The David Pakman Show - 12/20/24: Republicans trying social security scam, Trump's new mullet

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

-- On the Show: -- Exposing and explaining the Republican Social Security scam -- Republican Congressman Andy Barr wildly claims that the American people voted for Elon Musk to get as much power as he is currently getting from Trump -- Hakeem Jeffries has no idea whether Donald Trump or Elon Musk are in charge of the Republican Party -- Donald Trump resurfaces at Mar-a-Lago with a bizarre mullet, looking very run down -- Donald Trump voters are about to get what they deserve, and it's nothing to gloat about -- Users continue to flee Elon Musk's X, formerly known as Twitter, and Bluesky continues to grow as a viable alternative -- Exploring the important media differences between independence, bias, neutrality, and objectivity -- This week's Friday Feedback -- On the Bonus Show: Fani Willis removed from Georgia case against Trump, and much more... 🍷 Naked Wines: Use code PAKMAN to get 6 bottles for $39.99 at https://nakedwines.com/pakman 😁 Zippix Toothpicks: Code PAKMAN10 saves you 10% at https://zippixtoothpicks.com 💻 Get Private Internet Access for 83% OFF + 4 months free at https://www.piavpn.com/David 🥐 Wildgrain: Use code PAKMAN for $30 off & free baked goods at https://wildgrain.com/pakman 🖼️ Aura Frames: Use code PAKMAN for $35 OFF & free shipping at https://auraframes.com/pakman ⚠️ Ground News: Get 50% OFF their unlimited access Vantage plan at https://ground.news/pakman -- Become a Member: https://davidpakman.com/membership -- Become a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/davidpakmanshow -- TDPS Subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/thedavidpakmanshow -- Pakman Discord: https://davidpakman.com/discord -- David on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/davidpakmanshow -- Leave a Voicemail: (219)-2DAVIDP

. Welcome everybody. I want to start today by talking about the scam that Republicans have been running on social security. Social security is arguably the most successful anti-poverty program in American history. And especially because the math is just pointing to if Republicans really want to cut two to $2.5 trillion from the budget, they are going to have to look at social security because the math just doesn't make sense otherwise. Now you would think that social security would be something both parties just

agree on, but you would be very wrong. It would be a reasonable assumption, but you would be wrong. The Republican party has been scheming for decades to destroy social security, of course, quietly by telling seniors that they want to improve or add flexibility to or take control of social security. But what they really mean is let's privatize it, allow wall street to make a bunch of money off of it and gamble with your retirement savings. And if you explain it the honest way, which is the way I just did that in the second explanation, it's not exactly going to convince seniors to vote for you or people approaching retirement age to vote for you.

So I want to talk about the scam of Republican lying about social security, which they use to push privatization. So let's start with the lie. Republicans love to say social security is going broke. You've heard the scare tactics. Oh, the trust fund will run out by 2033. What they don't tell you when they use that talking point is that even if Congress did nothing and I mean nothing, no, no changes at all.

Social security could still pay 77% of benefits after that date. Now that's not ideal. We want it to pay a hundred percent of benefits, but it's hardly bankruptcy to pay 77% of benefits indefinitely. Now, secondly, if we were to raise just a little bit, the cap on social security, we fix almost all of the problem. Now, some people may not know this and I don't want to patronize. I'm just going to explain. You only pay Social Security tax on part of your earnings depending on how much you make. There's a cap at one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. So if you make one hundred and sixty thousand dollars, you pay Social Security tax on all

of it. If you make $250,000, you pay social security tax only on that first one 60. If you make $50 million, you pay social security tax only on that first one 60. If we were to raise that cap, not even uncapping it, just raise it a little, raise it to 225,000 or two 75. We fix almost all of the problem. Third, why is there a shortfall to begin with? Because Republicans have spent decades cutting taxes for billionaires instead of shoring up social security.

So step one, sabotage the funding. Step two, say there's a crisis, which you created. Step three, put in place what you really want, which in this case is privatize the whole damn thing. Now, as a side note, this is the same thing they do with education. This is the same thing they do with the postal service. We've talked about it recently. Make the postal service crappy and then say, this thing sucks. Let's privatize it. Make public education worse and then say, look at how bad this is. Let's get rid of the Department of Education. Let's push for religious private schools or whatever the case may be. Now,

the whole point of this with Social Security, what they really want is to privatize it. This has been their dream really since the Reagan era. If they can hand your retirement savings to wall street, it's a win win for them. Okay. The hedge funds will make billions in fees when the market inevitably crashes. Regular people will be left holding the bag. It's sort of like Enron, but with grandma's egg money, for lack of a better term. George W. Bush tried this back in 2005. He pitched this as freedom and choice.

Let's privatize it. Then you'll have freedom and you'll have choice. But even Republican voters were kind of like, wait a second, you want to risk my social security money on stocks, the very same stocks that have tanked my 401k. It was so unpopular that Bush temporarily shelved it. So here's kind of like a step-by-step breakdown of the scam. They create panic by saying social security is insolvent and they ignore that they could easily fix it, Deal with the payroll tax cap, make some other small modifications. Second, come in with a solution. The solution is we will privatize and

wrap it up in buzzwords like freedom and choice. We're going to modernize. We're going to bring the program into the 21st century. But what it means is handing your money to Wall Street. So their donors from Wall Street can rake in profits and then blame the victim. This is a critical part on the tail end. When retirees lose everything in the next crash, Republicans will blame the government, Democrats. If only Democrats had let us deregulate more or earlier, none of this would have happened. What's amazing is how bold they are about it. You'll hear Republicans say, we have to have a conversation about social security. Okay. Then what they really want to do is dismantle it, but make it sound like we had a policy debate.

We agreed we had a conversation and we agreed, but of course they already have their solution and it's a disaster. It's the sort of the political equivalent of saying we need to have a conversation about your wallet. And then you take money from someone's wallet and you say, Hey, we had a conversation. Don't you remember? So the reality check we need is that social security is not a handout. It's your money. You paid into the program. You deserve to get out of it what you were promised. And gambling that on the stock market doesn't make any sense. And meanwhile, the same people that say social security is unsustainable will always vote for increasing the military budget

by a hundred billion. Now, this time around, some have come to believe that Doge, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy are going to cut military spending. They're really going to do it. I just don't believe it. I'll believe it when I see it. So the next time that a Republican says, oh, we need to fix social security, just remember that they don't really want to fix it. They want to break it, sell off the pieces to their, so that their buddies can make fees. And when it all comes crashing down, they'll blame the government and they'll blame Democrats and they will move on to their next scam. Here's a reasonable question.

Should unelected bureaucrats get to set government policy at the top level? Well, if you believe what Trump campaigned on, if you believe what the vague Rama Swami campaigned on, the answer would be no. Unelected bureaucrats should not get to make important decisions and yet that's exactly what they're getting to do. Here is Stuart Varney on Fox business asking Congressman Andy Barr is Elon Musk getting too much influence? And Andy Barr says, this is what people voted for, which of course, this is not what people voted for.

A lot of people in Congress were looking at Musk's tweets. You were sitting there on your phones and there were the tweets coming in. You were one of them. I believe you were looking at those tweets. Does Musk have too much influence? No, I don't think so. I think this is exactly what the American people voted for when they voted for Donald Trump. They voted for competency. They voted for innovative thinking. And certainly in Elon Musk, we have and Vivek Ramaswamy. We have a very bright light who believes in bringing some business principles and innovation and efficiencies to government. Thank goodness for that. We have a $36 trillion national debt.

And so when our phones were ringing off the hook, our constituents were telling us, members of Congress, hey, this CR, this bloated CR with all this extraneous spending that's not paid for. That's not what we voted for. We voted to implement government efficiency measures like those that that Elon Musk is advocating for. Now of course that is very much not what people voted for. This is the way they have to pull this scam now in just about every way. The Musk Vivek Doge thing is the opposite of what they claimed to be offering us. They told us we need government that is smaller, not bigger, and they go and create a new commission. Not only that, the commission is led by two people rather than one or an advisory board or whatever they ran on.

We need to take away power from unelected bureaucrats who just do whatever the hell they want. And then Trump empowers two unelected bureaucrats to do whatever the hell they want. Trump told us that we were going to run the government in a way that was going to be power to the people and letting the individuals have their say in all of this stuff. And in the end, it's what is billionaire Musk want and what is half billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy want. And where this now leaves Republicans like Andy Barr and others is they have to try to figure out how do I couch a hostile takeover of so many aspects of government as something

that is good. And the way they do it is they go, well, Trump won. He gets to pick who, who, who he wants. Of course, in some way, it is true that presidents get to select who they want. But if you go through the established protocols and norms, which is like, haha, David, give me a break. You either have the president nominating individuals subject to Senate confirmation or they are subject to oversight by the chain of command or by the house of representatives or whatever. What Trump has done here is the epitome of everything they claimed to be against Musk and Vivek are unelected.

Musk and Vivek as part of a new advisory board are not placed clearly in the chain of command with oversight. And now you've got people like Andy bar just convincing you that everything is fine, that this is what people voted for. Are they going to go for it? The Trump voters probably, I mean it's, it's all cult of personality and not so much Vivek, but certainly with Elon Musk, there is a lot of cult of personality there to go around. Uh, will it backfire? Of course, because this is just, it's kleptocratic. It's

what's good for what's good for Elon though. What Elon is going to recommend is what's good for Elon Musk, either ideologically or, you know, he is just obsessed with the reaction. He gets to stuff on Twitter. What's going to get them a good reaction on Twitter. That is going to be primarily what the guy is working on and working towards. And it's a very sad state of affairs. However, people are starting to notice and that's what I want to talk about next. A Democratic Congressman Hakeem Jeffries is going to be one of the most important names in Democratic politics, Democratic Party politics over the next two and likely four years. He was asked hilariously yesterday, a question by a reporter. Democratic politics, Democratic Party politics over the next two and likely four years.

He was asked hilariously yesterday a question by a reporter. The question was, who is in charge here? Do you need to negotiate with Trump? Do you need to negotiate with MAGA Mike Johnson or do you need to negotiate with Elon Musk? And Hakeem Jeffries says, I don't know. It's a good question. I mean, what do you make of the role that's been off of that, that, that Musk is playing here? I mean, who is in charge? Do you

view in terms of who you have to negotiate with? That's a great question. I don't have the answers right now. I actually would have preferred Hakeem Jeffries to say, there's a reason that we're all referring to him as president elect Musk. And this would actually serve two purposes. One, it would be a reminder to voters, Hey, the guy that's getting the power, you didn't vote for him. He's, he's an unelected bureaucrat, the likes of which you were supposed to oppose. And number two, I do believe that, you know, Trump doesn't like playing second fiddle to anybody that we know perpetuating this idea, accurate idea that it's Musk who's really in charge can

only help to bolster or accelerate the implosion of the Musk Trump bromance. Like we talked about with Sasha Abramski a couple of days ago. Uh, but uh, Hakeem Jeffries certainly suggesting he doesn't know who's really in charge and who he's supposed to be negotiating with. During the same press briefing, Hakeem Jeffries asked, would you consider saving MAGA Mike Johnson if he faces a MAGA revolt? Here's what Hakeem Jeffries said. Speaker 2 Speaker 3 Thank you, sir. If Mike Johnson puts out something that's amiable to Democrats, he may face a revolt in the house Republican conference on the speakership vote on January 3rd.

Would Democrats consider voting for him in that vote if he does something amiable to you with the CR? No, I think that's the right answer. We just, we've got to play to win guys. Okay. And we can't do any more of this. Well, Democrats are against what Republicans are doing. But if MAGA Mike Johnson goes down a speaker, maybe they put in

someone worse or Democrats do want to keep the government open. So maybe if they can work with Mike, we have not given them the rope to hang themselves for too long. No more saving them. None of this stuff. They control everything. Now I know what your fear is. Many of you are rightfully afraid that Democrats won't be able to clearly explain, Hey, all this crazy stuff that's happening. It's because of Republicans. They control everything. It's not our fault. And I'm with you. Why am I with you? Because Democrats have been terrible at explaining whose fault stuff is. But the solution is not to help Republicans do stuff. It's to get better at communicating that they control everything. And this is all their fault. So I hope that they stick to what Hakeem Jeffries is saying. Pretty decisive,

if nothing else. And don't bail these people out. Let them destroy themselves, but be ready to explain that they did it. All right. Finally, asked a question or making a statement about how this entire agenda, this entire way of governance with Elon and all of this insanity, it's terrible for the American people. It's just, it does nothing for the average person. House Democrats, House Republicans, Senate Democrats, and Senate Republicans reached a bipartisan agreement to fund the government, prevent a shutdown shutdown and meet the needs of the American people. We reached a bipartisan agreement that will help farmers, families, the future of working class Americans, veterans, and the men and women in uniform all across the nation and the world. That bipartisan agreement has now been detonated because House Republicans have been ordered ordered to shut down the government and hurt the very working class Americans that many of them pretend to want to help.

This is a tired old playbook. OK, when Republicans put together a bill to get most of what they wanted on border security, what they genuinely claim to want, Trump said, kill it because Trump wants to continue running on. They haven't done anything about the border. I'm going to do something about the border when I come to power. And so Trump had it killed. Wasn't about what was best for Americans or whoever. It was just about what's best politically for Trump. And once again, president elect Elon Musk is now saying no bills, nothing should be done. Who cares about people whose checks may be slow or whose jobs may be furloughed or whatever

as a result of the government shutting down. We just want the political win as we see it. And for now, Elon's vice president elect Donald Trump, I guess is what he is, is mostly going along with it. He trusts Elon's instinct instincts and he likes it. Will this last for the next four years? Dear God, I hope not. All right. Here's a quick moment of Zen. This is not super substantive, but we need a little something to wrap up the week. Donald Trump resurfaced at Mar-a-Lago with a mullet looking not exactly vibrant and ready

to be president of the United States for the next four years. I just want I just want you to take a look at this video and ask yourself the question, does this guy look fit to lead in arguably the most demanding job in the country, if not the world? or does he look like maybe he should be spending more time on the golf course? Take a look. Everybody having a good time. Good time. All right. So a, a mullet laden Donald Trump, we are to believe is going to make the country healthy

again, is going to make the country prosperous again with economic policy. He doesn't understand is just going to fix everything before we know it. This guy doesn't look like he could lead anything. And yet we are going to have to deal with it for four years. We have a big, big show for you today. We're going to take a super quick break. And we might actually record this one because this one seems to be a seems to be a, seems to be a good, as good a show as we've done. Let me put it that way. Ever walk into a store and have absolutely no idea what wine to get.

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And the primary means through which we are supported that way, uh, is through the membership program. You can read about it and sign up at join pacman.com. You can use the coupon code, not again to get a discount. And you still get 100% of the membership experience at 50% of the cost with the coupon code. Not again at join pacman.com. All right, here we are getting ready to wrap up the year. It's December, 2024. We've counted the votes. The dust has settled. Trump voters are finally going to get precisely what they voted for. And I would argue what they deserve.

How do we know this? Well, because we've now had, what is it? Six weeks essentially of Donald Trump telling us who he's going to hire and what he's going to do. We warned them. They didn't listen. It's all laid out in glorious detail and it is very, very ugly. You may recall Donald Trump campaigning on, I will lower your grocery prices, talking a big game during the campaign, elect me and the prices will drop. And then a few weeks after winning, he goes, it's actually really hard to lower the grocery prices. Meanwhile, the people who believed the nonsense are going to end up paying more for groceries. When Donald Trump is president of the United States, again, we've got project 2025 Trump's authoritarian cheat sheet of sorts during the

campaign project. What, huh? Never heard of it. Don't know anything about it. Now it's, there's some good conservative stuff in there. Some really good stuff in there, Trump says. And of course the people that he's selecting to represent him, uh, intimately tied to project 2025 Trump voters. You signed up for this. You said, give me another four years and now you're going to get it whether you understood it or not. So there is a pattern. The guy loves to promise the world and then reverse himself the second that he's sworn in. He said to workers, no outsourcing of jobs. We're going to bring them back supply change by which he meant supply chains. But he doesn't really have any plan to make that happen. In fact, he's going to do the opposite. He promised that he would lower the tax

burden for average families. The plan he's sort of floating does not do that. It is handouts for his rich buddies. He said he would replace the Affordable Care Act with something better. He said it in 2015, 2016. He said it in 2020. We were two weeks away from the plan in August of 2020. He still has no plan, just a concept of a plan. And if at any point he develops a plan, it will obviously be just as bad as what Republicans came up with in 2017, which fortunately failed. Trump voters didn't just vote against their own

interests. They practically drop kicked themselves in the face. And the truth is that we're talking about policy here as if it matters. What I mean by that is they didn't pick Trump for his policies. Most of them can't even tell you what the policies are. They picked him because he promised to stick it to the people that they hate. The immigrants are going to be punished. They were told the city dwellers, the political opponents. It didn't matter. It was all about payback and revenge. But what happens when you elect a guy who treats the entire country like a punching bag is you also end up getting punched. The rural roads, which will affect disproportionately, uh, conservative voters will crumble.

The schools are going to lose funding. Prices are going to go up. Local hospitals will disappear or be barely functional. Wages will stay flat while costs will continue to go up and it's going to hit everybody. Now, what have we tried? We tried reasoning with these voters for years. Hey, here's a better way to organize healthcare. Here's a workable economic proposal. The actual policies that help people, they don't seem to want it. They prefer the rage bait politics over reason. So now they are going

to be stuck with the consequences of their choices. The real question is, and I thought about this a bunch over the last couple of days, does any of it matter in the end? Will maybe losing their healthcare, paying more for groceries, watching their community fall apart. Will any of it flip a switch in their heads or are they so deep in their denial and cognitive dissonance that they'll blame anyone but the guy that they put in charge? This is not about gloating or I told you so. This is about facing facts. Trump has already reversed so much of what he campaigned on just in the last couple of weeks and so Trump voters are going to get what they asked for, which is pure, uncut

Trump in chaos and cruelty. As I've been saying, the unknown is will the voters learn from it because it, there's two parts. will the voters learn from it? Because there's two parts. Will the voters learn from it? Will we effectively communicate it with a coherent strategy going into the midterms? If we do and they learn their lesson and we communicate that, then 2026 could be very bad for MAGA and very good for whatever semblance of the left will be will be remaining at that point in time. If we don't. All of the disaster will happen, but we're going to be right back here in a couple of

years shaking our heads and going, how did they build their margin in the House? How did they build their margin in the Senate? What the hell is going on here? That's the question mark that remains. A lot of what we talked about at the White House earlier this week was about how to manage these next two years. I can't tell you I'm optimistic that some kind of real coherent strategy is going to come together. I'm not telling you that I don't believe one will. I'm just saying it hasn't yet. And it's not exactly clear how that's going to happen, but they're going to get what they voted for. Who will they blame? That's a much tougher question to answer. private Internet access. A VPN hides your IP address, allows you to make it look like your device is anywhere in the world. So this lets you stream content on Netflix and Hulu and HBO Max,

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It brings me true joy to be able to tell you today that people continue to leave Elon Musk's X. That's the platform formerly known as Twitter. They're still calling it X, if you can believe that. And they're trying out new alternatives. And particularly in this environment where X is going to be a major node of miss and disinformation during the Trump, forthcoming Trump term, as the future of TikTok is sort of uncertain. It really is a time when some kind of new platform is necessary. And I'm glad that so far the big winner is blue sky, which has now surpassed 25 million users. We've been seeing this drift for months now. Uh, we know that one of the critical

sort of determinants of the degree to which the Trump administration is going to be able to circulate miss and disinformation is going to be the size of the user base on troth central and on X, which have become major nodes of the dissemination of that stuff. Now remember that misinformation is stuff that's just wrong. Disinformation is deliberately wrong in the sense that it intends to mislead or deceive or get people to believe something that isn't true. The miss and disinformation depends on an echo chamber signal boosting it. We've talked before about how Fox News's power is not necessarily in the raw audience

size, you know, a couple million people watching any one show in a country of 340 million, that doesn't seem that significant. And in a sense it's not, but there is an agenda setting power and Twitter, particularly when it was Twitter, Twitter, and to some degree as X has some agenda setting power where when Republican politicians and MAGA acolytes make news on the platform, it's still big enough that it starts to enter corporate media reporting and sort of like enter the water cooler sort of discussion at the weaker that X becomes and the weaker that truth social becomes, the more difficult it's going to be to use those platforms to spread the disinformation. So the algorithmic meddling, the bizarre moderation and the sort of right wing takeover of the algorithmic for you

page on X continue to push people away. Uh, the guardian and tech crunch show that the Exodus is relatively steady. Um, blue sky surged not long ago with millions of new users who were basically just done with X's sudden shift and the extremist leaning feeds. I'm certainly one of them and X is being left behind as basically a more successful vet version of truth, social and not much else. All the top people who I would go to see their commentary on X, they're now on blue sky. This is called the network effect. As the people I follow

shift from X to blue sky, I do the same since the utility of X to me diminishes and the experience on blue sky is so much better. Now I want to explain a little bit about the underpinnings of this. The user experience on X, at least for a lot of us, has gone from slightly chaotic to completely unbearable. The for you feed is forcibly promoted right wing influencers, sensationalists, conspiracy theorists and clickbait ridden hot takes. That's all that you really find in their legitimate conversations to the extent that they're still happening on X. And I don't really know that they are. They're getting buried under an avalanche of harassment and trolling behavior that enforcement isn't addressing.

I occasionally I will report an anti-Semitic threat on X, sort of like when someone says, I'll kill you, Jew fag or something like that. The sort of thing I get on X sort of like, uh, when someone says, I'll kill you Jew fag or something like that. The sort of thing I get on X all the time and I'll report it. And sometimes not even 15 minutes later, I'll get a message saying, Hey, we, uh, investigated the message you reported. We found it didn't violate our terms and conditions. If that doesn't, I don't know what does. So there's that aspect of it. You're being force fed content you never asked for. If that doesn't, I don't know what does. So there's that aspect of it. You're being force fed content you never asked for. And that's impossible to ignore because no matter how much you scroll, you get promoted and Alex Jones Jones video or Elon's tweets or Tucker Carlson's latest

video. I've moved a lot of my day to day social engagement to blue sky. I still have my ex account. It's not like I wiped it, but my posting is minimal. One of the reasons I'm keeping it open. Some people have written and said, David, why don't you just close the account? My tweets over the last however many years I've been on there, we have them and other sites have them embedded in so many different places like raw story will cover that. I tweeted something. If I delete my account, it breaks the article.

It doesn't seem to really be any upside, but hilariously over the last few months, my Twitter following is down 6,000 and my blue sky following is up 220,000. So I think for folks like us who consume this type of media with our political sensibilities, the blue sky experience is almost nostalgic. No ads for now, no algorithmic brain hacking feeds. I open the app and I get a simple chronological timeline of the people I follow. If I want to see new stuff, the discover tab is clearly marked and I'm actually finding stuff tailored to me rather than just the top 50 right wing nuts on Twitter, which is what gets forced on you with the X for you page.

And one of the things that I think is working well on blue sky is the moderation. When an extremist troll showed up a while back, think along the lines of, you know, Andrew Taint's fleeting experiment. Whoops. I'm not mispronouncing names anymore. That's Andrew Tate. He wasn't shielded. He wasn't coddled. The platform acted swiftly because the content violated terms and conditions. And so the message is clear, which is personal attacks, targeted harassment, just not going to be tolerated. Of course, conservatives, liberals, everyone in between is welcome there. But the endless bile that goes unaddressed on X isn't happening. So blue sky has now surpassed 25 million users and it keeps growing. Meanwhile, Twitter has been

and is projected to keep losing users throughout 2025. Uh, why is this so important? Well, there's, there's a lot of different reasons. I told you one upfront, which is the ability to spread misinformation depends on the size of the platform. If X shrinks the ability to use it to spread disinformation declines. Number two, especially with the TikTok ban on the table, TikTok, one of the platforms where the progressive message is actually getting out to a degree that's roughly on par with the right wing message. It's important to have platforms that are functional and working at least to a degree. And the reality is that threads really didn't end up being what it was chalked up to be. Part of it is because threads owned by meta, same company that owns Facebook, has proactively decided we're not really going to promote political content.

And that immediately kneecaps its ability to be a platform, not not, you know, we're not asking for it to be a biased left wing platform. We're just saying don't deprioritize the content. So that's all good. You can follow me on blue sky, davidpackman.com slash blue sky. And you know what, if it ends up failing, if it ends up changing its approach, uh, I will let you know. And, uh, you, you will certainly hear it from me. All right. I, uh, I want to talk about the meaning of words a little bit. I hope that this is instructive and that there's some utility here from a media literacy standpoint. I posted a couple of pictures from the white house earlier this week.

I went to the holiday party and we had a meeting with Joe Biden about the importance of online influencers and all of this other stuff. And there were people who reacted like I posted a picture with the author Ryan Holiday, for example. And I saw in the comments, some people said, David, how can you be an independent journalist if you're at the White House? Or I would see comments like you say you are unbiased, but you're at the Biden White House. So I think it is critically important to talk about what these terms mean. And this. So I think it is critically important to talk about what these terms mean. And this is a bigger issue of media literacy. We talk about people who don't know how to distinguish between opinion and fact journalism and all of this sort of thing. So I

want to talk about bias, neutrality, objectivity, and independence. This is an independent media show. No matter my bias, preferences, political leaning, neutrality or objectivity, we are independent in the sense that we are not part of a corporate corporate media ecosystem. There's no editors. There's no producers or executives that direct me. I don't work for anyone other than working kind of for all of you collectively, whether I go to the white house or Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster or British parliament or four seasons landscaping, this is an independent program separate from any media conglomerate. That's what that means. Now, separately from, from that, I am not a journalist and I am not a reporter. I'm a commentator.

There's a really important media literacy distinction there that should be considered. I don't pretend to be a just the facts guy. I'm giving opinion. I have a bias no matter where I go. I have a bias and I am on the political left. Independence aside, independence being a media structure, people have bias. I also am not neutral and I don't pretend to be. Neutrality would be that you pretend that you are indifferent between outcomes or views or parties or election results. When I say, Hey, Trump won and Harris lost. I'm not pretending to be indifferent or neutral. I wanted Trump to

lose. He won. And I make that clear. And that gets me to my goal, which is to be objective. Bias, objectivity and neutrality are three different things. Our biases can clock cloud our objectivity. When I talk about, for example, the Tik TOK ban, as I just did, and I hear, Oh, Trump might save Tik TOK. I don't know. We'll see. I try to say to myself, do I think Tik TOK should, should remain legal in the U S if so, I shouldn't allow the fact that I generally don't believe Trump is a good president to cloud the fact that if he does save TikTok, that is an outcome that I would agree with. If I objectively think that that's good, it should be good.

Even if the guy doing it is mostly a doofus. So I try to be objective. Now, no one can eliminate all bias. No one can always be objective, but talking about and knowing our biases and our stances helps. So if you are under the misapprehension that this show is something that it is not, I do think it's important to the to to to review this. I've talked about getting emails in the past that say, David, I love your show. You're so much less biased than Fox News. I don't know if I'm more or less biased than Fox News. I'm certainly biased in the sense that this is a partisan opinion show. What I do think is different than Fox News,

other than the political political orientation, is that Fox News has many hours per day during which they masquerade as news reporting. And a lot of the way they do this is because, you know, you see live up in the corner and along the bottom, there's a chyron that describes what sounds like news. And it's packaged as if it were news reporting when in reality it is the injection of a partisan right-wing opinion. I just straight up tell you, this is an opinion show. I am on the left and that is going to be my bias. I will do my best to be objective. I will do my best to be honest about how we are funded. And I am honest and there's no big media conglomerate at play.

So understanding this stuff is of critical importance, especially when there are so many media outlets that don't explain to you, Hey, even though we're packaging half the day as if it's news, it's really just opinion disguised as news. You are the one who has to figure that out and hopefully these are some of the tools that will help you to do that. The best gifts should really feel like they were picked out just for you, which is why I love aura digital picture frames during the holidays because you can give it to mom or grandpa. You can give them the same gift, but personalize it with their favorite pictures.

I've given these to so many family members now. Sometimes I'll preload it with pictures of my daughter or sometimes I'll preload it with different things. Depends who I'm giving it to. It is a really great gift instead of, you know, cuff links. Okay, fine. Socks. This is really great.

Uh, the New York times called aura the best digital photo frame. Very easy to set up and connect. You add the photos, you add the videos, connects to your photo library on your phone. You upload the ones you want. And if you're giving it as a gift, you can personalize the frame with preloaded photos. So it's ready when they hook it up. Save on the perfect gift by visiting or a frames dot com to get thirty five dollars off or as best selling Carver Matt frames by using the promo code Pacman at checkout. That's a you are a frames dot com and use code Pacman for thirty five dollars off. 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 so 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 be lurking in the background. Ground news is daily briefings are a great way to stay informed without feeling overwhelmed. It gives a quick breakdown of the day's most critical stories from every angle. Go to ground.news.com for 50% off their unlimited access vantage plan. It's their biggest sale of the year. And the link is in the description. All right, let's get into Friday feedback for

the week. Remember, you can email info at David Pakman dot com. We'll sometimes select tick tock replies or YouTube comments or messages from Facebook or Blue Sky or wherever. And remember that you can follow me on Blue Sky now at David Pakman dot com slash Blue Sky. Here's a funny one from user S.T.A T a one L I guess to those who listen regularly, what are your favorite running jokes on the show? Uh, some of the obvious ones I can think of pillow in reference to Mike Lindell war against the machines tool. See Gabbard from the standpoint of very strongly, bigly powerful. They came to me and said, sir, a gold one for me is Pedro from Columbia. When David still took calls from viewers,

others would be appreciated. So I take no issue with any of these, except I did make a declaration on the Tuesday show that I am moving away from the deliberate mispronunciations of people's names. Pillow is a nickname. So that is going to continue. Fear not. But Tulsi Gabbard, I'm retiring. I've been advised, especially since, you know, there's Gabbard staffers who watch the show and we want to be taken more seriously, I guess. I don't know that I need to be taken that much more seriously, but I have decided no more Tulsi Gabbard, no more Jimmy Dore, no more Laura Ingraham. We're just going to really focus on the substantive critiques. But otherwise, this is a great list.

And I welcome people who want to submit theirs as well. All right. Paula Wheatley said about my suggestion that Donald Trump will generate a crisis as a pretext to invoke emergency powers of different kinds. Paula says, I think the plan will be for this crisis to happen in the last year of his term. He will cite the FDR presidency to stay in power. There will be no election in 28 due to said crisis power for the rest of his life. As simple as that, Paula with peace and love. I don't think so.

I think that it's very clear that this second Trump term is going to heavily be based around changing institutions of power for MAGA to persist after Trump. But I truly do not think that Trump is going to make any attempt to stay in power. Part of the reason I don't think he will is I've been told from people who are sort of, I want to be really vague, but people who would know that there's an idea lurking here of JD Vance for president in 2028 with Donald Trump jr running as his VP, which would be very, very scary. But especially if that's sort of the plan, uh, then there, it doesn't serve the plan for Donald Trump to, uh, even attempt to do that. And I really don't think that he is going to.

Okay. Off of YouTube. Here's a comment. As far as I'm concerned, David, you owe an apology to every person in the military that defended the freedoms of this country because you are trying to tear them down. Maybe you look them in the eye and spew your rubbish and your miserable rhetoric that divides this country. I don't know what on earth this person is talking about. I just have no idea. This is not a show where we attack members of the military. This is not a show where, I mean, listen, I've said it's great that we have a volunteer

military as opposed to one in which you are conscripted. And it's great that there are enough people willing to join that. I never even had the potential threat or risk of maybe having to. That's a great, great thing. I appreciate that. It's not my thing. It's not my thing, but it's available for other people. So this is not a show where we attack members of the military.

In fact, I would say the opposite. For me, the fact that there are people who say, I don't have to do this, but I'm going to join the military so that I don't have to. I think that that is such a great thing that I want to respect and support members of the military by never sending them into harm's way as political pawns or for political retribution, arguably the way George W. Bush did with the second Iraq war to avenge George H.W. Bush's inability to really, in a durable way, win and defeat Saddam Hussein. I think that was terrible because I don't think it shows respect to the troops. So you might have this show confused with a different one.

I don't know what show, but don't know what the hell you are talking about. Magnum says, David, you should be in jail just for being woke, not to mention the clothing you wear. Listen, maybe the clothing I wear is criminal. I admit that's possible, but this is not one of those woke shows. In fact, in my forthcoming book, the echo machine, it's not just the critique of the right. I talk in the book about the excesses of the left because I think that they are just important to describe. If you are someone who is on the left and you believe the right has a thousand problems and the left has none, you might not be thinking clearly any major big political movement is going to have its shortcomings. And I've talked about

the weaponization of identity politics by some on the left as something that I oppose. Identity important informs our experience and our views, of course, but the weaponization of identity politics, something I have a problem with. So I've talked about it. Uh, the, every perspective is equally valid stuff that exists infringes on the left. I've said, I don't think it's useful. I don't think it's evidence-based. Um, but you know, criticize me for real stuff. This, this is not, you know, this is not a, a, a wokester show in any way. In fact, if anything, I get criticized because I'm not woke enough when it comes to some of these issues. Okay. Doug says I had lunch in a Denny's restaurant a few days ago, overheard three women, obviously of retirement age, but certainly not wealthy discussing why

they voted for Trump. One of them said, because I wanted to be entertained. How do you fix that level of stupid? Well, that's an extraordinarily privileged perspective. Let me tell you what I mean by that. If you are someone who, if Trump gets his way and either cuts the child tax credit or cuts a social safety net program, if you were someone whose livelihood is going to be impacted, if Trump is president, you don't have the luxury of voting for the candidate that's more entertaining. If you are someone who is worried, will I be able to get the medical care that I need or that I might choose if Trump is president? You don't have the luxury of voting for whatever sounds entertaining. So it is a level of stupid.

Yes, absolutely. But it's also a level of sort of disregard for the fact that for a lot of people, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, this is not entertainment. This is not about fun and games, but this is about policy. And in some cases it's life and death. So yep, it's stupid, but it's also extraordinarily privileged. We did a poll on the David Pakman show, YouTube channel asking what's the biggest problem with Trump's tariffs.

Almost 80,000 of you voted 66% a majority said the biggest problem with Trump's tariffs is that prices will skyrocket for everyday Americans. And that's true. 17% of you said the biggest problem with the tariffs is corporations will exploit the chaos for profit. And that will probably happen as well. 10% of you said that it's just, excuse me, it's just Trump's ego driven trade war 2.0.

And 7% of you said Trump's tariffs won't actually create us manufacturing jobs. You know, Trump's tariffs could theoretically create manufacturing jobs, but they would be after Trump's gone. Um, and it would be after everyday Americans pay a lot more. So yeah, the, the audience basically got it right. Many of Trump's policies will increase prices for the average American. Number one, the mass deportations will increase prices for the average American.

Number one, the mass deportations will increase prices for everyday Americans. The tariffs will increase prices for everyday Americans. The tax plan, if he gets it through, probably increases prices for everyday Americans. That's the theme. He ran on all prices will come down, but with policies that will actually push prices up. All right. This is kind of funny. Last week or the week before I talked about how the Lieutenant Governor of Texas wants to ban all THC. And I must've at some point talked about a one gram edible. Of course I meant one milligram and reggae for president wrote on the subreddit one gram THC edibles.

That's crazy. David mentioned on today's show that some states break down the total THC per package and per piece. He used grams, which is insane. THC edibles are sold in milligram amounts, usually 10 milligram pieces. I guess he doesn't consume edibles. Taking a gram of oral THC would be a complete disaster. Yes. This shows you how much I know about this stuff.

My example was supposed to be the package has 20 milligrams. Each piece has one milligram. And instead I said something like each piece has a gram of THC. I'm not advising anyone in general on THC consumption, but I am very much advising you against consuming a gram. That would be a very, very, very crazy idea. All right. Finally, Lisa says, David, you have no idea how tariffs work. They will benefit us. I wish I could talk to Lisa on the show because I would love for her to explain to me, which she doesn't do in this message, by the way, I would love for Lisa to explain to me exactly how tariffs work. Maybe I don't know it's possible, right? I'm open-minded. Maybe everything I've learned about tariffs over the last 20 years is wrong. I want Lisa to explain to me why my under interpretation of tariffs is wrong and exactly,

not vaguely, exactly how they will benefit us. I want to know that Lisa, please info at David Packman.com. Get your messages in. Remember to pre-order the book at DavidPakman.com slash book. I don't know if the freebies will continue after the new year. I'm just not sure. Hopefully they will, but they may not need to talk to my publisher. You can get all the free stuff currently. If you pre-order the book at DavidPakman.com slash book and submit your pre-order receipt to davidpakman.com slash free book stuff. Stay tuned for the bonus show. If you are a member, you can sign up at joinpakman.com and otherwise I will see you Monday.