donald Trump genuinely lost. That's it. We've got a great bonus show for you today. Republicans with unlimited sick days are voting against time off for rail workers. We'll tell you what's going on. Parents have refused the use of vaccinated blood, the blood from a vaccinated person for a life saving surgery for their baby.

Oh, boy. And an Iranian man was shot dead for celebrating that Iran lost a World Cup game to the United States. All of those stories and many more on today's bonus show. Oh, the bonus show where you want to make money. Everybody else that makes money to fund themselves is bad. Sign up at join Pacman dot com. We will see you then. on today's bonus show. Sign up at join pacman.com. We will see you then.