The David Pakman Show - 3/9/23: GOP hearings continue backfiring as Fox News in shambles

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

-- On the Show: -- Alana Newhouse, Editor-in-Chief of Tablet Magazine, joins David to discuss her writing on "brokenism," the idea that parts of American society are breaking down -- A Senate hearing explodes as Teamsters President Sean O'Brien is bullied by Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin, and responds by calling Mullin a "greedy CEO" -- Republicans, now in control of the House of Representatives, launch an investigation into the January 6 investigation carried out by House Democrats during the last Congress -- Fox News propagandist refers to his guest Russell Brand as a "public intellectual," and then proceeds to watch him rant unintelligibly for five consecutive minutes -- 36-year-old Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert is about to be a grandmother, and makes strange declarations about how great teen pregnancy is -- Donald Trump promises flying cars, among other things that will not happen, in his latest plan for his 2024 run -- Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson is now openly sucking up to Donald Trump on air after his leaked texts reveal that he hates Trump "passionately" -- Failed Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake starts doing Donald Trump's 2024 dirty work by going after Ron DeSantis -- Voicemail caller asks whether Fox News viewers will even hear about the latest text message scandal involving numerous Fox hosts -- On the Bonus Show: Arnold Schwarzenegger warns those who are on a "path of hate," Americans now favor legal cannabis over legal tobacco, Sarah Huckabee Sanders signs bill rolling back child labor protections, much more... ⚠️ Use Ground News for FREE, or sign up for unlimited access: https://ground.news/pakman 🍷 Crunchy Red Fruit: Code PAKMAN saves you $20 at https://crunchyredfruit.com ⚠️ Use code PAKMAN for a free supply of BlueChew at https://go.bluechew.com/david-pakman 💻 Stay protected! Try Aura FREE for 2 weeks: https://aura.com/pakman 🥄 Use code PAKMAN for $5 off Magic Spoon at https://magicspoon.com/pakman -- Become a Supporter: http://www.davidpakman.com/membership -- Subscribe on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/thedavidpakmanshow -- Subscribe to Pakman Live: https://www.youtube.com/pakmanlive -- Subscribe to Pakman Finance: https://www.youtube.com/pakmanfinance -- Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/davidpakmanshow -- Like us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/davidpakmanshow -- Leave us a message at The David Pakman Show Voicemail Line (219)-2DAVIDP

Speaker 1 I want to start today with an explosive confrontation that took place during another one of these Republican Senate hearings. This particular confrontation involved unhinged Republican Senator Mark Wayne Mullen, as well or with or alongside or up against, I guess you would say, Teamsters President Sean O'Brien. Teamsters, of course, a union. Republicans tend not to like unions. Republicans love to frame unions as sort of like mob entities and the guys or gals who run unions as as mob bosses. And we've seen that narrative for a while. The big continuing story since Republicans have taken over control of the House is the humiliating

face planting and self-destructive nature of these hearings, the hearings that Republicans have organized. And this is happening in the House and the Senate on big and crossover hearings as well on big tech, on weaponization of the justice system or whatever the case may be. And even when it is not Republicans who organized the hearing, they still find new ways to humiliate themselves. So let's take a look at this video. Bernie Sanders was sort of trying to officiate this thing. And it is the latest brazen attempt by Republicans to attack labor, which is what they love to do. You talk about CEOs that are making all this money. And what do you make, Mr. O'Brien? Well, I'm glad you asked that question. Yeah, I know what you make, because in 2019,

your salary was what is this? One hundred ninety three thousand. I'm sure you got some pay raises since then. Yeah, when I was an average- So basically like the same salary as Mark Wayne Mullen gets as a senator. That's an interesting thing. Little higher. UPS driver, the feeder driver makes 35,000 a year. That's inaccurate. And what do you bring to that? That's inaccurate. Hold on a second. That's inaccurate. State facts. No, I've got it right here. State facts. That's inaccurate. The average UPS feeder driver makes 35,000. If you don't know your facts, then maybe you should-

I know them because I negotiate the. So I say I say one thing to you. What do you bring for that salary? What do I bring? Yeah. What do you what do you what job have you committed or have you have you started? What job have you created? One job other than sucking a paycheck out of some other by somebody else that you want

to say that you're trying to provide because you're forced to remember the narrative here is unions are oppressive. The people who run them take money in exchange for nothing other than forcing the workers to pay union dues. And we would all be better off if there were no unions and the workers had a direct relationship with the companies. Now, of course, we know that that's not the case. And we know that as a result of the unions and being able to collectively bargain in this way, the workers actually end up earning more on average, all else being equal. But that's not the story that Republicans like to tell about unions. And then pay dues. No, we don't force you. That's the you're out of line.

And don't tell me I'm out of line. Don't tell me I'm out of line. You are out of line. Don't tell me I'm out of line. Don't tell me. You framed the statement with a huff guy. You're going to tell me to shut my mouth? Yes, I did. Hold it. I'm not afraid of physical abuse. Senator, hold it. Don't sit there and tell me I'm out of line.

Senator, you made a statement. You asked the question. I didn't ask the question. You did. I answered the question. You asked the question i didn't ask a question you did it i answered the question you asked the question about how many men let him and it was a rhetorical well you may think it's rhetorical it sounded to me like a question let him answer the question i'm not yielding my time to him so if you're gonna let me keep my time that's fine you'll have your time let him you ask a question he has a right to answer that. As far as my salary goes, my salary, if you follow me around, I walk. I actually look at this building. I bet you I work more hours than you do.

That's impossible. But no, that is. That's true. Sir, you don't know what artwork. Second, I'll do it in a minute. That's not hold greedy CEOs like yourself accountable. You call me a greedy CEO. Oh, yeah, you are. You want to attack my salary. I'll attack you. What do I make? What did you make when you owned your company? I made my company. I kept my salary down at about fifty thousand a year because I'm now this. We all know this game. This is so just I kept my salary down. And of course, as CEO Mark Wayne Mullen made tens of millions of dollars towards his net worth from non salary

compensation. Typical move. Maybe he thinks nobody else knows that, but we know that game to every penny into it. OK. All right. You mean you had money? Oh, I didn't. Oh, oh, hold on a second.

OK, so there's a couple of different things here that I think are important to mention. One of those things is the general idea that Republicans want to put out there. And I don't even want to say that Republicans believe they may not believe it. As we know, a lot of this stuff is just performance. The idea that they put out there is that rather than a tool or an infrastructure that allows workers to organize and to pool their negotiating strength in order to obtain better salary and benefits from a situation in which an individual worker has disproportionately little power. Right. That's essentially what the union allows workers to do in order to get higher salary and better benefits. The union they frame as almost like a leech that just collect dues forcibly, which, by the way, often is not the case that you're forced into the union and to pay dues.

In fact, sometimes it's the opposite, where even if you refuse to pay the dues, the union still represents you. But that's a detail and depends on the union. And it takes away value. The idea is, oh, the workers come out with less because not only do they end up having to pay the dues, they don't even get a higher salary or better benefits. We know that that's not the case. I mean, it's been studied endlessly and we know it's not the case. So that's number one. And then number two, with all of these Republicans, some personal hypocrisy is not far behind and it is not lost on me. and I hope it's not lost on you. The irony or the absurdity of Mark Wayne Mullen calling the Teamsters president with a low six

figure salary, the greedy CEO, when the entire point of the Teamsters is to negotiate better pay and benefits for for tons of different workers. When Mark Wayne Mullen's net worth and his assets exploded by tens of millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars over the last few years. So they are pathetic. Yes, they are hypocrites. Yes. But they also have to lie about unions. Now, I am not an unreasonable person when it comes to unions. I recognize that there are lots of small businesses where a union doesn't really make sense. And I am not someone who goes around and says every business should be unionized. That's just not my view. I've not come to believe that that's the best thing. But when you're talking about these organizations with tons of workers, electricians, electricians,

union trade unions for particular companies, UPS, etc. The dynamics of those companies and the sheer scale of those companies are such that there has to be some mechanism for all of these employees who have shared interests to be able to pool their power. Because remember, when there are 30,000, 60,000 employees or whatever the case may be, one person, if forced to negotiate individually, has relatively little power because they can just be excluded or pushed to the side or their influence minimized. When the negotiation is happening collectively, that is a very different situation. And it puts large companies in the position

of having to really come to the table, not necessarily in good faith, but at least willing to negotiate in a real way. So very interesting exchange and shows the continued hostility towards labor from the modern Republican Party. Republicans are now going to investigate the January 6th investigation. What? Yeah, we knew they would do it. The last Congress saw the House of Representatives January 6th committee. That was a committee which investigated the Trump riots. Republicans for a long time have been saying the committee is the problem. The committee has committed wrongdoing. And now, as expected, there is going to be an investigation of the investigation. NBC News reports Republicans launch an investigation into the January 6th committee that examined

the riot. Congressman Barry Loudermilk from Georgia will lead the investigation and was accused by the House's former January 6th panel of giving tours of the Capitol in the days leading up to the riot. So individuals whose connection to the riots is at minimum raising some red flags are going to be doing the investigating into the very committee that looked at some of their own actions. This is an infinite regression to some degree, but it is also maybe one of the most bad faith investigations that Republicans want to take on.

The article goes on to say many House Republicans were vocal critics since the creation of the January 6th committee. Yeah, we know the inquiry seems to make good on lawmaker campaign trail vows to investigate the investigators. Now, understand this will go nowhere. This is going to go absolutely nowhere. I know that I get some of these emails from the right and see some comments on the YouTube channel about, oh, we're going to put we're going to put Adam Schiff in prison for that January six committee. Jamie

Raskin is going to be locked up for the. No, they're not. Nobody's going to be locked up. It was a completely reasonable, well-organized, well, it was actually one of the best investigative endeavors that I've seen the House of Representatives undertake in at least a decade. But they need to virtue signal. They need to show that we are going to do the thing and it'll sort of end with a fizz rather than a bang and nothing will happen. A couple of other notes about this. CNN reports some additional details. House Republicans plot new January 6th probes, despite internal backlash over Kevin McCarthy giving Tucker Carlson footage. So this is the background to Republicans saying we're going to investigate that January 6th committee.

In the background, Republicans are only raising new reasons why they should be the ones investigated. And most recently, it is Kevin McCarthy handing over previously unreleased footage from the January 6th insurrection riot. Call it what you want to Tucker Carlson, to Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson. We now know, of course, that Tucker Carlson turned that around and use the footage to try to claim falsely, by the way, that the entire story we were told about January 6th was wrong. Even many Republicans in responding to Tucker Carlson's bogus narrative that he has played out on national television, I believe it was Monday and Tuesday of this week. Even many Republicans have said Tucker's conclusions, Tucker's narrative based

on the footage that he aired doesn't actually follow from the footage. So this is the latest thing. It will probably end, you know, to people like you and I, we see this stuff and we say, wow, humiliating, endless resources spent the virtue signaling and the mouth flapping and the entire thing. And of course, they come up with nothing. It's like Durham Trump waiting around for months, if not years. Durham Durham's going to expose all the things Democrat. Nothing came of it. Nothing came of it. And that's why these investigations are very loudly announced. And then they end with a fizz because there's really nothing there. If anything, we need a new January 6th committee investigating the alleged and arguable Republican cover up of January 6th that even includes these recent things over the last

few months. What will actually happen as the day to day and what confrontations will there be or what would the hearings be like? We'll just have to wait and see. But I am not a betting man, but I would be willing to bet here. Nothing substantive comes of the investigation into the investigation. If you disagree with me, if you think that the January 6th committee did something wrong or whatever the case may be, let me know in a comment. Let me know in a comment. Let me know in an email. I'd be interested in hearing from you. being reported around the world, it has become a go to resource for me. Right now, I'm looking at a story about residents in Ohio reporting medical symptoms after the train derailment. Ground news shows the headline from The Washington Post owned by Jeff Bezos says East Palestine residents

should look to Agent Orange victims. The headline from The Epoch Times, a radical right wing outlet, says federal officials enter 500 East Palestine homes after toxic train crash. I also like that you can sort things by factuality, location and bias. Check out ground news for free at ground dot news slash Pacman. If you find ground news as useful as I do, subscribe for unlimited access. That's ground dot news slash Pacman. The link is in the podcast notes. I like wine, but I know very little about it and I am completely clueless when I go to a wine shop. I just don't know what I'm looking for. I don't know what I'm looking at. I couldn't tell you anything about varietals or if there's hints of persimmon or any of it. And so if you're like me wishing you had a seasoned expert by your side

when you're choosing wine, crunchy red fruit is the answer. Crunchy red fruit delivers choice, handcrafted, small production wines right to your door. Every bottle is handpicked by owner and Thank you so much, David. videos to help you appreciate what you're drinking. Go to crunchy red fruit dot com. Use the code Pacman for twenty dollars off a single purchase. Or if you join their bimonthly wine club, send a message to circle at crunchy red fruit dot com after you sign up and they'll take twenty dollars off your first shipment. That's crunchy red fruit dot com. Use code Pacman for twenty dollars off a single purchase or sign up for their bimonthly club and email circle at crunchy red fruit dot com for twenty dollars off. The info is in the podcast notes. The David Pakman show is a viewer and listener funded program, and the easiest way to support the work that we do every day is to sign up for a membership

at join Pacman dot com. Not only do we do an extra show every day for our members, we provide you with commercial free access in either video or audio format to the daily podcast, as well as that bonus show. And we make it all available to you hours before the shows are publicly launched. We also do members only town hall events and we have a member only soundboard with a lot of the clips that I play globalist internationalist. OK, yeah, you know those. All of that is available when you become a member at join Pacman dot com. And you can finalize our anti celebration of last weekend's

CPAC by using the coupon code CPAC trash. That's all one word, lowercase, uppercase, whatever. But it is all one word CPAC trash to get yourself a neat little discount off of the cost of a membership at join Pacman dot com. I am going to play for you something quite stunning. And this goes to, you know, we've talked before on the program about the pseudo intellectual and anti intellectual movement. And this has come overwhelmingly from the American right wing, although sometimes the left engages in it as well. And one of the things that has been a staple, one of the aspects to this that has been a staple from the right is that thinking too much actually isn't that good. Formal education is little more than liberal indoctrination. And so we shouldn't

even really be praising or seeking out intellectualism. But there's another aspect to this, which is making nonsense people out to be intellectuals that they are not. And I have an example of this that is quite stunning. Tucker Carlson introduced an interview that he did with, I guess, former actor and now YouTuber Russell Brand. Tucker Carlson refers to Russell Blan, Russell Brand as a public intellectual. Now, I know I know that will come as a shock to many of you. But what is stunning is that then Russell Brand proceeds to rant completely unintelligibly about covid for five minutes and Tucker just sits there looking dazed. Take a look at this. There is a lot that I want to talk about from this clip. Let's listen.

So as we told you, we sat down yesterday with Russell Brand, the comedian, actor and now kind of a public intellectual for about an hour and a half on our show, Tucker Carlson. Today, we want to share more of it tonight. In particular, Brian spent a lot of time thinking about and telling us about the COVID lockdowns. Yeah. Russell has thought about it a lot....of them was maybe the clearest explanation we have heard of what we've just lived through. Here it is. Speaker 1 I think COVID provided a lens through which we could scrutinize the machinery of power and how the intentions and agenda of power are able to play out, coalesce and let's call it conspire when a crisis occurs.

Speaker 2 Now, remember, there's two things here that might trick right wingers into thinking that this is deep thought. One is that for the American audience, you know where I'm going. Russell Brand speaks with a British accent, and that actually is quite an effective tool. This this applies both to left and right. I hate to say it into making it sound like someone is actually speaking quite intelligently. The other thing is that he is only feeding back to a lot of these right wingers the things they already believe. Our tendency, a globalist tendency to increase surveillance, a big tech appetite to capture

data and a comparable appetite within government converges. The great American comedian George Carlin used to say there is no need for conspiracy where interests converge. It seems that even at its advent, it was a legitimate crisis, and I certainly wouldn't make any contention around that. It was opportunistically handled in order to enhance regulation and control at a time where regulation and control are increasingly difficult to implement as people are more suspicious of institutional power. So in a

sense, the best way to understand covid, I believe, is to take covid out of it and look at how the institutions ignore covid to understand covid and government behaved around it. Pretend almost like there was no covid and then be like, well, none of this stuff made sense if you remove covid from it. Right. Well, but there was covid. How did they benefit? How did they utilize it? What narratives did they disseminate and which narratives did they control and curtail? Even with the recent text messages from our health minister at that time, Matt Hancock, you can explicitly see it was exploited. Oh, no, we need to scare people.

Is there any way high net worth individuals can get into the country? All these conversations that many people that are cynical about the behavior of the powerful believed were happening were indeed happening. The way that natural immunity was discussed proved to be true, i.e. that natural immunity is effective. They probably understood earlier than they admitted that natural immunity was effective and for reasons that- Note the use of the word probably. What could it be? What could be the reason that a monetizable solution to covid was prioritized over non monetizable? Is there anyone involved

in the situation? Well, one interesting aspect to that would be the dramatically higher death rate of people who got covid rather than unvaccinated versus people who got covid vaccinated. That would be one interesting reason why you would prioritize the vaccination program that has a profit motive. Let's look at the data. And you know, so what? It was just revelatory, like the apocalypse always will. And remember, Tucker Carlson hasn't said a word. We're two minutes in the apocalypse is revelation of all what was always there. Corruption, convergence of interests, alliances. this is not conspiratorial no this is the moot recital of economic interests and the ordinary movements of the powerful if people can uh honor one another and talk to one another in good faith and recognize that anybody is like

this whole debate between like that i've sort of felt a little bit around me even for coming here i feel like it used to just be normal that someone in your family would be a conservative and someone in your family would be liberal and someone in your family would be socialist and someone in your family would be trans and someone in your family would be gay and different races are coming together. This is part of who we are. And if it isn't a part of who we are, it's certainly OK. So this goes on and on and on and on and on. OK, so a couple of different things here. First of all, most of the things that Russell is saying actually just aren't true. And if you really kind of dissect all of this different stuff, you see there's really nothing there. But I want to zoom out and talk about this, this the framing that Tucker Carlson gave of saying that Russell

Brand is now he's a public intellectual. Quite frankly, I think it is what Tucker Carlson said. Now, what do we mean by a public intellectual? Many of us can imagine sort of like the academic intellectual, right? This is someone who and this is this is the caricature. And I understand I'm playing into the caricature. But the idea would be the academic intellectual is someone who if you put a camera in front of them for a TV show, they're not really good at explaining their ideas and they're not concise and they go on and on and they talk about their work and their thoughts in a way that is not relatable to the average person. And they are sometimes seen as as as maybe elite or condescending to the average person. Right. So public intellectual would be it's someone who is well known and an intelligent, you know, learned person from an academic pedigree of sorts, but who is also

contributing their knowledge in the sort of more popular culture, I guess we would say, and is recognized both on the academic side, but also on the non-academic and sort of like media side and by members of society in general. So obviously, by that definition, Russell Brand is not a public intellectual. But the bigger story here for me is I've said before, you know, sometimes Marjorie Taylor Greene will rant somewhere. And I will say to you all. A lot of a lot of the American right wing sees her as a thinking person and Lauren Boebert will rant or, you know, Ted Cruz will make some statement about

a legal precedent during a hearing. And I will say there are a lot of people in the U.S. on the right who see that as what it means to be a thinker. And of course, Russell Brand is very far from really what I would consider to be public intellectuals. Now, public intellectuals today do look and sound a lot different than at times past. So I'll give you some examples of people that I do think are sort of public intellectuals. One that comes to mind, and I was just recently listening to some of his podcasts, and that's why he's on my mind. Cal Newport. Cal Newport is a Ph.D. computer scientist who teaches at Georgetown. He's been on the show before who writes both for academic audiences and for general audiences about the sociocultural

impacts of technology and so many other things. He's written articles that would be really for an academic audience. And he's also written great popular books like Deep Work and A World Without Email and others. That, to me, makes a lot more sense as like a modern public intellectual. And when you when you listen to Cal's podcast, you realize, wow, this is a very different thing than Russell Brand. Cal doesn't have a British accent. I will mention that. Other examples, maybe Jared Diamond, someone who has done a ton of academic work and and really deep fieldwork and also has written books for popular consumption. This one, I'm less sure, but someone like Kazuo Ishiguro, the British Japanese British writer, Salman Rushdie comes to mind. Camille Paglia, even if

you don't like her views, hard to argue that that's not, you know, when we talk about a public intellectual today, that's what we're talking about. Daniel Dennett would be another example. So anyway, it's an interesting thing. I don't know if Tucker is is serious when he says Russell Brand is a public intellectual or not. But it's a very interesting phrase to hear him use, particularly when the right has spent a long time sort of deriding the value of public intellectuals until they found someone they can try to pass off as one in order to try to make some kind of political point. Interesting, interesting use of that term. This is a crazy story. I thought this was fake when I first heard about it. Lauren Boebert is about to be a grandmother. Now, I know I know you're saying, wait, Lauren Boebert, how old is she? Lauren Boebert is 36

years old and she is about to be a grandmother because her teenage son is going to be having a baby next month. And listen, there are a lot of cultural differences between different parts of the country. There's no doubt about that. And it is much less common in parts of the country, more liberal parts of the country to see something like this celebrated. And I'll tell you why in a moment with some statistics. But Lauren Boebert is celebrating it. Lauren Boebert is acting like it's a good thing that she, as a former teen mom, is now going to be a grandmother thanks to her son becoming a teen dad. Let's take a look at this big announcement from Lauren Boebert. This is this is there's a lot here. OK, I'm a mom of four boys.

And I've said many times, Jason and I, we are raising our four boys to be men. OK, before liberals teach them to be women. Okay. But I leaned over and I asked my husband if it was appropriate to announce this here today. So I'm going to tell you all for the first time in a public setting that not only am I a mom of four boys,

but come April, I will be a Gigi to a brand new grandson. Wow. Even this crowd is sort of like, OK, yeah, kind of like a muted reaction, I have to say. And Jason and I are so excited to welcome this new life into our family. Now any of you who have young children who are giving life, there are some questions that pop up. There's some, there are a hell of a lot of questions popping up based on what she's saying. That's for sure.

Fear that arises. Now my son, when I approached him and told him, Tyler, I'm going to be a 36 year old grandmother. He said, well, didn't you make granny a 36 year old granny? Said, yes, I did. Right. He said, well, then it's hereditary. That's pretty interesting, actually. There's actually a lot there. And here's an additional clip, again, where Lauren Boebert, she talks about. She she talks about this like it's a good thing, OK? And she wants to make it a cultural thing. She wants to know how great is it that the culture of life in red states leads to a high teen birth rate?

And, you know, there's something special about rural conservative communities. Yes, there is. They value life. If you look at teen pregnancy rates throughout the nation, well, they're the same in rural and urban areas. However, abortion rates are higher in urban areas and teen mom rates are higher in rural conservative areas because we understand the preciousness of the life that is about to be born. And, you know, wow. So a few different things. Now, I don't want to make this into a cultural critique. There is a cultural critique here to be made without a doubt. OK, but by their own claims, by their own claims, it's not really clear to me that these really are the

pro-life values as exhibited by teens who get pregnant in red states not seeking abortions. I don't think that that's the great thing to celebrate that Lauren Boebert is making it out to be, because the most important thing to look at here is how do the kids of teen parents do in life? And the children of young mothers do notably less well in life. This is not about saying Lauren Boebert's grandkid deserves to do poorly. The grandkid I would consider a victim in this situation. It's that the kid is not being well set up to succeed. When you look at outcomes of all sorts and types, poverty, how likely to graduate high school, all of these different things. You see the ideal outcomes when the

parents or usually what they're looking at is the mother is at least 25 years old. And then from 20 to 25 year old moms, you see less good outcomes. And then when the mom is under 20, you see absolutely the worst outcomes. And the difference is significant. Now, this isn't about saying a 19 year old can't be a good mom. Of course, that's not the case. This isn't about saying if you're 18 and you have a kid, you love the kid any less or whatever. It is not about that. But the younger the mother is, the higher the rate of poverty, the less likely the child is to graduate high school. You get the picture. But then we get not only to the weirdness of celebrating this when we know that

statistically it's actually not a good thing. The hypocrisy here is that the way to prevent this, if you think it's not a good thing now, Lauren Boebert seems to be celebrating it. OK, there is a cultural aspect to this. If you think this isn't a good thing, the way to prevent it is, of course, safe legal access to abortion. We know that. But teaching comprehensive sex education that reduces teen pregnancy, it's been studied widely. Comprehensive sex ed reduces teen pregnancy. Lauren Boebert is against that. Lauren Boebert recently voted against funding that. And so there is that aspect to it as well, which is she is partially to blame. Certainly her movement is to blame for the creation of

the circumstances that got us here in the first place. And by the way, Lauren Boebert also says that children should be forced to wait until they're age 21 to make decisions about just even what their gender expression is going to be. But having a baby at 17 is a great thing and is fine. That's also another one of these stunning hypocrisies. So listen there, when we talk about different different American cultures, this is one aspect that is very, very different. And to what degree some of what she's doing is a rationalization because the cake is baked, for lack of a better term. I don't know. But it is really, really wacky stuff. If you want to see Lauren Boebert deliver this news to this titillated crowd, all of these clips that I played will be on our Instagram, which you can find by searching Instagram

for David Pakman show. One of our sponsors today is Blue Chew, a unique online service delivering the same active ingredients as Viagra and Cialis in a chewable form and at a fraction of the cost. And they're giving my audience an entire month supply for free. So if you think you could benefit from an extra boost of confidence, all you have to do is take a short quiz on their website. A licensed doctor approves your prescription. The medication comes straight to your home within days in a discreet package. No driving around to the doctor's office or the pharmacy. No waiting around. No awkward conversations with your doctor. All of Blue Chew's tablets are made in the USA. The entire process is just a

few clicks. Go to Bluetooth dot com. The link is in the podcast notes and they'll give you an entire month's supply for free when you use promo code Pacman. That's P.A.K. M.A.N. All you do is pay five dollars for shipping. Imagine for a second that you try logging into your email account only to find that your password was changed an hour ago and then you get notifications of activity from your bank and then your credit cards. That is what identity theft is like. And it's a horrible feeling. And we dealt with it at the show not that long ago. But now I have an app called Aura, which gives me much more peace of mind. Our sponsor Aura is the all in one solution for keeping your online account safe because Aura will scan the dark web for your personal info,

password, social security number, and you get fast alerts when they find something. You also get fast alerts about credit inquiries. Aura protects all of your devices from malware. Thank you so much off of devices. Go to aura.com slash Pacman to try it free for seven days. Your login credentials might already be floating around out there and aura will tell you instantly for free. That's a u r a dot com slash Pacman to try aura for free. The link is in the podcast notes. Today, we're going to be speaking with Alana Newhouse, who's the founder and editor in chief of Tablet magazine. We're going to be talking

about a term brokenism, which I think is super interesting. And it sort of puts a different perspective on what, you know, maybe Alana in our program, we often see as like a left right political divide only. And that's the analysis we make. And we sort of don't go any further. You talk about brokenism and status quo ism. Talk a little bit about how you first thought of this framework and what you mean by it. Sure. So two years ago, I wrote a piece called Everything is Broken. In it, I tried to articulate what felt to me like an experience that not only I was having, but a lot of my readers were having, a lot of people who I knew were having, which is the sense that a lot of the institutions in American life and society that we have to interact with, whether that's our kids' schools or health insurance companies or the IRS felt like they were not functioning properly.

They felt broken. In the wake of that piece, I got a tremendous response to it. It was really incredibly gratifying. And one of the greatest parts of it was that I ended up getting emails from a bunch of people who became regular correspondents with me. And one of them became a friend, and his name is Ryan. And I talk about this in the beginning of the follow-up essay on brokenism, where at one moment, Ryan looked at me and said, you know, I don't even know what I am. I don't know if I'm a Republican or a Democrat, or if I'm a liberal or conservative. All I know is that I believe in the basic premise of your piece, which is that things feel broken. And so I guess I believe in brokenism. And that kind of articulated an idea for me that I thought

was very clarifying because it felt to me like that actually was a thing that people believed from all over the spectrum. And so I tried to write a second piece that articulated what I thought a brokenness perspective on the world entailed. You know, sometimes when I'll have a more detailed conversation with folks who have this general idea that there's a lot of things that aren't working, but they might identify as being on the political left or on the political right. One of the things I've experienced is that when you really get details from them about what are the ways in which some of these systems aren't working and what's your instinct about the solution, it seems to align much more closely with what would be considered a left wing view.

Now that may be my bias and who I'm talking to, but very often it will be the revelation I have that there's a lot of discontent with many systems, but a lot of people don't seem to realize that the solutions they are gravitating towards are actually more aligned with one side of political spectrum than the other. And that's sort of like a concern to me that people aren't aren't acknowledging that. Do you experience the same thing when you talk to some of these folks or is my view maybe partial or biased? What I think I probably experienced something a little different from you, but what I guess I would say is, is that one of the things that people talk to me about is not only the solutions that they're

looking for, but also the diagnosis of the problem. And if in a funny way, if I could say what I think might be the case, even maybe for the people that you're talking to, is that the solutions that they're grasping for, no matter what part of the spectrum they come from, end up being solutions that would be associated with the left. matter what part of the spectrum they come from, end up being solutions that wouldn't be associated with the left. But the diagnosis of the problem sounds a lot like people from the right. And that's also interesting, right? Because then we can have a conversation that can be generative, where we can say, oh, okay,

so maybe I come from the left, but I can talk to somebody from the right, because actually what we could agree on is what's causing some of these problems, even if we disagree on what we would do to replace them. And that, to me, part of the reason why I set out this different way of seeing things is because also I was trying to get people out of their entrenched teams and get them talking to each other and finding the the areas of the landscape on which they might agree. One of the things that I've experienced at the anecdotal personal level when interviewing former extremists like KKK, neo-Nazi types, et cetera, is that they all tell a very similar story of the circumstances that made them vulnerable to getting pulled into these movements in the first place. And it's a lot of things that weren't working. It was a lot of

broken things that that were going on. Is this a I mean, not everybody becomes a KKK member, obviously, or a neo-Nazi, But there seems to be a radicalizing effect of a lot of these things that just aren't working for people. Is that accurate? I think it is. And I think the people who study extremism might find overlapping themes or events in some of what I write about. And, you know, it's part of what's a challenge here is a friend of mine actually wrote and said, you know, Alana, I sort of agree with you. I see what you're saying, but I mean, come on, is it really monocausal? How did all of these institutions get broken at the same time? How is that even possible? So many of them started at different times. And so, of course, the answer is quite clear, which is technology.

We did have one thing happen. And if you actually look back to the Industrial Revolution, this exact same thing happened in society. When you have an economic revolution that changes the means of how we live, it then comprehensively, almost in a cascade, changes all parts of life. It changes religion, communication, the postal service. It changes everything. And as a result, we have to adjust. I think the same thing is happening now. These institutes, all of our institutions were faced with the challenge of needing to embrace and adjust themselves to new technologies. Some of them adjusted better

than others, and some of them are breaking under the pressure. Yeah. Neil Postman wrote quite a bit about this in his books, Technopoly, and then also amusing ourselves to death. And there's a sort of structural argument there about, you know, in linguistics, there's this idea. It's not I don't know that it's completely universally accepted, but it's much explored that the language you speak actually impacts your worldview to some degree, based both on a combination of syntax and the culture surrounding it and the vocabulary, the technologies that we have, including social media or television or whatever, actually are deterministic to some degree about what issues make it into the news media or how

do we approach problems or whatever the case may be? It's that sort of argument that would explain the timing, I think, of what you're talking about. Yes. Absolutely. So Neil Postman would say there's really no going back and it's about how do you try to regulate in order to harness the parts we want, but to limit the parts that don't work so well when we think about solutions. Do you agree with that? Yes, I think that part of the you know, in this interview, I've talked a lot about the brokenness perspective, but part of what I tried to do with the essay was also articulate the other perspective, the sort of warring perspective, which I also find incredibly

compelling, which is also find incredibly compelling, which is the belief in what exists and the belief that what exists may or may not need some reforming or need some tweaking, but that you simply don't throw whole institutions or systems out the window, especially when those systems are the basket for people's needs, sometimes in their safety and their livelihoods. Status Quoists believe that we need to work very, very hard at fixing our current institutions. In a way, there's, I think, an incredibly inspiring and exciting conversation to be had if you put those two groups together. Because what you get is you say, oh, how about instead of fighting and trying to convince each other to join sides we're not going to join, what if together we look at the landscape and we almost assess, like do an assessment and say, what are the institutions that need reforming?

What are the institutions that need radical reforming? And what are the institutions that need complete replacement? And let everyone do their part. Let the brokenness look at something and say, this is broken. I'm burning it to the ground and I'm starting again and let the status quoists reform what might actually be salvageable. The difficulty in that, as great as it sounds, is that there is a big divide about what's worthy of totally being destroyed and starting from scratch and what needs to be reformed. You mentioned education last week in a 48 hour period. You had Candace Owens

saying the solution to the US being poor at math is breeding for math skills like the South Koreans do. And then two days later at CPAC, she says we should get rid of the Department of Education. It's like you don't need to breed. You need to teach. We have. But they want to. But on the left, I think we would not say we need to get rid of the Department of Education. So it seems that the disagreement would come in which of which institutions fall under which of the two categories. So you're you're right. And look, the if if the people that you're trying to create conversation with are people who are political rhetoricians, that's a challenge. It's very different from my own. Right. I'm actually looking to create, to generate a conversation that feels fruitful among regular people.

Okay. And people who actually are maybe people who belong to the same town. Right. But who feel differently about the solutions or differently about the institutions of their world. And they're invested at a personal and granular level in those institutions. And they are not grandstanders who are just looking to make broad points. These are people who actually want to get their hands dirty. They just don't know in what way. They don't know if they want to get their hands dirty by level and do have to get made person by person,

town by town, community by community. And then I think it generates friends nationally and maybe even internationally. Super, super interesting. We've been speaking with Alana Newhouse, who's the founder and editor in chief of Tablet magazine, and we'll link to the articles that we've been sort of talking about in this conversation. Alana, really appreciate your time and insights. Thanks so much for having me. as an adult, check out our sponsor, Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon is the breakfast cereal with the crunchy, sweet goodness you love, but with zero grams of sugar, more protein, and only four to five net carbs. So it's perfect if you're doing low carb, if you're doing keto,

if you're like me and you just don't want to eat a bunch of sugar. Magic Spoon has delicious flavors to choose from. Cocoa, fruity, frosted peanut butter, honey nut, cinnamon roll, birthday cake. My favorite is maple waffle. And right now they have limited edition spring flavors, strawberry milkshake and peaches and cream. Sometimes you just feel like sitting down with a bowl of cereal when the mood strikes, go for something with plenty of protein without all the sugar. If you don't love magic spoon as much as I do and our team does, magic spoon will refund all of your money.

No questions asked. Go to magic spoon dot com slash Pacman. Create a custom bundle. Use the code Pacman for five dollars off. That's magic spoon dot com slash Pacman. The link is in the podcast notes. If you thought Donald Trump's 2016 promises about a wall on the southern border that Mexico would pay for a beautiful new health care plan ending the Israeli Palestinian conflict and all of that stuff was unrealistic. If you thought that was far fetched, the stuff that Trump is increasingly promising if he were to become

president in 2024 is even more outrageous. And it includes flying cars. I know. I know. It's it's truly a stunning thing. But that's what Trump is talking about. There's an exclusive Politico article. Trump calls for contest to create futuristic freedom cities, which says modern cities and flying cars might sound like the makings of an episode of the Jetsons where a fictionalized family flew around in Orbit City for former President Donald Trump. It's the foundation of a new set of futuristic policy proposals in a video set to be released Friday. Trump will call for a quantum leap in the American standard of living. He already talked about those freedom cities during his CPAC speech, which was pretty unhinged and basically sort of like a camp for homeless people.

And Trump also is talking about technological elements in another political article. It sort of expands on the flying cars idea. Trump calling for massive investment in vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, also known as flying cars. There is something really interesting here. Now, first and foremost, the right loves to say that the left promises unrealistic things. The things the left promises are only unrealistic insofar as Republicans are unwilling to actually fund them and insist that they're not things worth worth worth doing, including trying to get everybody health care or whatever the case may be. One of the really interesting thing about flying cars is that it's very easy

to visualize it when you talk about, well, we're going to work hard to change the way that we power our homes and cars. So it's increasingly from wind and sun rather than well, listen, I flipped on a light bulb. I don't know. It turned on. It doesn't feel that different if the source changes from being coal to being solar or whatever the case may be. And because it's less visual, it also doesn't really sound that worthwhile to put any money into it. OK, so flying cars, extraordinarily visual. The other thing is that Trump does have this tendency to get obsessed with something without really understanding it. You might remember where

there were a few speeches Trump gave. I think this was in 2020, where he became focused on going to Mars, even if he called it NARS. The United States will be the first nation to land an astronaut on Mars. OK, I remember it like it was yesterday. So Trump does get fixated on some of this futuristic stuff as well. But the flying cars, the inclusion of flying cars is is pretty damn interesting. Now, flying cars are also interesting because of the cultural importance of flying cars. Flying cars have been a sort of microcosm or emblematic of the future is now here. And if you look at things that were written in the 30s and 40s, and certainly you look at sci-fi in the 50s and 60s, lots of the things that Arthur C. Clarke wrote about 50 years ago have happened, satellites and different things. But flying cars as a sort of ubiquitous staple

of the futuristic society has not developed nearly as quickly as some imagined that it would. And there's a lot of different reasons for that. One is if you're going to have flying cars, they've got to be really, really safe. And of course, drone technology, the sort of quadcopter type technology might offer some of the redundancies that would be needed for really safe flying cars. But also, listen, every time I'm on the highway, there's someone in the fast lane going 57 while on a cell phone. I don't know that I want to put those people in the air anytime soon. And so until the self-driving technology really matures, flying cars aren't going to be happening anytime soon. But the inclusion of it is certainly interesting. So a lot of cultural stuff to talk about when

we talk about flying cars. And it is really interesting. Trump promising flying cars between 2025 and 2029. That is not a realistic promise, as I'm sure most of you realize. Tucker Carlson now seems to be sucking up to failed former President Donald Trump after the text messages were revealed in which Tucker admits to hating Trump passionately. This is very interesting. And I want you to remember that the number one priority, there's really two priorities for almost all in corporate media. Priority number one is ratings and priority number two is maintaining access to the most powerful people you can possibly maintain access to. Despite the reality that Tucker Carlson hates Trump, quote, passionately, he doesn't want to be on the outs if Trump is again president of the United States. And so the day after his text

messages attacking Trump were leaked, Tucker Carlson goes on TV and talks about all of the great ideas that Donald Trump is now proposing. Take a listen to this. You wouldn't know it from watching the news media, but Donald Trump is running for president again. Right. So first of all, the media isn't giving Trump enough attention. Put him in prison first, which, of course, their plan. And he's saying things that are really interesting. Trump is saying interesting things. Wait, but you hate him passionately and you think he's an idiot. Not rehashes at all. In fact, he's come up with a bunch of proposals that were so interesting that we thought we would bring them to you. We've asked Fox's Kevin Cork to bring us the story. OK, so then he brings on Kevin Cork. And if you thought that Tucker was being sarcastic because

look, I just told you what the proposals are. It includes flying cars. If you thought that Tucker was kidding, he's not. This is a serious segment. A good idea often begins with a very single thought. Tucker Kevin Cork. Thanks so much. More babies, prettier buildings, cleaner parks. Those are achievable goals. Once we improve everyone's life, he's taking it seriously. Tucker is pretending like these are reasonable and good ideas. So this is this is very overt. Tucker now having to suck up to Donald Trump. And I don't know what happened behind the scenes when Tucker's text messages leaked saying he hates Trump passionately. It's completely plausible that Tucker and his producer and Fox Brass got together and said, listen, I get it. You hate him. I get it. Listen, we all hate him. Maybe was even said behind the scenes. But he could be the president. And we want to host a primary debate and we want to host a

presidential debate. And we can't have Trump furious with us. And he's increasingly furious with us. So you got to go and clean this up. That's a completely plausible conversation that could have happened behind the scenes. These ideas, nicer buildings and flying cars and all this different stuff. If it were a Democrat that was proposing this stuff, Tucker Carlson would be doing his psychopathic laugh and talking about how unreasonable and expensive and unfair to the American taxpayer it would be to pursue these ideas. So don't fall for it. Tucker is trying to clean up his mess. It might actually work. Carrie Lake is now starting to do Trump's dirty work. She is pounding Ron DeSantis. We know Carrie Lake is desperate to be Donald Trump's vice president.

We know that Carrie Lake is someone who is willing to do the dirty work. And she's so desperate to be Trump's VP. She can just taste it. She is now trying out by going on TV and attacking Ron DeSantis here, saying, why would Ron DeSantis even consider running for president? He just was reelected. He should really be staying in Florida. And the people of Florida just reelected him. I'm assuming when they reelected him, they were hoping he'd stay around for a while. So, I mean, he's I guess he's in his 40s. He's about 10 years younger than me. He's got a long political future ahead of him. And I think he should respect that the people just voted him in as governor and serve out that term for the people

of Florida. And then he could obviously run for president. But this is President Trump's turn. And so, oh, and there's one more. We haven't seen Ron DeSantis on the world stage yet. And, you know, some of the people that are surrounding him are kind of the type of people that were pushing for war, that were pushing for the endless war. And yeah, so a couple of different things. First of all, I had to look that up. Ron DeSantis is 44 years old. When I look at DeSantis, I don't see a guy who's five years older than me. I see a guy who looks 15 years older than me. He's genuinely 44 years old. That's stunning stuff. I mean, that's an incredible, incredible thing to realize.

And I'm going to have to process that probably a little bit later because it's bonkers. But the most important thing to understand is that the polling data supports the strategy of encourage everybody but Ron DeSantis to run against Trump, but try to keep Ron DeSantis out of the race. Why? When you look at Republican polling, DeSantis is the only person who polls well in a head to head matchup against Donald Trump. Trump crushes Nikki Haley in a head to head matchup. Trump Trump really crushes everybody else, even people thinking of running who have not yet announced.

But the more people you include in the polls, if you say who would you support if it was Trump versus Nikki Haley versus Mike Pompeo versus Mike Pence versus Tim Scott? The more people you include, the better Trump does, because all those other people divide up support except DeSantis. Trump genuinely would benefit from DeSantis not running. And so here is Carrie Lake trying out for Trump's VP and certainly willing to do the dirty work. Will it work to get her that VP slot? Axios report we talked about yesterday says that indeed Trump is considering her for his running mate. We have a voicemail number. That number is 2 1 9 2 David P. Here's a really good question about the Fox News text message scandal. Listen to this. Hey, David, I just want to speak really briefly about the Fox News scandal.

I know that you've been covering it really well, but I just have a comment. You know, I think that all of this stuff that's coming out in general simply won't have as big of an impact because the people that watch Fox News will never see it. In other words, the reason they haven't settled, which most people are like, why haven't they settled? This is very damaging to them. Because if they settle, they have to say to their audience, listen, we lied to you, and they probably have to say it 100 times a day.

But the point is that they make more money doing it and they know this. Therefore, why would they settle the lose one point six billion? It'll hurt them. So here's the thing. The caller is correct that a lot. You know, we asked yesterday and the day before. Are Tucker's viewers going to abandon Tucker because they're MAGA people and they watch Tucker with the idea that Trump's going to be praised by Tucker and now Tucker's exposed

in text messages saying he hates Trump passionately. Tucker's viewers just won't even hear about that story because Fox News isn't covering the story and they only watch Fox News. But there's another aspect to this. Even if the caller is right, that if Fox were to settle, they might have to do a mea culpa and say we were wrong. We lied about this and that. I don't even think their followers would care about that. I genuinely don't.

I think they'd go. The liberal media forced them to do it. The liberal establishment forced them to do it. They didn't really lie. They told the truth. So I actually think the caller is wrong in that particular sense. Let me know what you think. We've got a great bonus show for you today. Sign up at join Pacman dot com. Don't miss it.