The David Pakman Show - 12/18/24: I met with Biden, confused Trump blasts out rant

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

-- On the Show: -- Sasha Abramsky, freelance journalist and The Nation magazine's Western States correspondent, joins David to discuss the terrifying reality of Project 2025 -- David talks about his meeting with President Joe Biden at the White House discussing the online creator ecosystem and media environment -- A disoriented Donald Trump holds a bizarre press conference at Mar-a-Lago, riddled with lies, distortions, and confusion -- Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene fully embraces the vaccines-cause-autism conspiracy theory -- Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville parrots anti-vaccine propaganda in the context of RFK Jr's nomination by Donald Trump to be Secretary of Health and Human Services -- A deep dive into why trickle down, supply side economics, including the sort of tax cuts favored by Donald Trump, cannot possibly work to help the economy -- As the US Tiktok ban looms, questions rise about what might stop it, and the future of the platform in the United States -- On the Bonus Show: Police ID 15-year-old girl as Wisconsin church shooter, AOC loses key vote for committee leadership, DC cafe banning people under age 30, much more... 💪 AG1 is offering you a FREE $76 GIFT when you sign up at https://athleticgreens.com/pakman  ⚠️ Ground News: Get 50% OFF their unlimited access Vantage plan at https://ground.news/pakman 🖼️ Aura Frames: Use code PAKMAN for $35 OFF & free shipping at https://auraframes.com/pakman 🥦 Lumen lets you master your metabolism. GET 15% OFF at https://lumen.me/pakman 🛡️ Incogni lets you control your personal data! Get 60% off their annual plan: http://incogni.com/pakman 🧴Geologie: Use code PAKMAN70 for 70% OFF your skin care trial set at https://geolog.ie/PAKMAN70 -- 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

All right. Welcome, everybody. Let's start with something very interesting as far as the show is concerned, which is that yesterday I was in Washington, D.C. and met with President Joe Biden. And I think there are some important takeaways here with regard to the next four years and so many things that we've all been talking about. So first and foremost, what was the context of this meeting? I went for a meeting with administration officials from what's called the Office of Digital Engagement. Now, for folks who have been following prior White Houses, there has been no such thing in the past. And so one of the things I've said that's been notable about the Biden White House is that such an office exists, a group of people specifically designed to be intermediaries between the administration and online creators like me as an alternative to the legacy corporate media being the only media apparatus that is even kept informed about what's going on at the white house or has access to the president. Now I will give you the good and then the not so good.

The fact that we, it was a group of 10 of us, myself included, were invited was a great thing because it means they understand the importance, particularly in the context of Kamala Harris recently having lost an election in which she did not engage with online media, I would argue, anywhere approximating what should have been done. It's a sign that they understand the importance. It's a sign that they want to build these relationships. And of course, a lot of you are probably saying, but David, they just lost and they've got a month to go.

And of course, that's really the problem. And I would kind of explain it this way. I spoke very candidly with everybody about what the right is doing correctly, how they build community. You know, one of the things we've seen post election is that everybody who has been in the kind of Trump media ecosystem, they're all part of a very clear community. They're hanging out by the pool at Mar-a-Lago. They're obviously going to have significant access to Trump and top administration officials once they are sworn in.

Comparatively, I expressed this was not to president Biden. We only had about 15 minutes with president Biden, all, all 10 of us. But we had two hours total plus then a lunch for a smaller group of us. I expressed my frustrations. As you all know, this is not anything that I've not been public about before, where when we want to have Pete Buttigieg on the secretary of transportation, or when we've asked for interviews with others, we are either ignored or put into a sort of scheduling black hole where you're asked, what questions will you be asking? To which I always say, I'm not going to tell you that. We just, that's not how we do interviews.

Can you do it at this one particular time, three weeks from now? Sure. And then three days before it's rescheduled and then it's rescheduled again. And by the time we finally get to the interview, everybody's exhausted from the whole thing. They tell you, you get nine, nine minutes and it's not good for anybody. It doesn't build community. It doesn't give us an opportunity to actually build relationships with these people. Nobody's happy with the interview. It doesn't do well and it just benefits nobody. It's just an exercise in frustration. Contrast that with Charlie Kirk texts Trump, Charlie Kirk texts whoever. Now, I'm not saying give me Biden's cell phone number. But the point is, we are so far from the idea that we need to do community first and then let's figure out the details. They were extraordinarily receptive. And yet the Harris

campaign, which is a different entity, I think it's important. A lot of people may not know the president and vice president, separate staffs. They are not working in concert the way some might imagine. They're not a unit in the sense they really have their own things. And the Harris campaign completely failed on this. And I was extremely clear and candid here as well. So there is certainly a bit of a too little too late sort of reality here. And it was also very interesting to hear Joe Biden clearly know about what we're doing, understand and talk about the platforms, realize why it is that it makes sense to engage with us. And listen, I know it's sort of like,

oh, great. Four years from now, my hope would be that whoever is the nominee, particularly if it is someone younger, that will even more understand the sort of importance of these online platforms. Hopefully they will from the beginning engage with us. Now what was our ask? One of the great things I believe that came out of yesterday's meeting was making it clear that, Hey, listen, you at the white house have done an increasingly better job of engaging with us over this last year of this presidency. What about the House and Senate? And this is another aspect, which is this is something that could be done right now.

As I've told you before, and again, I don't I don't think I'm violating any confidence. But by saying this thing, when we have a member of the House, we've occasionally had senators. It's mostly members of the House on the show. We work directly with that members staff. There is no real coordination across shows. Midas touch Brian, Tyler Cohen, et cetera. It's our team, right? Uh, Pat and John make contact and we try to schedule something. And it's always basically a nightmare with a few exceptions. Uh, Ro Khanna's team is really good at just like, yeah, let's get him on and he'll hop on his phone and get on.

But for the most part, it's excruciating to really coordinate. We finally have made a little bit of contact with AOC now that she's following me and the show on Blue Sky. But for years, we've been trying to get AOC on. We usually don't hear anything back or we hear, oh, like, yeah, check in a month or whatever. Bernie, same thing, et cetera. The ask we made was there should be a handoff from the Biden digital engagement team to

a contact at the House and a contact at the Senate that can help really coordinate something similar to the Office of Digital engagement at the white house so that when Trump's in power and the deportation start and this, that, and the other thing, there is someone that can say, Hey, let's bring the top 10, 15, 20 creators to the white house, meet with a bunch of members of the house and Senate, do interviews with everybody, set it up properly in a room that's properly lit with equipment rather than doing this piecemeal thing where maybe we get, you know, we get Ron Wyden for eight minutes and then Brian's got Bernie for 12 minutes. And it's, it's completely uncoordinated,

uncoordinated in this way. And meanwhile, Trump's just got the ecosystem and he's got the NELC boys and he's got Rogan and he's got Charlie Kirk and he's got the Fox News people and he's got the Newsmax people. It's just not going to work. So this was sort of like the outgoing request. And I think it's an important one. I don't know that it will happen. I will push for it to happen. But it was very clear that all of us as creators and even Biden's digital engagement staff, everybody recognized

that we're just not doing it the right way. And the right is absolutely, absolutely crushing us. So on the bonus show, we'll talk a little bit more about the kind of texture and some of the other things I did. I had, uh, I, I saw so many of our friends, uh, Brittany page and Jesse Dollimore, Luke Beasley, uh, Adam Mockler, Dean Withers, Parker, um, uh, the, the Mycelis brothers, all three of them were, I think the three of them that are involved. I don't know if there's more, I think it's just the three, uh, Ben, Brett, and Geordie. Um, so many, so many different people, uh, were there and it, and it was really great to catch up with everybody. And that's the other thing that that was discussed, which is we all White House aside should be a community that's not so disjointed and where we are working together and trying to get some of these things going in a very negative environment where we just got crushed and we know some of the reasons that we got crushed and we know some of the areas where things need to be fixed.

If there's anything to feel optimistic about, it's that everybody I spoke to yesterday is obviously demoralized by the results. But as independent media people, we have specific things in mind where we say if we can accomplish these five things between now and the midterms, no matter what happens, we will be better off from a media ecosystem. We don't control policy for the Democratic Party. We don't control campaigns. But what we do control is the media ecosystem that we are a part of. How well functioning is it?

How coordinated is it? How coordinated is it? There's a clear desire to do it. And I'm optimistic about that. I'll say more today on the bonus show. All right. We are once again hearing from the failed former and soon to be once again, orange president, Donald J. Trump. Apropos of nothing, Donald Trump held a very strange press conference at his home in Florida. There's a sick nostalgia here reminding me of what it was like from 2017 to 2021. Remember the COVID press conferences for some of our younger or newer viewers? This is what it used to be like every day. It was not a fun time in the United Stash of America. Now, I'm including numerous clips here because this was such a wide ranging press conference

and Trump's dangerous views on so many issues were illuminated. I think it's worth looking at in some detail because it really serves as a preview of what we are to expect over the next four years. Donald Trump announced he plans to sue Ann Selzer and the newspaper in Iowa that published that Iowa poll saying, hey, Harris is winning. Now, can you sue someone over a bad poll? I don't think so. Can you ruin their life by suing them even if you don't prevail? Yes. That's what makes this so dangerous. Take a listen to the orange menace. I see others. I have a few others that I'm doing. I'm going to as an example, we're bringing I'm doing this not

because I want to. I'm doing this because I feel I have an obligation to I'm going to be bringing one against the people in Iowa, their newspaper, which had a very, very good pollster who got me right all the time. And then just before the election, she said I was going to lose by three or four points. And it became the biggest story all over the world because I was going to win Iowa by 20 points. The farmers love me and I love the farmers. And it was interesting the way she did it. She brought it down two weeks before. She said I was going to only win by four. That was a big strike. But that was good because she brought it down from like 22 points to four or whatever the number was way up, way up. Easy win. Never even thought to go there. OK, so the point is he's going to sue someone. He liked her polls when they were favorable to Trump.

She put out a poll that was wrong. And by the way, it essentially ended her polling career. She announced I'm retiring after that failed poll. And now Trump says he's going to sue her. Once again, we have to believe that they're going to do the things they tell us they are going to do. And Trump is going to weaponize lawsuits now riding high on the success of the ABC News lawsuit. Trump doesn't have to win these lawsuits in order for this to succeed. It's make it economically impossible for people to publish news polls or opinions that are unfavorable to Donald Trump. This was a topic at the creator summit yesterday at the White House, which is are we going

to be targeted simply because we have unfavorable opinions of Donald Trump? Now, Donald Trump also said that people who admire the suspected United Health Care CEO shooter Luigi Mangione have a sickness. That's the way Trump explained it. Health care shooting. The CEO. Can you give us your thoughts about that? And what do you make?

Well, I think it's terrible shooter. Does that tell you? Yeah, I think it's a terrible thing. I think it's really terrible that some people seem to admire him, like him. And I was happy to see that it wasn't specific to this gentleman that was killed. It's just an overall sickness as opposed to a specific sickness. That was a terrible thing. It was cold-blooded, just a cold blooded, horrible killing. And how people can like this guy is that's a sickness, actually. That's really

very bad, especially the way it was done. It was so bad right in the back. Yeah. Apparently, had he come up, had Mangione gone up to the United Healthcare CEO from the front, it would have been a much more respectable assassination or something, I guess Donald Trump is saying. Trump asked about tariffs. Are you worried the tariffs will increase prices and hurt the stock market? The answer is, of course they will. Trump says, no, no, no, it's all going to be great. Are you concerned that tariffs might hurt the stock market rise that you have seen in

the economy more broadly? Make our country rich. Tariffs will make our country rich. The whole thing will be priced right. Properly used. No, well, I didn't have any inflation and I had massive tariffs on a lot of things. We put tariffs on steel. If I didn't put tariffs on steel, 50 percent and more, they were dumping steel in China and others. I put tariffs on and it stopped and we took a fortune. We made a fortune on it. Tariffs properly used, which we will do and being reciprocal with other nations. But it'll make our country rich.

Now, of course, Trump ignores that he is not carefully suggesting tariffs. He's saying, I'm just going to blanket tariffs. That's going to be it. And still not understanding how they work. Will he actually do it in the end? I don't know. I don't know. But he absolutely says that he will.

Trump rehashing some old favorites, insisting that the 2020 election was stole from stolen from. We had that election. If it were an honorable election, we wouldn't have had any of the problems that we're talking about right now. Putin would have never gotten in. You said that you could make that deal before you take office. You still think you could make that deal?

I'm going to try. Will you ask Putin to give up Assad? Well, I hadn't thought of it. I'm going to try. Will you ask Putin to give up Assad? Well, I hadn't thought of it. I think we have to get on with our lives. Yeah, that's a no. Trump is not going to ask Putin to give up Assad. Trump, of course, one of the things he likes to do is privatize. What can we privatize? Can we privatize Social Security? What could we privatize? And Trump saying privatizing the Postal Service, not the worst idea he's ever heard. Streamline the logistics of the post office, but they lose billions. Well there is talk about the Postal Service being taken private.

You do know that not the worst idea I've ever heard really is it. You know, it's a lot different today with, uh, between Amazon and UPS and FedEx and all the things that you didn't have. Now, remember one of the classic playbook items out of the Republican playbook is make something really crappy and then use the crappiness you created to justify taking it private. Oh, public education is failing because we hate it and do everything we can to make it fail. Let's do voucher programs. Let's do religious private schools. Let's push for charter. Let's use the fact that we ruined public education to justify getting away from it. Same thing with the postal service. Let's make the postal service as terrible as possible.

Remember, Trump put in Louis DeJoy and then they throughout covid and the holidays and elections with the ballots make it as bad as possible. And then he goes, you know, it's not really working that well. Thanks to me. It's not really working that well. Maybe we should privatize it. The issue of Gaza came up and Trump's answer was a reminder that there is a canyon of difference between what Kamala Harris's approach would have been to Gaza and Trump's.

Listen to this. You say that there will be hell to pay if the hostages are not released before January 20th. What does that mean? Well, they're going to have to determine what that means. But it means it won't be pleasant. Mr. President, it's not going to be pleasant. Yeah. And we knew that a world of difference, even though some said, eh, I don't know,

Harris, Trump, it's kind of all the same in Gaza. Quite a difference from Biden, Biden, Harris, that's for sure. On the topic of the drones slash UFOs slash stars slash planets that have been confusing people in the sky. Trump ominously saying something strange is going on here. Thank you. Good to see you. Good to see you. Can you comment on the drones that are flying around New Jersey ports?

It seems like the American people have a big disc. The government knows what is happening. Look, our military knows where they took off from. If it's a garage, they can go right into that garage. They know where it came from and where it went. Do they? And for some reason, they don't want to comment. And I think they'd be better off saying what it is our military knows and our president knows.

And for some reason, they want to keep people in suspense. I can't imagine it's the enemy because it was the enemy that blasted out. Even if they were late, they'd blast it. Something strange is going on. For some reason, they don't want to tell the people. And they should because the people are really, I mean, they happen to be over Bedminster. We should know. They're very they're very close to bedminster. I think maybe I won't spend the weekend in bedminster.

I just thank you. So of course, Trump kind of vaguely saying he knows and everybody knows what it is, but he won't say and nobody will say. I would assume that then on January 21st, Trump will tell us exactly what is going on. The sucking up that New York City Mayor Eric Adams did to Trump apparently is going to pay off because Trump was asked, would you consider pardoning Eric Adams, a Democrat? And Trump says, yeah, you know, I would consider pardoning Eric Adams. Yeah, I would. I think that he was treated pretty unfairly. Now, I haven't seen the gravity of it all, but it seems, you know, like being upgraded in an airplane many years ago. I know probably everybody here has been upgraded. They see you're all stars and they say, I want to upgrade that person from NBC. I'm going to upgrade him. And that would mean you'll spend the rest of your life in prison. I don't know. Somehow I would.

I mean, I'd have to see it because I don't know. So he's going to consider that. And of course, it's a reminder that Trump's politics is a politics of personal loyalty, as defined by sucking up. Eric Adams has done a little bit of sucking up to Trump despite being a Democrat, and it's sort of sounding like Trump is going to reward him. And then finally, Trump asked, do you believe there's a connection between vaccines and autism?

We're going to look at that very strongly. Can I ask just clearly, do you believe there's a connection between vaccines and autism? Well, I don't look right now. You have some very brilliant people looking at it. I had dinner the other night with the head of Pfizer, the head of Eli Lilly and, uh, RFK, as you know, and Oz, and we had, uh, and other people within the administration that are involved in the medical. And, uh, we're looking to find out, you know, if you look elements of medical, including the wizard of Oz are looking at vaccine autism very strongly. I won't delve into it now because Marjorie is getting involved in it and I'm going to deal with it later. But once again, playing coy and sort of rehashing

one of the oldest debunked conspiracy theories in medical science that vaccines are related to autism. Trump's using it to fire up a part of his base, even though honestly, I highly doubt that Trump believes there is any connection. So these sorts of press conferences, orange, swollen, disoriented, confused, vindictive and authoritarian. These likely will be the norm during this forthcoming presidency. If you want to learn a little bit about how it got this bad, I explain it all in my forthcoming book, The Echo Machine, which you can get at David Pakman dot com

slash book. We'll take a quick break and be right back. Staying motivated and eating healthy during the holidays can be a challenge. That's why I love our sponsor, AG one. 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 quality vitamins and minerals and probiotics from whole food sources. The travel packs are a lifesaver

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two and five free travel packs in your first box. Go to drink a G one.com slash Pacman. That's drink agey, the number one dot com slash Pacman for seventy six dollars worth of free gifts in your first box. The link is in the podcast notes. As Trump's inauguration approaches, we're already seeing what the next four years are going to look like. A Trump campaign official said Pennsylvania election workers will face jail time for counting mail in ballots with technical errors like missing dates. Part of the rights attempt to sow election distrust and weaponize the courts. This story is almost exclusively being covered by right leaning news outlets spinning the narrative to villainize the election workers.

So the public probably has a skewed perspective on what's really happening. That is, unless you use ground news, which lets you see every side to every story like this one. Ground news is an independent platform that exposes the biases of media outlets by showing you who owns them, what angle they're taking on each story and what hidden agendas might Thank you, David. ground.news slash Pacman for 50% off their unlimited access vantage plan. It's their biggest sale of the year. And the link is in the description. consider signing up at join pacman.com. We do a daily extra show for our members called the bonus show, the bonus show, where you want to make money. Everybody else that makes money to fund themselves is bad. Sure. We also do commercial free audio and video streams of the show and so

many other great things. Check it out at join pacman.com. You can use the coupon code not again to save off of the cost of a membership. All right. We have what I am calling opportunistic anti-vaxxer ism that is now growing because there are many Republicans desperate to be back in the spotlight or to get the spotlight for the first time who are thinking to themselves, how can I sort of thread the needle between being a complete lunatic, which, of course, I am when it's with regard to Marjorie Taylor Greene and also and also try to ingratiate myself with incoming cabinet members and with Donald Trump? Well, the perfect way right now is to play anti-vaxxer and to rehash the debunked notion

that vaccines cause autism. Here is radical and repugnant reactionary Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. She put out an excretion on X where she said, quote, I fully believe vaccines cause capital A autism. It's another example of crimes against humanity and innocent babies, children and their families are the victims. You know, sometimes when we say there is no evidence for X, what we mean is we haven't really studied it one way or the other.

Like we don't have it. It might be true. We have no evidence this way. We have no evidence that way, but we really have no idea. In this case, when it comes to vaccines and autism, it's been studied and we have endless evidence to the contrary. Vaccines simply do not cause autism. We have endless scientific literature.

It's so extensive that at this point claiming otherwise is either ignorance or you have a nefarious purpose of some kind. And that's probably what it is with Marjorie Taylor Greene. It all goes back to 1998. British doctor Andrew Wakefield published a study saying it looks like the MMR vaccine causes autism. The problem with the study was that it was based on 12 kids, way too small a number to prove anything. The methods were flawed. The 12 kids were brought directly to Andrew Wakefield. Lawyers looking to sue vaccine manufacturers were involved. Wakefield had a conflict of interest because he was paid by the lawyers suing the vaccine companies, and he was involved in a patent for a standalone measles only vaccine,

which could be an alternative to MMR. If parents came to believe that there was a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, endless reach researchers tried replicating the findings of Andrew Wakefield. They were unable to larger and larger and better and better studies found no link between vaccines and autism. And ultimately what happened is that the Lancet, which published this paper, withdrew the paper. Andrew Wakefield lost his medical license and that was the end. As far as the science was concerned, we now know with decades of research involving millions of kids, there's no connection between vaccines and autism. It's hard to find something that's been studied more. And Republicans

love to use this phrase. And actually, I should be more precise. It's not just Republicans. Often conspiracy theorists love to say they won't let you study X. They won't let you. In this case, it's been studied extensively. It's been studied arguably more than any medical question. We've had the open inquiry for decades. And the only thing that we can get out of bringing this up again is getting people to say, damn, maybe there is a link. Maybe Trump's onto something. Maybe RFK Jr. is onto something. Maybe I won't get my kid vaccinated. And then next thing you know, you've got a measles outbreak the way we've had in these anti-vax communities. Now on the question of why are autism rates going up? I've, I know I've talked about it so many times. If you've been listening to every episode,

I'm sure you're sick of this. We are better at diagnosing. We are more aware of how autism can present. The diagnostic criteria have expanded to include people in different parts of the autism spectrum. There are better services that are able to evaluate kids earlier. And it is possible that the actual rate, that it's not just a diagnosis issue, it's possible the actual rate of autism is going up. Older average parental age could be a factor. You know, people are looking at microplastics or different things, survival of premature babies

that previously would not have survived who may have a higher rate of autism. That could be a factor. The one thing we have absolutely ruled out is vaccines and the MMR vaccine. So Marjorie Taylor Greene, her brain leaking out of her ear. And then we go from the House to the Senate because now there's also a senator whose brain seems to be breaking over this issue in an attempt for relevance and celebrity, Senator Tommy Tuberville. I know I'm no longer mispronouncing names. Remember, I guess his real last name is Tuberville, not Tuberville. Republican Senator Senator Tommy Tuberville said he met with RFK Jr.

and was extraordinarily impressed with him. Oh, wow. What a great thing. And he made the claim that most of us know someone who might have died from the COVID vaccine. Of course, most of us know nobody who has died from the COVID vaccine. Take a listen to this. On vaccines, we see how kind of views that he has espoused with regard to school mandates and things like that. Are you worried about potential changes that could cause outbreaks here in America? Well, what I was excited to hear him about

is get away from guessing and do facts, do science. Get behind the science and stay with it. Don't be guessing. And that's what a lot of these vaccines have done. They haven't been 100 percent proven. If you look at the number of vaccines these young babies get over a short period of time, it's dozens and dozens of them. And he's totally against that. He wants to make sure that parents understand the good and the bad and the ugly instead of just forcing parents to give vaccines to their kids. But now I want to focus in on forcing. We've already talked about the

science, right? I don't need to redo that. We just talked about it in the context of Marjorie Taylor. And I want to talk about this forcing parents to give children's vaccines. No one is being forced. And in fact, if we do what Tommy Tuberville wants done, we are forcing organizations out of being able to decide for themselves what their vaccine policies are going to be. Let me tell you what I mean. Public schools require certain vaccinations for enrollment. There are exemptions. Some states have religious or philosophical exemptions that are allowed. I believe every, every state has medical exemptions. If a parent chooses not to vaccinate, they can opt out of public schooling. They can say, I will homeschool, or I will look for a private school that doesn't require vaccines. The alternative is forcing states and municipalities to not be able to determine their own vaccine

policy. So for the only person being forced in the scenario, Tuberville is pointing out is saying the federal government is going to force schools to accept everybody with no vaccine policy. There are pediatricians who might have a policy. Our pediatrician says this. If you refuse childhood vaccines, we will not see your kid. You don't have to do anything. You can go to a different doctor. You can find, you know, a naturopathic doctor that maybe has a different policy or whatever. Find a different MD. At our practice, we require vaccination as a condition of being a patient here. You don't have to do anything. These are practice decisions made by individual doctors, not government mandates. Summer camps, many summer camps say to come to the summer camp,

you need proof of this vaccine or that vaccine. Why? To reduce the risk of an outbreak running rampant in the middle of summer camp. If parents don't like it, they can say, oh, we'll go to a different camp. We will find a camp that has a different policy. So when you call it forced vaccination, you're acting as if there are no alternatives. In reality, it's conditions that are set by different independent entities. You can refuse the vaccines. There might be a consequence. You might have limited school options. It might be tougher to find the pediatrician that you want. But this concept of people are being forced to vaccinate. It is not happening. And it is, again, part of the ruse that they have really fleeced people with.

Tuberville is getting involved in it. Marjorie Taylor Greene is getting involved in it. Let's hope that this dissipates. But the fear, of course, is that Trump and RFK are scheming to do something terrible on vaccination programs. If it happens, I'll tell you. Obviously, I hope that that's not the case. Sometimes the people we are closest to are the toughest to shop for. Luckily, there's a gift everyone on your list will love. It is the aura digital picture frame. I gave one to my mom, preloaded it with pictures of the baby and some of me, right? I mean, please, you hook it up and it's already got pictures on it. You can select pictures from your phone and upload them remotely to any picture frame named number one by wire cutter or a frames,

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He's in Paris with Trump. He's already at least potentially convinced Trump about some of the goodies that he would like for the benefit of his companies. What do you make of the origin story of how Musk initially got involved? Is it as simple as you dump 250 million into PACs and now you're Trump's friend, or is there sort of something more to it? I think there's something more to it. I think if you look at Musk's story over the last five to 10 years, it's a process of radicalization. And you see this among people across the economic spectrum. And you see that it was accelerated by the

pandemic, that the pandemic happens. And a lot of people who were sort of mildly conservative before got radicalized by shutdowns, by vaccine mandates, and so on. And Musk happens to be the richest person on earth. So we sort of assume his motives are different from everyone else. But I actually think if you look at Musk's trajectory, you see a very ordinary trajectory, which is you see a person who is not necessarily the politically savviest or most politically literate of individuals who thinks he knows a lot more than he knows. And because he has hundreds of billions of dollars behind him, has the power to muscle center stage.

And so when Trump sort of befriends Musk and Musk befriends Trump over the last three years, it becomes this instant bro fest. Both of them are very rich. Both of them have these enormous egos. Both of them believe that they know way more than they know. And that in Trump's infamous phrase, they're the only person who can fix the woes of the world. And so they form this sort of partnership that benefits both of them. It benefits Trump politically because he accesses all of Musk's not just money, but also his social capital. And it benefits Musk because he now finds himself on the inside of an administration that is going to dramatically rewrite regulations, dramatically reshape the federal government's system of investments, all of which can now be used to benefit Elon Musk. And I think what we're seeing here, and Bernie Sanders has been tweeting a lot about this, we're seeing the emergence of an

absolute unfettered American oligarchy, something we've never seen, even in the sort of wealthiest days of the Gilded Age of the 1880s, 90s or the 1920s before the Great Depression, we have never seen the kind of oligarchy that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the other sort of center billionaires now represent. It's something extraordinary. I've even called it a kleptocratic, kakistocratic oligarchy, which arguably is even worse and more complex. In the context of Project 2025, do you see Musk's desires as serving the goals of Project 2025, either implicitly or explicitly, or are these sort of different paths and trajectories? As far as I can see, they're an uneasy partnership. And that goes way beyond Elon Musk. There are these different constituencies that Trump is bringing together that sit well at the moment

because they're all about power. But when they actually have that power and then they try and implement their agendas, they're going in completely different directions. So you have the MAGA base, which is this sort of, you know, angry, nationalist, xenophobic, racist base. You've got the Elon Musk crowd, which is essentially these sort of techno-utopians who believe that you can blow up existing infrastructure and then replace it with this sort of high technology utopia. You've got the Steve Bannon group, this sort of group that thinks very carefully about history and has really mapped out the way to a far right revolution. And then you've got these sort of vaguely traditionalist groups, Marco Rubio might be the example here, who are entering the cabinet with this assumption, maybe like the conservative assumption during Nazi Germany, that traditional conservatives can reign the great leader in. Didn't work well in the 1930s in the Third Reich. I doubt very much it's going to work well in Trump's authoritarian America. But I do think that it goes beyond just a sort of Musk

vision versus another vision. I think there are all kinds of competing visions. And here's the thing. When you are dealing with a strongman who only deals with people who flatter and favor him, you're going to have an awful lot of sycophants coming into that administration. And those sycophants aren't going to say what needs to be said. They're going to say what they think Trump wants them to say, which means you're going to have this brewing chaos and these brewing feuds, but they're going to exist below the surface. And they're all going to be circling around the sort of radiant figure of Donald Trump. It doesn't make for democratic politics. It makes for the sort of court almost like a regal royal court that you saw in medieval

Europe. It's something that the modern democratic world is really very unfamiliar with. You talk about, you know, how Trump likes Trump. Trump is impressed by a relatively narrow set of things with with women. He prefers women that he finds attractive. We know that he gives significant preference there. He likes people who are wealthy. He sees wealth as a combination of, you know, sort of virtue and proof of concept in some sense. when it comes to foreign policy, he seems quite smitten with more authoritarian strongman type leaders. I've spoken to a bunch of people kind of in my space who are convinced that within a year, the Musk, uh, bromance completely implodes because of the clash of egos and that ultimately there's going to be some kind of disagreement and the loyalty

that Trump expects just won't be there anymore. What do you think? Do you think it's bound to implode? I think it's likely to implode. You're absolutely right. Trump surrounds himself with baubles. He likes gold and glitter. He likes extreme wealth. He views wealth not just as a proxy. He views it as the be all and end all. If you are wealthy, you are valuable. If you're not wealthy, you mean nothing. All of his policies over his first term and all the indications are that his policies over the second term hew to this. They're policies designed to benefit the super elite and the policies that really don't help or in any way benefit everybody else. It's a mystery to me and it's going to be a mystery to me till the day I die. It's a mystery to me how a man of his lack of morality and lack of empathy can claim the populist mantle. Because actually, he is the most plutocratic president in American history.

His current cabinet and inner circle of advisors, which includes Elon Musk, obviously, is worth nearly half a trillion dollars. He's appointing one billionaire after another billionaire after another billionaire to the offices that ordinary Americans need to maintain their access to Medicare, to maintain their access to Social Security, to maintain a clean environment, to maintain a workplace that's safe to work in. All of those areas are now being controlled by the super wealthy who have their own agendas. And you're absolutely right. Musk's ego is at least as big as Trump's ego. And when you have clashes of egos like that, very rarely does it last long in peace because they do have their own agendas and they have their own sense of what's right and what's wrong. Neither of them likes compromise and neither

of them Brooks fools or people they view as being fools so i think it's more than likely that at some point some kind of twitter or truth social blast goes out from one or another of them and that sort of detente goes maybe it's because trump doesn't approve a deregulation that elon musk wants maybe it's because elon musk you know wants to burn even more down than Trump wants to burn down. But whatever's going to happen at some point, that camaraderie shatters. And I do firmly believe that. So we've kind of outlined many of the reasons why none of this is lining up to be good for sort of the average American and in particular small town America, as you write about in your book, you explain in the

book that there is this seemingly unlikely coalition of Trump supporters that has come from many of these small towns. Now, when, when I try to look at it objectively, I see the first term policy was not good for farmers. It was not good in a lot of way for ways for small town factory workers in places like Ohio and Indiana, et cetera. So it's, it seems as is often the case illogical that there would be this growing base of support, uh, in, in rural small town America. And yet it, we see, we saw it and we saw a shift in that direction from 2020 to the 2024 election. What explains it? Is it a cognitive dissonance? Is it a misunderstanding of what Trump is offering? Is it more personality driven? How do you square it? I think it's a great question. Look, I've

spent the last 30 years traveling around America, going to especially small towns and rural communities and writing articles. I've probably written a thousand articles for dozens of different publications over the years. And when I go into those towns and those villages and those rural hamlets, I talk to people. I don't just sort of go in and sort of pontificate. I spend weeks and weeks talking to people. And so for my book, I was in two places. I was in a very small area in the Olympic Peninsula in Washington called Clallam County, and I was particularly focused on a little town called Squim. And then I was in this right-wing county in far north of California called Shasta County, which has been right-wing for decades and has now become even more right-wing.

And I talked to a lot of people. There was this incredibly charismatic barber called Woody Clendenin. There was an ex-marine called Mkala Sapata. There was a geriatric nurse called Woody Clendenin. There was an ex-Marine called Mkala Sopata. There was a geriatric nurse called Jodie Wilkie. There were loads of people who had their own reasons for sort of going towards the right. And some of it was to do with a sort of maybe classically conservative narrative around guns, around regulations, around, you know, lack of sympathy for higher minimum wages and social welfare and things like that. But a lot of it was to do with the new right. Some of it was to do with sort of the rise of MAGA movement and the

suspicion of mainstream media. And I think that's really important that people just stopped getting their news from trustworthy sources, and increasingly went to rumor mills around social media. And it broke down the concept of trust. I think part of it was the unique demagogic skills of Donald Trump. And I've never been one to sort of dismiss this guy and say, oh, he's just a buffoon. He's a clown. I've been reporting on Trump and on his language for nine years, since 2015. I have immense respect for his skills as a demagogue.

Doesn't mean I like those skills. He is an extraordinarily skillful demagogue. He knows how to find people's resentments. He knows how to exploit those resentments and those fears. He knows how to bring people together into a movement built around resentment of other people and other groups and other ways of thinking. So I think that was part of it. I think the other part, which is just so enormous and yet doesn't get discussed enough, certainly not analysed enough, is the role of COVID and the pandemic. That, you know, here you have this once in a century total dislocation because of a public health emergency. And it wasn't just, you know, one area or one state or one region. It wasn't just one country. It was the entire world skidded to

a halt in 2020 and went into lockdown. And the consequences were immense, the psychological dislocation, the sense of distrust of government, because a lot of people just didn't understand the epidemiology, didn't understand the idea that you could have exponential growth, that you could have very low infection rates one week. But if you did nothing, you would have extraordinarily high infection rates maybe a month or two later. And so you had these lockdowns that were kicking in in the spring of 2020. And in rural areas like Shasta County,

there were almost no infections at the time. So you had locals who were extraordinarily antipathetic to the idea of a lockdown. They thought it was inimicable to local liberty. They didn't understand why churches had to be closed, why schools had to be closed, why non-essential businesses had to be closed. And it fuels this resentment. And you start seeing people turning up at border supervisors meetings, some of them with guns, some of them in costume, all of them angry and all of them shouting. And you have this sort of degeneration of civic

discourse where in-person meetings or Zoom meetings, when these meetings went on to Zoom, just became this sort of exercise in incivility. And then you had the internet, which gives people this sort of imprimatur, this right to be aggressive, because it's anonymous. You can go online, you don't have to use your real name. You're angry at your public health officer because your public health officer has recommended social distancing or suggested people wear masks or whatever it might be. You look up the name of her, of your public health officer, and then you send her a death threat. Or you send her this sort of awful screed of the most misogynistic terms you can conjure up. And that's what was happening in 2020. And so you had this sort of utter breakdown of

civility and the injection of a language of violence right into the heart of the body politic, not just at the national level, but in these small places like Shasta County or Squim in Washington. these social media postings as they came online. And I was seeing this decline of civility. And I think we're sort of in the long tail, the aftermath of all of that. The COVID emergency is over. We get on with our lives now. But the psychological ramifications of that period of dislocation is with us. And it's playing out in our politics. And it's pushing politics in this weird sort of anti-authoritarian language right, which actually is very authoritarian. So they use the language of personal liberty. They use the language of freedom from government intervention. They demonize public health workers like Anthony Fauci, for example. But in actual fact, it's a really authoritarian project because when those people get power, we're seeing the consequences, not just locally, we're now seeing it nationally.

Trump's attack on the free press, the rise of this sort of very oligarchic, kleptocratic elite, the idea that nonprofits can be defunded or even gone after as being terrorist organizations if they say things or do things that Donald Trump disapproves of. Congress, the House Committee yesterday recommended that Liz Cheney be prosecuted for daring to investigate Donald Trump's role in the January 6th uprising. Yes. Well, this is Orwellian. You know, if we're in a situation where somebody can basically trigger an insurrection against the US government, not be convicted because he runs out the clock, comes back into power, and then launches prosecutorial efforts against the investigators. Yes. Well, that's the world of Hitler. That's the world of Stalin. That's the world of Putin. That is the world of authoritarianism. It's a really

dangerous path that we're heading down. I hope we can find a way to sort of pull back from this before it's too late. I hope so, too. We've been speaking with Sasha Abramski, freelance journalist, The Nation magazine's Western States correspondent and also the author of numerous books, including Chaos Comes Calling The Battle Against the Far Right Takeover of Small Town America. Sasha, really great having you on. I appreciate your time and insights today. Oh, it was a joy. Thanks for having me.

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or push the levers of fiscal and monetary policy, only certain outcomes are possible. And a lot of what we are currently being fed by Trump and the people who are saying his ideas are great, has been debunked with a hundred years of economic data. So we're really talking here about supply side economics. It's, it's the fairy tale that if you lavish corporations and millionaires with tax cuts, the wealth you hand them trickles down to everybody else. And it's just so awesome for everybody. And it's kind of the economic equivalent of believing that you can breed a unicorn to spit out gold bars and then everybody just has more money. In reality, what trickle down economics spits out is deficits, usually stagnant wages and inequality that goes up. And right now, Donald Trump is

rolling out a 2024 tax plan, 2025 tax plan that will just double down on that. It has never worked. It will not work this time because it can't work at the core of supply side economics is the idea that if you slash taxes on the rich and on corporations, they will say, thank you, sir, for the tax cut. May I have another? And then they will say, I'm now going to invest. I'm going to create jobs with my tax cut and everything will just grow. And maybe it sounds nice on paper. I mean, the idea that everything's better for everybody. Sure.

It sounds nice. The problem is it doesn't work in the real world. In particular, it doesn't work because people usually invest based on demand for what they're selling, not because they just got a tax cut. We tried it with Reaganomics. In the 80s, Reagan's huge tax cuts were supposedly going to supercharge growth. GDP went up a tiny bit, but the deficit went way up. Income inequality went way up. And you had the bottom 99% getting table scraps and the top one percent had a party and wages were basically flat.

We have the example of the Bush tax cuts, another round of breaks for the George W. Bush, another round of tax cuts for the wealthy. And we saw some of the weakest job growth in modern American history, more inequality. And then it was capped up off with the worst economic collapse since the great depression. We have Trump's tax cuts from 2017, the tax cuts and jobs act. And it was sold to us as this kind of like magic potion for economic growth, which we were told would pay for itself. The idea there is the tax cuts will stimulate so much growth that even though the cuts reduce government revenue, all the growth they generate will increase government revenue and it pays for itself.

We didn't get it. We got corporate windfalls. We didn't get any trickle down. Corporations funneled a bunch of the money that they saved on taxes into stock buybacks to drive up the price of their stock, disproportionately held by a small number of shareholders. Workers saw very little. And meanwhile, the debt just exploded. The deficit soared by 984 billion in 2019. This was before COVID even

entered the picture and GDP growth, barely Obama era level. Somehow Obama without these huge tax giveaways saw roughly the same economic growth as Trump with the massive tax cuts for the rich. So we know it didn't work. Reagan, Bush, Trump. Trump's at it again. More giant tax cuts for corporations and the ultra wealthy. The reality is that historically, when top marginal tax rates were higher, like the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, the economy grew faster and inequality was lower. Now, that doesn't mean in any environment, super high marginal tax rates, rates will generate that. But it is proof that in certain situations, it certainly doesn't hamper growth. Cutting taxes on the rich does not jumpstart growth, but it does pad the pockets of those at the very top.

I gladly accepted Trump's Q bid giveaway to me and my business. I mean, sure. I mean, let me keep more money. Fine. But I can't honestly argue that it was good for the economy. It just didn't do anything one way or the other. The point is there's not a secret conspiracy here. And even some right wingers admit that supply side economics does not work the way that they claim. What does work is investing in people, better educating the population, roads, bridges and infrastructure so that commerce can happen more easily, improving schools, ensuring that lower and middle class folks have a basic level of access to health care and to services such that they can be productive members of society. That's called demand side stimulus.

That does work historically. And we're not going to see that under Donald Trump because he doesn't care about it or believe in it, and neither do the people that he's hiring. But anytime you hear a supply side trickle down idea presented, we know it doesn't work because of Reagan, Bush two and Trump's first term. All right. I want to talk a little bit about something that we have built, which now may be taken away. We have nearly a million followers on TikTok, and there are many other progressive creators with far bigger followings. One of the things that has shaken out

is that TikTok is a far more balanced platform politically than many others. Like, for example, X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. And we now have a situation where indeed TikTok may be banned in the United States. Now, there is a lot that is still out there that we don't know. There is sort of a deadline of Trump's inauguration. There are some hoping the Supreme Court steps in. There are others hoping that a buyer steps in domestically to transfer ownership of TikTok U.S. to the United States, which would allow it to keep going. But the idea here is that if none of those things happen, TikTok is going to be banned.

Now, I will tell you the following. as we've been building our TikTok presence, I knew it might be taken away. We, we knew that because they've been kind of talking about the potential of banning TikTok for a while now. If it is going to be taken away, we will put in place a plan, the best plan we can come up with to transition as many people off of it onto our other platforms. But as I've said before, I don't think it should be banned unless we have laws that apply to all platforms. And then any platform that doesn't meet the guidelines could be sanctioned or punished. I've given examples of this. If there was a law passed that says if you want to operate in the US based app stores and have the app available, here is how your data storage and privacy rules must be.

If Tik Tok doesn't meet that requirement, they're banned. If Facebook doesn't meet the requirement, they're banned, et cetera. The point is I have not seen a good reason to target TikTok specifically despite vague claims about the Chinese communist party. Now, some may say, well, David, this is because you are on TikTok. Okay. My view was the same before we were on TikTok. And my view is the same about platforms. I'm, I'm not, you know, we're, we're nominally on Snapchat. We have a much smaller audience on same about platforms. I'm, I'm not, you know, we're, we're nominally on Snapchat. We have a much smaller audience on Snapchat than Tik Tok. I would be against the same thing if somebody said this about Snapchat, we need a set of

rules that can be applied to everybody. Now, to the extent that Trump might save Tik Tok, I agree with doing it. I don't care who's doing it. As I, as I will explain later this week, objectivity and neutrality are two different concepts. Bias is a third concept. I think that as outlined, the tick tock ban doesn't make sense, especially since it's one of the platforms where the progressive movement is actually holding its own. When I was in DC yesterday, talk to a bunch of other progressive tick tock creators who say, this is a platform that we're actually doing okay on. All of a sudden they want to ban it. Here's what Trump had to say about it.

Who? How do you plan to stop the ban on TikTok next month? We'll take a look at TikTok. You know, I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok because I won youth by 34 points. And there are those that say that TikTok has something to do with that. Now, Joe Rogan did, and some of the other people that were recommended by my son Barron, he knew names. I said, who is that? Tell me, who's that? Dad, you've got to be kidding.

I can't believe you don't know. And I did those interviews, and it was actually sort of cute. Do you want to know the truth? But we did them and that had an impact. But TikTok had an impact. And all right. So anyway, Trump, as usual, confused. He didn't win young voters by 34 points. He's just constantly confused, but he may try to save the platform. And I think it would be good for the progressive movement. That's my view right now. If there are people in my audience who disagree and who think it would be right for tick tock to be banned, let me know. We've got a great bonus show for you today. We are going to talk about

AOC losing a key vote for committee leadership to a Pelosi backed 74 year old. We're going to talk about a restaurant that wants to ban people younger than 30. There's an interesting legal question here and we will discuss it. And police have identified a 15 year old girl as the shooter in the Wisconsin Christian school shooting. We will discuss that and so much more on today's bonus show. Sign up at joinpacman.com. I will see you then.