The David Pakman Show - 6/18/24: Fake Biden videos going viral, MAGA openly rooting for attack
Episode Date: June 18, 2024-- On the Show: -- Reece Peck, Associate Professor at the City University of New York and author of the book "Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class," joins David to discuss his latest o...p-ed in the Hill, “Trump, the UFC and the New Conservative Culture War.” Get his book: https://amzn.to/3VNRyqW -- Bogus videos of President Biden's supposed "dementia" are going viral so quickly, fact-checkers are struggling to keep up -- The latest conspiracy about who will replace President Biden on the 2024 Democratic ticket shifts from Michelle Obama to Hillary Clinton -- Donald Trump's memory problems are reportedly so bad that he completely forgot meeting and being interviewed for an hour by author Ramin Setoodeh -- Republicans are increasingly rooting for a terrorist attack before the election under the belief that it will help Donald Trump defeat Joe Biden -- Sean Hannity and Lara Trump start to panic about Donald Trump's forthcoming debate performance and start to lower expectations -- Kari Lake makes a number of unhinged allegations about Hunter Biden in the latest effort to continue to focus on him in the absence of any real Joe Biden scandal -- On the Bonus Show: Donald Trump calls for ending taxes on tips, US Surgeon General wants social media warning labels, US sues Adobe for "deceiving" subscriptions that are too hard to cancel, much more... 🌱 Ounce of Hope: Get a THC Seltzer for just $5 at https://ounceofhope.com 🛌 Helix Sleep: Get up to 30% OFF + 2 free pillows at https://helixsleep.com/pakman 🥦 Lumen lets you master your metabolism. GET 15% OFF at https://lumen.me/pakman ⚠️ Try Ground News and get 40% OFF the Vantage plan at https://ground.news/pakman 🔊 Babbel language learning: Get up to 60% OFF at https://babbel.com/pakman 💪 Alpha Progression: Get 20% OFF your 1st year or month at https://alphaprogression.com/pakman -- Become a Member: https://www.davidpakman.com/membership -- Become a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/davidpakmanshow -- TDPS Subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/thedavidpakmanshow/ -- Pakman Discord: https://www.davidpakman.com/discord -- David on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/davidpakmanshow -- Leave a Voicemail: (219)-2DAVIDP
Transcript
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Welcome, everybody. I received a lot of positive feedback about yesterday's story showing the viral Biden wanders away video, which was cropped into insanely vertical fashion and then comparing it to the full video and showing how these
a doctored and edited videos are going viral very quickly.
I want to talk about the broader issue here, which is no matter what I can do to debunk
a single video and show you how it's been deceptively edited and it doesn't represent
reality.
Uh, no matter how many times I do it or how quickly I can do it.
These videos are going viral so quickly and on so many platforms that it's actually very difficult
to keep up. And there's a very good article on MSNBC on NBC News dot com rather from Alex Seitz
Wald, which talks about this. And the article is called misleading.
Republican videos of Biden are going viral.
The fact checks, fact checks have trouble keeping up.
One Democratic strategist said the lie is sprinting the hundred meter dash and the fact
check is taking a stroll on the beach, so it's never going to catch up.
And of course, this is very similar to the dynamic that exists with corrections, some
front page newspaper story.
And then three days later, a correction at the back of Section B. Way fewer people see
the correction at the end of Section B than do than the number that see the erroneous
information on the front page story.
And this all really comes from desperation from the Republican Party.
We're going to see them now starting to set expectations for Donald Trump in next week's
debate lower and lower because obviously some of them are seeing what is going on with Donald
Trump.
And so the reason that the Republican Party is resorting to these sort of cheap fakes,
you know, what's next?
Biden's an alien or something is that they know that if someone sits down and watches an hour of
Biden and an hour of Trump, it becomes very evident who the risk is and who isn't making
any sense. I actually think that that's sort of the challenge. And I would even challenge
people to do this. If you you know, we do in our show roughly in an hour show,
I can't include an hour Biden speech and questions and a Trump hour speech and questions. Some
of Trump's hour speeches turn into two hours because he's rambling and sometimes tells
the same stories multiple times. But that would be the challenge. Sit down and watch
a full Trump speech and a full Biden speech. And what will you
see? Well, in the Biden speech, you will see an individual who understands policy, particularly
when it comes to the foreign policy discussions that he's been having and sometimes will kind of
mumble or stutter, something he's dealt with his entire life.
And yes, sometimes he will talk really slowly and quietly.
And we wonder, did he just lose his train of thought there for a moment?
That's what you will see with Biden when he speaks for an hour, as he did in the State
of the Union much longer.
On the other hand, if you watch an hour speech with Trump, first of all, if you turn it
on at the time it's scheduled to start, you'll wait an hour before it even starts because Trump's
perennially late to every speech that he gives. But once the speech actually starts and you watch
60 minutes of the Trump speech, you will see a guy who will very often repeat the same nonsensical
or imaginary stories. He will glitch and be so unable to even continue speaking that
he will physically have a shaking reaction and then go on to something else, sometimes pointing
to someone in the crowd that he recognizes. He will sometimes make up words. He will sometimes
misstate basic facts and have no idea that he is misstating them, who the president is, who he
defeated, who he ran against, who Obama ran against basic facts. And he will just continue on because
he has no awareness that, oh, I just said something that doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
And sometimes the stories he tell make such little sense and seem like free association,
a sort of verbal inkblot of sorts that you will see the crowd
become visibly confused about what even the general topic is. Was the topic electric vehicles
or sharks or electrocution or batteries or wind farms or Obama or Biden? What was the topic here?
So that is what you will observe if you watch an hour of each of them. But the viral videos of Biden often slowed down or often cut in ways that are not representative
of reality or sometimes cropped.
So you can't see what it is Biden is looking at.
They've done this one many times.
There's one time where, remember, Biden turned and stuck stuck his hand out sort of like,
hey, great to see you or whatever. And it makes it look like he's looking at nothing. And then you see the wider
shot and at a 45 degree angle behind him, there's a group of people that he's talking to. And that's
what it is. So the only thing more consistent than the misleading nature of these Republican videos is the Republican Party's desperation to have the lies sprint
out there and leave the truth to sort of try to walk up to the finish line while they are
completely devoid of any serious policy discussion.
The real the funny thing is there is a program of policy that Republicans have for next year. If Trump wins, it's project 2025,
but they don't really want to publicly talk about it. Bannon will sort of allude to it.
Steve Bannon and his programs. Some other Republicans will kind of allude to,
we got to deal with the administrative state, but the only real policy they have
is the disastrous project 2025, which when people
hear about it, they hate it.
So they talk about it very, very little.
So the Republican spin machine is working overtime.
They're creating fiction after fiction.
And when you can't win on merit, when you can't win on policy, when you can't win because
the things you want, like overturning Roe v.
Wade, are extraordinarily unpopular.
You go to these cheap tricks. I read somewhere, maybe it was in Alex's article or elsewhere,
they're trying to win with pixels instead of policy, for lack of a better term. And these
misleading videos are an extraordinarily effective camouflage for the complete lack of platform as a
party and for the fact that Donald Trump's brain seems to be melting
and turning to tartar sauce. Let's call it tartar sauce. So this is I don't have a solution right
now. I'm trying to kind of explore the problem with you, but it's hard to fact check because
so much of this stuff comes out and it spreads way more quickly. And when it spreads
a thousand and a thousand different videos on TikTok and on 250 different right wing shows,
how do you attach a fact check to that? You can't really do it at any real, real way as the
technology improves to do deep fakes and other AI based deceptive video. This is going to become even more difficult. And it is a way to
exploit fears and to sort of distract. So do we need to focus on holding platforms accountable
for spreading falsehoods? I don't know. I don't really know how you do that. I think there's
risks to that, but it is a relentless spread of disinformation. They are doing well with it
because they are spreading it faster than we can fact check it.
And it is going viral faster than the fact checks are going viral. So that's where we are.
At least there are articles being written about the fact that this is going on and sort of
alongside the viral video disinformation are the conspiracy theories and the new very low expectation
setting. And I want to talk about that next. They have a new version of Democrats are going to
replace Biden. You might remember that for a while now it's been Michelle Obama. I remember when I
was on a trip last summer and I recorded a show remotely and we talked
about why do they keep talking about Michelle Obama is going to replace Biden.
Michelle Obama has been very clear that she doesn't want to be president.
And that was a year ago.
It's been now a year.
Joe Biden is the presumptive nominee.
He did extraordinarily well in what was not really even a real primary because there was no serious challenge to Joe Biden. And he is going to be crowned the Democratic
nominee at the DNC in August. So they've stuck with Michelle Obama. But they are also now
slowly shifting to a different one, which is Hillary. Yes, Hillary Clinton, Hillary
Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate who has made absolutely zero indication that she is even considering or thinking about ever
running for president again.
Never mind the idea that she would be swapped in sometime over the next seven weeks between
now and the DNC.
Here is Jesse Waters speaking to Jeanine Pirro yesterday on Fox News, And he goes, now they they they are talking about swapping in Hillary.
It only fires up the hyper partisans on the left.
I saw a poll the other day.
The expectations for Joe Biden, half the country judge thinks the man's going to wander the
wrong way off the debate stage.
That's how low I shouldn't even say that because it's already too low.
But you now have a
poll out in Iowa. Donald Trump is beating Joe Biden by 18 points. What does that mean for
Michigan, Wisconsin? This thing looks bad. And now they're talking about swapping Hillary in
if he bombs in this debate. Well, you know what, Harold? Nobody wants to see the president fail. But the whole
idea that, you know, they're out there saying this election is not about age. Joe and the other guy
Speaker 3 that only fires up the hyper part. Speaker 1
So they say they are now talking about swapping in Hillary. No one is talking about swapping in
Hillary. We haven't heard it anywhere. There is zero conversation happening about swapping in Hillary Clinton for Joe Biden.
And of course, it used to be that everybody said it was going to be Michelle Obama.
Now they're saying Hillary. Quite frankly, I don't know why it makes a difference.
The real story would be Biden being swapped. I don't know why it even matters whether it's Hillary or Michelle Obama.
But the reason that now they're floating Hillary is there's a very clear, real underlying intent here. And it's to undermine Biden's candidacy by creating uncertainty.
Although in particular, it doesn't really matter whether it would be Michelle Obama or Hillary
Clinton. The big story would be, oh, the guy who is president said, I'm running for reelection.
One, all the primaries, to the extent that there was a primary, even though there really wasn't.
But even when he wasn't on the ballot and there were write ins, he still overwhelmingly
won.
The idea is shift the baseless rumors, create chaos, create uncertainty and underlying all
of it, wanting to destabilize the current administration, destabilize the political
system, take it apart as they say, we're going to dismantle the administrative state underlying all of this is a desire for
the president to fail.
Jeanine Pirro there said it's not that, you know, we don't root for the president to fail.
That's exactly what they're doing later.
I'm going to have an example of how they are actually rooting for a terror attack as well.
Some of these folks, Sean Hannity, Lara Trump,
they have calculated if there were to be a terror attack that we could plausibly pin on Biden,
we might be able to use that to simply defeat him in November. I actually don't know that that would
work. We'll talk about that later. But they do want to see the president fail and they do want
to see the country fail. And by the way, they regularly say that the country sucks now.
It's not a great country.
Old Republicans and by old, I'm only talking about 16, 18, 20 years ago and before that,
they never went as far as to say the country is bad.
The country is not great.
The country sucks.
They would say this is the best country period.
We could use better leadership.
I have a better vision. Now it's different. It's the country is a disaster.
We're not great anymore. This is not a great country under Biden. It would be great again if you voted for me. That's also a change to the Republican rhetoric where now they are willing to
openly say this country sucks, even though it'll get fixed right away if you elect me.
So, of course, there is no evidence at all that anyone is talking about Hillary Clinton.
If you've seen her recent public appearances, by the way, there is not even a drop of suggestion
in her that she is even positioning herself to be considered as someone to replace Joe Biden. And quite literally, unless Biden is completely incapacitated and which is the same standard,
by the way, with Trump, unless Trump is completely incapacitated, these two are going to be the
nominees. So we're going to take a very quick break after the break. An extraordinary news story
that I want to discuss regarding Donald Trump completely
forgetting an hour interview that he did. Makes no sense. Extraordinarily concerning.
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We have a new report firsthand. This is not, oh, unnamed sources, anonymous. No, this is
a direct primary source who says Donald Trump's memory is so bad. He didn't remember that I
interviewed him for an hour. This is I mean, listen, I know that they are desperate,
desperate, desperate, desperate to make Joe Biden seem like the one who doesn't know what's going on.
But that is becoming increasingly difficult to do. Author Ramin Satude appeared yesterday on MSNBC
and said, I interviewed Trump, sat with him for an hour. He wasn't doing a lot of interviews at
that time. And then he had absolutely no memory whatsoever of the fact that I had interviewed him
for an hour. Trump is having severe memory issues. Here is the interview from MSNBC yesterday.
I think is really interesting because I really got to know Donald Trump post-presidency and I
got to see what he was like.
And over the weekend, he was talking about how Joe Biden needs to take a cognitive test.
Joe Biden, you know, isn't all there.
Donald Trump had severe memory issues.
As the journalist who spent the most time with him, I have to say he couldn't remember
things.
He couldn't even remember me.
We spent an hour together in 2021 in May. And then a
few months later, I went back to the White House. I went back to Trump Tower to talk to him about
his time in the White House. And he had I said he had this vacant look on his face. And I said,
do you remember me? And he said, no, he had no recollection of our lengthy interview that we had.
And he wasn't doing a lot of interviews at that time. So I think that the American public really
needs to see this portrait
of Donald Trump because this shows what he is like and who he is and who he has always been.
Speaker 1 I want to mention that one reaction to this was it's not that Trump doesn't remember
because he has a memory problem. It's that Trump doesn't remember because he's a complete and total
narcissistic individual. And he just he'll
remember an attractive woman who interviewed him. And reportedly that makes him interested in going
to interviews, according to what some of the NELC boys have said publicly. But he just doesn't
remember people because he's a complete and total narcissist. The problem with that story is that
people around Trump for a long time have said, no, no, no, no. He does remember people.
He shows up at Trump tower and he knows Tom and Steve and Nancy. He knows the janitors. He knows
the trash people, the maintenance people, the front desk people. He remembers everybody and
asks about their kids and so on and so forth. So it's actually contrary. On the one hand,
these right wingers love to say Trump's such a great guy.
Everybody who used to work with him when he was really more involved in real estate would
say he remembered everybody.
He would say, how's the kid?
How's their braces?
How's that tooth or whatever?
He had an incredible memory for it.
And at the at the same time now they're saying, well, no, no, no.
It's not that Trump's memory is the problem.
It's that he's such a narcissist that he doesn't care about remembering anybody else.
And that's what's going on. Well, but that's the opposite story that the very same people were
telling several years ago. And the vacant look that Satu Day describes, that's something we
know very well. Trump gets that look during his speeches all the time. And you need look only
to last week's rally or over the weekend's rally where Donald Trump,
in a moment of incredible irony, if you want to call it that, was angrily demanding that Joe Biden
be cognitively tested while wrongly saying that the doctor who tested him is Ronnie Johnson,
when in fact, Trump's doctor who tested him was Ronnie Jackson.
So I know there's a lot of people saying, well, then test both of them.
I have absolutely no problem with that.
I say, go ahead and do it.
I would want to know the results.
But the idea that it's obvious that Trump is fine, given his frequent lapses, forgetting
names, the vacant looks, the confused statements about what's going on in the world.
And the other thing that I think is very important is there's been this narrative that Biden
can't do anything without a teleprompter.
Trump can't do anything without a teleprompter.
And after years of saying Obama needs a teleprompter and Biden needs a teleprompter, when you take
Trump's teleprompter away, when the teleprompter has failed from a
technical standpoint during recent speeches, it becomes an unintelligible experience to listen
to a Trump speech. And that, to some, highlights the severity of what's going on with Donald Trump,
which is that his campaign is really especially in the evening hours, managing Trump's engagements in a way to just keep him on the teleprompter.
And yet a lot of the media discussion about this is just fixated and obsessed with President Joe
Biden. So the campaign is going to at least presumably put these two men more and more
in situations where they won't have the safety net of a teleprompter. The debate next
week is going to be one of those moments. And I'll tell you, part of the reason I'm not looking
forward to the debate to hear the tax plans of Biden and Trump. I know what they're going to be.
Biden wants a tax on billionaires. Trump's talking about what about just going with a flat tax or let's lower taxes or, you know, we I know what that is.
What I want to see is do they look, as doctors like to say, oriented to time and place?
Do they relate to each other in anything approximating a normal sort of social disposition?
Does Biden wander off stage confusedly or is it Trump who seems confused? I mean, a lot
of what we're going to look at here, especially as the stakes are so high and part of it is project
2025 and we'll release our white paper explaining what those stakes are really soon. The American
people are going to be looking very closely at what they can glean about mental fitness of their leaders. That's OK.
That makes sense when they're both around 80 years old.
What doesn't make sense is that on the one hand, we have these five alarm fires.
Within a couple of months, he forgot that I was one of the only long form interviewers
who went to Mar-a-Lago to interview him, says Rahman Satute. And meanwhile, they're releasing these toothpick thin videos of Joe Biden appearing to be talking
to no one when in reality he's talking to people, which you can see in the original
video.
So a lot of this is media irresponsibility.
I'm glad that it is becoming more of a corporate media story.
And we've been talking about that.
And we will mean, listen,
depending on what happens at the debate next week, this could be in very, very sharp relief.
They are now openly rooting for a terror attack before the election because they believe that
it will help Joe Biden be defeated by Donald Trump. Who is they? The usual suspects. It's Hannity.
It's Lindsey Graham. It's others. This isn't the only example. We they often couch it as
concern trolling predictions. You know, I'm really worried that with the way things are
going with Biden and how no one respects Biden, that our adversaries are going to see this as
an opportunity to attack us on American soil.
And of course, the more you talk to them about it, you realize it's actually a wet dream about what they see as a path for Donald Trump to defeat Joe Biden in November.
Terrorist attack that they can blame somehow on Biden hurts Biden and lets Trump win.
Here is Sean Hannity again.
It's something really bad is coming.
It's going to be 9 11 or worse.
They've been saying this since Biden became president.
It's almost like they want it to happen when you have all of these people coming from our
top geo political foes with ties to radical Islamic terrorism, that there are terror cells
in this country and 9 11 or worse is coming.
Now it's not a matter of if to me it's
almost a guarantee i hope and pray to god i'm wrong i don't think i'm wrong i've been saying
it over and over again when you have all so he is saying this because they are increasingly of the belief that something major needs to happen for Biden to lose.
And they aren't wrong, obviously, hoping and praying, as Hannity says, for Biden to be
completely incapacitated at next week's debate. That would help them. I'll be honest, if Biden
really just can't even orient himself to what's going on at the debate. It will be bad for Biden.
I don't expect that to happen.
I think it's as likely or more likely it happens to Trump.
But the other possibility is that there's an attack they can blame on Biden and say,
this is why we need the strength of Donald Trump.
Now, as far as the implied notion that the individuals who would commit these attacks
would come over the US MexicoS.-Mexico border.
If only we had a bipartisan plan to enhance security at the border. Oh, right. We did.
And Trump said, kill it because Trump wants to keep this as an issue to run on. If they fix the
border issue, then Trump can't run on fixing the border issue anymore, which, of course,
proves that they're not really serious about protecting the country from what they claim are the threats. All they really care about is
winning elections here. And it needs to be made very clear that they see one of their best paths
to winning as having an attack take place where there is loss of life that they can blame on Joe
Biden. And it's disgusting. And this rhetoric really highlights how desperate
they are. They have a I'm using a charitable word here. Trump is a lackluster candidate.
They have a lackluster candidate at the top of their ticket who's increasingly losing his mind,
who can't remember anything, who's been convicted on 34 felony counts, has three more criminal cases
against him, has been found civilly liable for
sexual assault with a judge, which a judge said meets the New York definition for rape.
And they want to replicate Rudy Giuliani's surge in popularity after 9-11. There is a risk,
though, and you might know what that risk is. Bush and Giuliani were in office at the time of 9-11 and their surge in popularity came from Americans
rallying around those who were our leaders at the time. Obviously, the risk to an attack,
other than the fact that it's disgusting to hope for an attack. Right. We're putting that aside
for a second. There's a political risk to hoping for an attack while Joe Biden is president.
And the risk is that instead of saying, oh, an attack happened under Biden, we have to
now vote Trump.
The risk is that the country actually rallies around Joe Biden.
They are counting on the fact that if there is an attack, they will be so able to successfully
pin it on Biden, I guess, because they're assuming it'll be someone who came over the
border and Biden didn't secure the border and we can blame him for it.
But there's a risk.
And the risk is if such an attack happens, obviously this close to an election, it's
hard to predict.
But that if such an attack happens, the conventional wisdom used to be war or terror attacks help
the incumbent no matter who that incumbent is.
So I don't even know if it would work.
But these people are desperate.
Their priority is not the safety of the American people. Their priority is not what's best for the country.
It's what's best for their party. And Hannity has always been a what's best for my party type
of guy. It's disgusting. It's completely disgusting. I think one of the most interesting
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Let's say you want to figure out if Trump did use a Nazi slogan in a campaign video or if it's just
a misunderstanding. Ground News is an app and website that gathers news stories from across
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the story and see that only 17 percent of those are right leaning. No surprise there. Comparing
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in the podcast notes. It's great to welcome to the program, Reese Peck, associate professor at the city university
of New York.
Also author of the book Fox populism, branding conservatism as working class.
He recently published a very interesting op ed in the hill called Trump, the UFC and the
new conservative culture war.
You know, Reese, I'm really interested in talking about this because these UFC events
that Donald Trump attends alongside UFC owner
Dana White and the crowd seems to go crazy for Trump. I'm very interested in how UFC has become
this sort of cultural flashpoint for the American right wing, because I'll be honest, like I grew up
in a liberal area. So I had friends that like UFC, they're all liberal. So it's not the case that UFC is objectively
only appealing to right wing people. And yet the events and the embracing of Trump
and even by the fighters to some degree seem to be doing something culturally that I want to talk
more about with you. So give us an overview of what you think is going on here with UFC and Trump and MAGA. Yeah, I'll start by saying I'm a lifelong UFC fan. I wrestled in
high school. You know, I watched it back in the blockbuster video days when you couldn't even get
it on pay-per-view. And you're right that it isn't, it wasn't historically just like coded as
Republican partisan, you know, sport. It, it had, it celebrated
its diversity because it's a global sport. It's celebrated that it has women fighters, right? And
many of them are, are LGBTQ members of the LGBTQ community. So it really wasn't until 2016 where
it became explicitly coded as kind of Republican aligned when Dana White spoke at
the Republican National Convention, right, supporting Trump. And it just kind of it's been
off to the races in terms of partisan politics since that moment. That was really like the
juncture where it shifted and became kind of explicitly conservative.
And why is it that that has worked when, you know, you look at
Major League Baseball and there's sort of this America's pastime and connections to a lot of
different cultural events in history that don't necessarily code as liberal. Like you could make
the case that maybe Major League Baseball should be more visibly conservative or college football is a tradition that is bigger in parts of the country that vote way more for Republicans
than they do Democrats in general, on average down in the South.
Like what?
Why is it that it has started to lean this way with regard to the public facing UFC audience
and their reception of Trump?
It's a tricky question to answer. I think that those
sports that you mentioned, they have kind of like a throwback to the network era of television where
they're still trying to appeal to a mass audience. They don't want to alienate one group or the
other. So it's really, I mean, we live in a world of niche TV markets and niche online video markets, right?
That's really where you have hardcore fans. They're small, but they're loyal and you can
make money off them because they're, they're, they're fanatic. They're, they're into the brand.
And I think the UFC really came of age in the social media era, right? Because it was seen
deviant and it was outlawed in a lot of states, right? John McCain famously called it a human cock fighting sport and it was
banned.
So it really was not getting any love from network or cable television.
So it had to lean into social media much more to circumvent the kind of
gatekeepers.
And it's always had a kind of counter-cultural like vibe to it because it
has seen cage fighting and it's,
it's kind of beyond the pale. It it because it has seen cage fighting and it's it's kind of
beyond the pale it's outside of the realm of legitimate sports and it's gradually kind of
tried to dance do this tightrope of becoming mainstream getting contracts with ESPN right
enjoying the benefits of mainstream broadcasting and mainstream sports and branding. But at the same time, it's,
it's, it hasn't escaped that early origin as a counter-cultural kind of deviant, extreme sport
that a special fan base likes. So I think it, it, it's, that's already kind of baked in and then you
add partisan politics to it and it just adds, it adds another kind of layer of that niche branding. It seems that there is definitely some
overlap in terms of some of the fan base of UFC and those who like characters from the so-called
Manosphere, Manosphere influencers, the Tate brothers and others. I mean, and Andrew Tate
was a kickboxer. I don't know that he was ever in UFC specifically, but he was a kickboxer
at one point. So it seems that there is, if we want to draw an analogy to what pseudo political
movement does UFC most connect to other than the presence of Dana White and Trump as individuals,
there does, is there some overlap with the manosphere appeal?
Absolutely. I mean, we really need to pause and think about what does it mean that
one of the most Googled people in the last two years, Andrew Tate, started his career in kickboxing,
right? And what that says to you is that it has social currency to be in combat sports for young
men particularly, right? And that is an apolitical thing that can lead to ideological conclusions.
Right. It starts out as that's why you like him. But then he's starting to engage in political
commentary about society, about gender, about the sexual marketplace. Right. And so it's one
thing for a professor like me to speak to young men. They're like, I don't listen to this guy.
Right. I'm not I don't really respect that type of culture and that type of authority. But I do
respect a guy that has this
courage to go into a cage and fight another man. And it really does speak to in another way.
You know, we live in a world of hyper media saturation, where we think everything's fake,
everything's a simulation. And there's nothing more real and authentic than a fight, right? So
there's something about fighting, particularly that speaks to our kind of postmodern existence existence where we kind of believe we see everything is like smoke and mirrors.
We see everything is fake and in stage. And, you know, and so we latch on to the things that are real.
And people like people, Joe Rogan, right, has a background in mixed martial arts, the other most popular kind of one of the most popular online personalities in the world. So I really think, you know, progressives have to particularly have to think about that. Like where are, where are progressives
gaining their cultural currency in politics? Uh, and, and, and, and the right is definitely
latched onto this idea. Tate won't once called himself an action hero, right? So he's really
lived. He really lives up to this idea of a courageous fighter, you know, a guy that's a manly man,
alpha male. Trump and some of the manosphere influencers will often try to portray themselves as really powerful and alpha, but also victims of just about everything. You know, we've talked
about Trump before and Trump's the victim of a rigged election system and of a weaponized justice system. And the media treats
him unfairly and regulators treat him unfairly and culture, social, social media and cultural,
you know, Hollywood treats him unfairly. The manosphere influencers, including the Tate's,
but also many, many others, uh, you know, the platforms are limiting our speech and then they're
going after us in Romania on trumped up charges as far
as the Tates go. It's it's simultaneously. We are victimized by everyone, but we're also alpha and
really powerful. Is that is that appealing to their followers in some way? Because you would
think that if everyone can so easily make turn them into victims, it runs counter to being alpha
in some way. Yeah, I mean, I've kind of grappled
with this contradiction. You know, I think maybe this isn't a really simplistic answer, but I think
it really boils down to underdog stories that we that in our kind of pop culture and politics,
populist candidates will use this underdog story where on one hand they are courageous and alpha but on the other hand
they have to be under siege right there has to be some sort of villain right like a superhero movie
right it's only as good as the villain right so they're always saying there's this idea of a power
block an establishment right that is that is suppressing regular people and then trump and
the tates of the world are like the proxies. They're the avatars
for like what the regular guy is going through. Right. And they're they're kind of guiding them
out and taking on this heroic crusade against the powerful. But it is it is ironic because you could
flip it as well, where they say liberals are the weakest people. And yet they're also the people
dominating them. And, you know, the yet they're also the people dominating them.
And, you know, the same contradiction works on the backside of the coin. It seems one of the other aspects to the the the manosphere in general is economic struggles and more complicated dynamics are often supplanted with explanations like feminism, woke culture, DEI, et cetera,
as explanations for why things maybe aren't going as well as some would hope.
Do you think that that's an effective strategy in terms of activating people or, or, or not?
Yeah, this is one thing I try to get out in the piece that I really don't want. I think there's a typical way to approach the manosphere and Trump's kind of hyper-masculinity, which is to simply say, look how vulgar it is, you find out they're talking a lot about the economy. They're talking a lot about the struggles of the labor market, about what it is
to have dignity, right, today, if you can't get a good job and that you're not attractive as a
marriage partner, right? You work at, you know, a service industry job, you can't buy a home,
right? So they interweave the realities, the hard realities of our economy and how it's hard to find status and
dignity in the economy. And so I don't want people, people kind of look at the incels or
the people that like this content and they just dismiss them as bigots and gross reactionaries,
but they don't really have any other empathetic, like a more empathetic lens or approach to them
that could see why people are lonely, could see why people are lacking meaning in their life and struggling.
And what the manosphere does is say, yes, I see you.
I see that you're struggling in the sexual marketplace to find a marriage partner.
I see that you're finding a good job.
But then they redirect and say it's women, right?
The problem is that women have too much power, right?
It's with their high credentials and this new pop culture that
platforms them and centers their voices the most.
They're the enemy, right?
Not these deeper economic forces at play that are really the core of your hardship, right?
And so it's that maneuver that they do.
It's that redirection that I'm interested in.
So if we loop this back to the to the UFC stuff, is there some way in which some of
the folks in that group you just mentioned with the struggles you just mentioned, where
being part in some way as an audience member, especially if you can afford to go in person,
scratches that itch that you're describing
and connects to it in some kind of relevant way psychologically?
Yeah, I think so. It's like if you feel like all these systems around you are out of your control,
one thing you can control is your fitness, right? You can control like training and jujitsu or
fighting. Like these are things that are immediately attainable
that you see transformation um and i don't necessarily think think those things are toxic
it's the way the kind of right weaponizes them that lead them to toxic toxic kind of conclusions
right it's like i have to be a dominating man this like ultra aggressive guy and and they
narrowly define what it means to be a
man or they narrowly define what masculinity is. That's the problem, not masculinity per se.
It's their kind of warped version of it and reductive version of it. And so that's what I
think it does scratch an itch, but it's like, how are you scratching that itch? And what's
the political significance? And how is that an entry point into either, I would say, good politics and good ideas and good solutions or more reactionary, unhelpful, toxic kind of directions?
When it comes to the November election, obviously, it's very hard to say when an election will come down to probably under half a million votes in three to five states.
And there's no one thing ultimately that is that is going to be definitively pointed to
as a difference maker.
But is UFC and the environment that's being built around Trump, is it even conceivably
significant enough if we include all of these other outcroppings of it to influence the election results and maybe even a single state or is this really an artifact of social media that in the same way that in 2020 if you looked at Reddit you would have thought Bernie would easily be the nominee and it turns out it didn't really represent the majority of the Democratic Party.
Is it similarly deceptive to see what's going on in social media with Trump
and UFC and think this is where the culture is right now? I mean, it's a great question. And I,
I, again, I struggle with prognostication. I like diagnosis better, but I I'll just say this.
I'm alarmed. I'm I'm I'm surprised by the fact that more progressives are not waking up to this,
or they're not seeing how important this is. I mean, George Wallace, the Alabama governor,
was very smart at using country music, radio demographics and markets, and then planned his
campaigns around those. You can convert these entertainment markets into powerful political constituencies.
This is what Trump is doing. And people used to look down on country music as a joke when Bush was using it, right? The liberal Hollywood set were like, oh, who listens to Brooks and Dunn?
Guess what? A lot of people listen to Brooks and Dunn and a lot of people like UFC. My own son is
obsessed with it, right? So, so I think I can't
say for sure, obviously this is going to be the deciding factor, but what I am kind of concerned
about is that it seems like everyone is sleeping on this. Everyone is just like not realizing he
has been at six events. It's unprecedented since April 23 to now he's been at six separate pay-per-view events.
I mean, I can't think I tried to kind of do research before this where there's ever been a president that's attended this many sporting events.
And I couldn't find a parallel. Obama, sometimes college basketball, you know, but but it's really on.
So it's like we don't really have a case, a previous case to test how effective this is going to be.
We can look at music with George Wallace and in other kind of ways in which politicians have used popular culture and entertainment to build their constituencies.
But I'm just I'm just kind of concerned about it.
I'm wondering why everyone is kind of missing this story.
That's a good question.
And one we're going to keep talking about.
We've been speaking with Professor Reese Peck,
associate professor at the City University of New York. We're linking to his book as well as the article. Reese, really appreciate your time and insights. Yeah. Thank you, David.
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One of the biggest signs that the MAGA crowd is worried about what's going to happen at
next week's presidential debate is that they're starting to downplay expectations and to set
a low bar for Donald Trump.
Why are they doing this?
The answer is so simple. When they set the expectations really low for Biden, he blows them out of the water,
not with anything insanely spectacular. But when you set the expectations that Biden's not going
to know his way on or off the stage, he won't be able to speak. He won't be able to give a
State of the Union. He won't be able to debate Bernie in 2020 or Trump in 2020 or any of it. And then he does it. It hurts their cause by setting
expectations so low. So now they're trying something different. Last night, Laura Trump,
Lara, Laura appeared on Sean Hannity's Fox News propaganda show. And the new thing is they're doing is they're
setting expectations high for Biden because he'll be on drugs like they're not doing it because they
think, oh, Biden's Biden's a very, you know, admirable and serious debate opponent. No, no,
no, no, no. They're saying Biden will probably be on the same drugs he was on at the State of the
Union.
And in so doing, they are setting it up so that if it appears as though Trump didn't
do that, well, obviously it's because Biden is on some kind of drug.
Think about how insane this is.
And Trump is not because Trump doesn't do drugs.
So here is Biden talking about Biden.
Here is Hannity talking about Biden being jacked up, hopped up, you know, all code words to
say Biden will be on drugs and people should be prepared for that.
The former president, you know, took on the challenge.
I don't think he'll regret it.
However, the Joe Biden that we're talking about tonight, I don't think will be the Joe
Biden we're going to see on debate night.
I think the Joe Biden we see on debate night is going to be the guy that we saw at the State of the Union. He's going to be all hyped
up, you know, hyper caffeinated, whatever it is, whatever it is. It's interesting that
70 percent of the country does like the idea of drug testing. I like the idea. They do
it to athletes. They do it to horses and horse racing.
Right.
I do it to presidential candidates.
I like the idea.
Let's even find more things we do to horses to do to presidential candidates while we're
at it.
Right, Sean?
70 percent of Americans apparently agree with me.
However, what do you expect for the debate?
Yeah, well, this is nothing new.
Of course, the cards have always been stacked against Donald Trump since the day he came
down the escalator. OK, anyway, so she goes into the
escalator ramp. They are pre spinning what is potentially going to be a debate disaster for
Trump. Now, I'm going to be careful here. I'm not predicting necessarily disaster for either
candidate. I think the most likely outcome I know this is so boring. I should be hyping it up and lying to everybody. The most probable outcome is that Biden goes and does his thing and is generally coherent when it
comes to policy, but has moments where he speaks quietly or stutters, which we know he has been
dealing with. I think Trump hurls wild allegations while making no serious policy discussions of any
kind.
Both claim victory after the fact, and it doesn't really move the needle very much.
I am so sorry.
That's like the most realistic and quite frankly, very tedious prediction.
But the Mago world is increasingly worried that this will be a disaster for Trump.
Now, just Biden doing OK would be a disaster because they've set the bar so low for months.
And so accusing Biden of drug use is a classic example of poisoning the well.
They suggest it's sort of like with 2020 election. If it looks like Biden won,
it must be fraud because Biden couldn't possibly really win. If it appears in next week's debate
that Joe Biden did OK, it's because he's on drugs. That's the only way that Biden's performance
would look better than Trump's. It would be because Biden is on drugs. And that's why
the framing of your opponent in this way, which, by the way, classic, classic characteristic of fascist rhetoric.
You frame your opponent in these completely imaginary terms in order to make it so that
if it appears as though you lost, you didn't really lose. It's the way that fascists and
authoritarians deny reality. They lie about the size of their crowd or other things.
They lie about their opponents. They lie and make themselves the arbiters and
source of truth. And fascism really thrives on the idea that you have an illegitimate enemy.
They can't win fairly. And therefore, any means that you can use to achieve a defeat of your
enemy are valid. And that's a big part of it as well. If your enemy cheats and is on drugs and
steals votes and is illegitimate, well, of course,
you should allow me to take the presidency by force by inspiring a riotous insurrection
because my opponent is illegitimate.
If my opponent were legitimate, there would be no one who would support that.
Right.
Well, maybe some in the United States would, but certainly far fewer.
And so when you argue that your opponent is incapable of winning fairly, you manufacture
consent to allow society to let you do whatever the hell you want.
Very dangerous, very, very, very dangerous.
And of course, the entire system is rigged against me as part of this.
And so when you see these tactics, it's a sign of weakness.
If you actually are coming from a place of strength, think back to Barack Obama's rhetoric
during the 2012 election
against Mitt Romney. It was, hey, I have a record to run on. I have better ideas than my opponent.
People are going to come out and vote and that's it. And had he lost, of course, I'm sure that he
would have would have accepted that with grace that Trump can only imagine. So they're laying
the groundwork to
dismiss a Biden performance next week. That's fine because they've set the bar so low. And of course,
that's part of the bigger groundwork that they're laying to argue that they won an election that
they lost if indeed they lose. And fascism at its core is for those who can't engage in fair debate
and ultimately resort to lies and manipulation to try to maintain or in
this case, seize back power. Hannity knows it might not go so well. Lara Trump knows it might
not go so well. And that's why they're doing it. And by the way, they're also not only poisoning
the well this way, they're trying to poison the well with Hunter Biden. And I want to talk about
that next. Seemingly not satisfied with the conviction of Hunter Biden,
Carrie Lake's latest tirade, where she is, by the way, using a blur filter to high heaven.
I've never seen anyone who uses blur filters the way Carrie Lake does. Carrie Lake now is saying
that there is probably way more crime to go after Hunter Biden for. She wants him prosecuted
over his laptop. She makes baseless accusations about supposedly illegal behavior with potentially
underage people. And it's all completely made up out of thin air. And pay attention to the exact
language she uses because she understands the risky nature of some of the allegations that
she's dancing with here. So listen to this morning about Hunter. We knew this. He is now seeking a new federal
gun trial after conviction, of course, because apparently rules don't apply for your last name's
Biden. And by the way, seeking a new trial, appealing Trump's doing all the same stuff.
Defendants often try to get a new trial or seek to appeal. Trump's doing it. Hunter Biden's doing it.
The real question is, why is she only talking about Hunter Biden doing it? But that's not the focus here. Let's hear
Carrie Lake. Well, it'd be nice if he got a trial for some of the other things found on his laptop.
I saw some very illegal activity happening on that laptop. And so maybe, you know, he's just
desperate searching for a different court. But I think that we didn't even try him for all that he should have been tried for.
Hunter Biden is a common criminal when you see what happened on that laptop and you see some of the debauchery and frankly, really inappropriate and most likely illegal behavior involving possibly underage kids, children, women.
It's frightening. It is. And David.
So you might notice their most likely illegal behavior involving possibly underage kids.
Let me say it a different way. I have no evidence of the illegal behavior and I have no evidence
of underage kids. That's it. That's all she has.
She has nothing else. And by the way, I do think it's important to mention when we're talking about
Hunter Biden and his laptop, private citizen, private laptop, the DOJ found no evidence of such
crimes, even though Carrie Lake insists it's most likely illegal. And very importantly for people who now
write in and go, David, do you have a reaction to the fact that the laptops chain of custody?
Who do I sound like? The laptops chain of custody is compromised. It makes anything you find on it
unreliable. And multiple individuals have handled the laptop. It raises questions about the
authenticity of things that you find on the laptop.
Doesn't mean anything there is necessarily staged.
But in particular, since there isn't evidence of crimes and we have no chain of custody
on the laptop, the obsession about the laptop is seeming like a little bit of this too little
too late stuff.
But there's a bigger picture here and you all know what it is.
I jokingly said when Hunter Biden was convicted last week or the week before.
Now, I don't I think it was last week.
I said, well, that does it.
I'm definitely not voting for Hunter Biden.
And of course, that's what they're trying to do here.
They are trying to poison the well when it comes to President Joe Biden with Hunter Biden.
It's a smear campaign.
And as I've said before, Joe Biden shouldn't interfere in Trump's prosecutions,
nor in Hunter Biden's prosecutions.
I'm pleased that Joe Biden has said, I'm not going to pardon.
I'm not going to commute a sentence.
I'm not going to get involved in any way.
That's the right action for Joe Biden to do.
But the entire obsession about Hunter Biden's private life and even potential crimes.
I mean, listen, he's been convicted.
He committed some crimes.
He has now been convicted.
He will now have to be sentenced in accordance with the law for that. But they have nothing left. And so they are trying to hurt Joe
Biden through Hunter Biden. If you push them, they'll go. Well, they were involved in crimes
together. They were involved in criminal money laundering or bribery. They've still presented
no evidence. And by the way, notice how little you hear about that. Every once in a while,
James Comer will say, well, we're looking at some criminal referrals.
You are barely hearing anything about the criminal bribery that they talked about for
years because there is no evidence of it.
I want I mentioned yesterday that it was Father's Day.
And I said, you know, to everybody who celebrated Father's Day, I hope it was good.
I want to play.
Here's a little palate cleanser,
a reverse palate cleanser. It's more of a gagger. I would. This will make you gag.
Donald Trump on Father's Day was interviewed by Brian Glenn, and he was asked about what's the
best part about being a dad. He has no answer. And if anything, what the answer that he spits out
does reconfirm for us is the total lack of
genuine connection to being a dad.
No question on this Father's Day.
What is the best thing about being a father?
What's the best part about being a dad?
And your and your son is on stage, by the way, loving the reception he's getting.
Don is getting some reception.
I have wonderful children.
They're great.
They're loving.
They're they're really good people.
They're good people. And having them around is just for me is a very good thing. Very good thing.
And we love our children. And it's Father's Day. And it's a good time to have good children.
Isn't that right? What is the most it's almost a joke. What is the best part about being a dad?
Well, my kids are really good and it's good to have good children around. No. Well, it's just the experience of seeing them grow up and go from
being babies to toddlers to preteens to teenagers to adults with desires and an impact on the world.
And no, nothing, nothing. It's just, oh, these are good kids. It's good to have good kids around
complete, complete and total lack of connection to parenting.
And this isn't the first time you might remember this really wacky video where he was interviewed
by Moms for America, who are very much, by the way, not in favor of what's good for America.
And he was asked about Barron and he said, well, Barron is very tall and he's doing a
good job, a job at what's good.
Tall guy to very tall. How tall is he now? I'd say six, eight. Oh, my goodness. He's
up there, right? And he's a great he's a great young man and he's a very good student. And
I think he's doing a good job, Barron. He's I think he's doing a very good job.
He's 17 now, Barron, right? Yes. He's doing a very, very good job.
And as usual, Trump's when Trump is asked about family or friends, what he says and
often what he doesn't say reveals so much about his shallow persona and his inability
to really connect with people in a serious way.
And we've talked about this before.
We don't need to belabor it, but an incredibly not so inspiring Father's Day message from the failed former president. All right. We've got a
fantastic, fantastic bonus show for you today. Thank your lucky stars every day. You're not
Dave Packman. Exactly. We are going to talk about the idea of warning labels on social media. Is that crazy?
Is that a nanny state?
Well, the US surgeon general believes that there should be warning labels on social media.
Also, we will be talking about the US lawsuit against Adobe for making subscriptions deceptive
and too difficult to cancel.
And I have some anecdotes actually to share about this.
And also, what about the Republican and Trump plan to end taxes on tips? Not even all Republicans
are in favor of this. I have thoughts I'm going to want to hear from you on it.
But what about ending taxes on tips? What does this do with regard to those tablets that ask you to tip 40%
when you buy, you know, something for five bucks? Uh, we will discuss all of that and more on
today's bonus show. Get instant access by signing up at join pacman.com. I will see you there. And
I'll also be back tomorrow with a brand new show. Make sure you're subscribed either to the audio
podcast on Spotify or wherever you prefer to get your podcasts or to the YouTube channel, be the same.