The David Pakman Show - BONUS FREEBIE: Republican Rep says he's spoken to dead voters, Trump targets wind and solar

Episode Date: August 23, 2025

-- On the Bonus Show: Republican congressman says dead people told him they voted fraudulently, Trump says U.S. won't approve new solar and wind projects, African Union wants a map that better represents Africa's size, and much more... Become a Member: https://www.davidpakman.com/membership  Subscribe to our (FREE) Substack newsletter: https://davidpakman.substack.com/  Buy David's book: https://davidpakman.com/book 

Hey, everybody, David here. What you're about to hear is an episode of the bonus show. We do a bonus show every day for our members. And for a limited time, we will release one of the week's bonus shows on Saturdays exclusively for our audio podcast listeners. If you'd like to get access to all of the bonus shows, simply sign up at join packman.com. Here is that bonus show episode. Welcome to the bonus show. A Republican congressman is taking heat because he seemed to say that he spoke to dead people like that movie with Haley Joel Osman from when I was a kid. The sixth sense, exactly right. He, I see dead people. But I do think that there's a little bit of like a semantic or linguistic game that's being played here.

So here's Jeff Van Drew. I'm going to play the audio for you. I'm going to talk about it, but then we'll talk about the bigger picture of which is, which is really the subject of mail-in votes, mail-in voting that Trump wants to get rid of. Department buildings, there were multiple mail-in ballots sent to the same person. Sometimes people would have multiple ballots sent to different addresses, other times people who were passed away. These are real people I spoke to, large numbers of them, and it's indicative of what happened

around the country. So he says, sometimes people who passed away, these are real people. people I spoke to large numbers of them. And it's indicative of what happened around the country. Clearly, a literal linguistic analysis is he says he spoke to large numbers of dead people. There is no doubt that linguistically, that's what he said. Do I think he's saying he spoke to dead people? No. My interpretation of what he's saying, Pat, is that a lot of people he spoke to said they saw ballots arrive for people that are dead. That's what I believe. he means here. I'm actually getting charitable here.

I agree. I also think that's what he meant to say. However, it's still absurd because we have plenty of evidence showing that this claim having to do with dead people voting all across the country, it doesn't hold water. There's not a lot of tangible proof behind it. And usually what they cite is people getting sent ballots or sent ballot applications. That doesn't point to fraud, though, because if people don't actually fill those ballots out and send them in, then no fraudulent activity has taken place. It's absolutely true that sometimes there's a bit of a delay between the time when someone passes away and when they are removed from the voter rolls.

But as long as they, as long as a dead person's not voting because they're dead so they can't. And as long as no one else is taking that ballot and filling it in and return. it fraudulently, this is very similar to, you know, at one point, I think anyway, I wouldn't know because I never tried to vote in two places, but I'm pretty sure at times in my life, Pat, I was on the voter rolls in multiple places until moves caught up, but I went to the place where I really lived and I only voted there. Now, there are a lot of Republicans who would say, oh, you're registered in two places. Yeah, but I voted in one and that's it. It's not a it's not a huge deal like these things aren't a problem absolutely uh and the right remains unconvinced

by the data they want to continue making their arguments that there's so much voter fraud going on across the country and so they're going to continue to lie about it and all they really need is a particular instance of someone who's deceased having showed up on the voter rolls or people showing up on the voter rolls in different states to make their argument they can try to expand that one error across the entire country. And as you point out, sometimes it's not even an issue that affects the vote tallies just because you're registered in a couple places. That's not a problem unless you vote in more than one place. Yep. So Republicans are going to continue to lie about this issue. To some degree, it's worked for them because they've been able to try to restrict voting access

across the country whenever they hold power. And they have their eyes set on the 2026 midterms. I'm not sure if their efforts will be successful nationwide, really, because it comes down to the states having to choose what their voting systems are going to be like. But certainly when it comes to these red areas, places that Republicans have control over, they're going to move in this direction of getting rid of mail-in ballots and ultimately limiting people's access to the vote. The other thing maybe is just worth commenting on briefly. Sometimes when we hear from folks making claims like this, they say, dead people were getting multiple ballots. Now, I think that there's really two possibilities there.

You never hear about people who are alive getting multiple ballots. So I am suspicious that any dead person is getting multiple ballots. If they were, that would either just be a glitch that needs to be corrected. I don't know why someone would get two ballots. But honestly, Pat, you know what I think it is? A lot of people don't understand that you might get three ballots in a year. There might be municipal elections on some day in your town. would be a primary election, and then there would be a general election.

And so to someone who's just casually observing, they may go, I don't know, I saw this dead person next door. There were multiple ballots throughout the year addressed to their name. It's not that they got a stack of 10 ballots all to their name that someone filled out. There are multiple elections often, you know, all of these talking points when you dig down don't really make any sense. It could be that, but also Republicans are largely BSing when it comes to this issue. So maybe they feel as though, yeah, just saying that a dead person received one ballot isn't

enough. You have to exaggerate the claim even more. And the way that you do that is by saying that they got three ballots, four ballots. And apparently to them, that makes it seem even more convincing and also more of a pressing issue. All right. Donald Trump says that the United States will not approve any more solar or wind power projects. They are tightening federal permitting for all renewables.

secretary of the interior, Doug Bergam, just an electric personality and titillating speaker, if you've ever seen him speak. He now is going to have the final say. And of course, renewable companies fear that we are no longer going to get permits. These permits used to just be sort of the normal course of business. There would be no political reason that they are not approved. And Trump posted on truth social that these forms of energy are very stupid, that they're going to approve it, that it destroys things and it's bad and the whales get cancer and the noise kills birds and the blades and all this different stuff. I mean, listen, there's really not much substance behind this. The way I like to approach this is if we strip all forms of energy

of subsidies, where are we in terms of efficiency and in terms of negative externalities? And so, number one, we are still really early in solar and wind, and we already are getting favorable reductions in price per energy created. And so imagine another five years, you know, with a lot of oil and gas and this stuff, these technologies have been around decades and decades, if not even longer in some cases and some primitive forms. Imagine if we actually gave wind and solar and geothermal five, 10 years to really develop the technology.

My prediction is it's going to blow a lot of this stuff out of the water. But even though it's true, some birds are killed by wind farms. That's absolutely true. But what about all of the animals killed by oil spills, the pollution from burning gasoline and oil, the impact on the ozone. And as a result, the ozone depletion also causes harms to human health. Like, if they're really committed to the animal and human health analysis, you've got to do it with the technologies that pump carcinogens into the atmosphere, too.

Well, they'll just say that that's the cost of doing business. But of course, they won't apply that same explanation to the birds that are killed by the wind farms with many of these proclamations Trump makes. He's not willing to go in depth with them. He just likes to do his schick about how the wind farms are ugly and how solar energy doesn't work if it's not sunny out. The wind energy doesn't work if it's not windy. They treat this stuff as if it's like not a serious topic. And they don't expect people to delve any deeper into it. They just write it off as woke technology. They think that the oil and natural gas and

coal that we currently use is fine. And they're not willing to go any further with it. They're making it more like a culture war issue than anything else. I saw a very interesting video the other day. There's this guy, Rory Sutherland, honestly, I don't even know this guy's credentials. He's like an older British gentleman. And I see him on social media sometimes. And he's always weighing in about this business strategy or that marketing strategy. He said something very interesting about the resistance to electric vehicles. And I want to run it by you. He said, it's a thought experiment. Imagine that we had had electric vehicles for a hundred years. And someone came to you and said, hey, listen, I've got this other type of car, okay? It's a gas powered car. Now,

here's the thing. Instead of being totally silent, it makes a lot of noise. And when you press the car, the gas, the car vibrates. It's powered by the burning of something that is bad for the environment to get. And then it pumps carcinogens out into the atmosphere. Also, you've got to be careful if the car's in a garage, you can't run it. Don't pre-cool or preheat the car because in an enclosed garage, it'll pump out carbon monoxide and it could kill you. And also, by the way, it has a hundred times more moving parts that can break belts and radiator and all these different things and those are going to need service and it's got oil that becomes corroded. But you can gas it up in five minutes. Do you think in that environment, people would go, oh my God, get me

one of these gas powered vehicles. Of course not. Of course not. No, of course. It's just that we seem to favor gas powered vehicles because we've had gas powered vehicles for a long time. And there are some other things to it. Like I understand maybe people don't want to be spending their time at a charging station or maybe people like the vroom broom when they put their foot to the gas pedal. So there are some things that maybe people would view as better when it comes to gas power vehicles versus electric cars. But in the all in all, we of course know that electric cars are better all around. It's just the fact that we've had these gas powered vehicles for 100 years that biases us towards the gas powered vehicles. And so much of our economy is based around them.

And by the way, I'm not naive thinking that electric vehicles as they exist today are the be all end all end point of individual vehicular transportation. I think this is just the beginning. And if it's electric vehicles that continue, I think in 50 years, they will look very different, but then we're talking about hydrogen fuel cell and all these other ideas. So my question is, is it an improvement? Is it an improvement? And I've decided that it is. I've been, I've been very happy with mine now for, I guess, I guess seven years.

Wow. At this point in time, pretty wild stuff. All right. The African Union is backing a campaign to replace the Mercator maps that distort Africa size. Now, I don't know how many people are familiar with this, but the typical map that is used when you look at a map of the map of the globe, flat, not on a globe, just a flat map of the globe, is something called the Mercator projection. This does a number of different things. One is it makes Greenland look a lot bigger than it is. And so this is something that's been talked about before where people go, no, you know, on that map because of how it's projected,

if it looks like Greenland would be like bigger than the United States, but it's really not. And then the other thing is that it makes Africa look smaller. So there is now a move by the African Union to move away from the Mercator map and replace it with one that more accurately reflects the continent's relative size. And of course, the idea is that there are political implications here that by making Africa look smaller, it's diminished in terms of its economic and political significance. And, you know, we can sort of understand all the explanations. Here's my thing on this path.

I think I've researched. I can't say I'm an expert in this, but I've researched it a fair amount. I think that the only two-dimensional map that wouldn't distort something that wouldn't distort something is one that's basically a circle where you look down. You could look down from anywhere, but it's a. circle with the North Pole in the middle and all of the continent spreading out to the side. And Antarctica, it's kind of a weird way to think about it. Antarctica kind of goes around the edge on the bottom, if that makes sense.

Isn't that distorting Antarctica, though? Well, yeah, but I guess we would say we don't care about distorting Antarctica. Okay. It distorts it in its shape, but not in its land mass, I guess would be the point. But the point I'm making is I think most maps that are practical, I don't know how practice it is to have this north pole down circular. I just don't know. I think they all distort something. Yep. And so I don't really know what, what is the right map that should be used and also saying, well, just use a different map everywhere. I don't know if that is conducive to a shared understanding of what we're talking about if everybody's using different maps.

I don't know the solution here. Yeah. Well, the issue is when you take a sphere and try to project it on a two-dimensional plane, you have to distort something, right? Yeah. So it could be the shape of the continents. And that's exactly what happens when you use the equal Earth map that the African Union is pushing for. Yes, it does portray the sizes of the continents correctly. That's one thing that you gain from this map, but you do lose the authenticity of the shapes. So, for example, on the equal Earth map, although the land masses look accurate, Africa, for example, looks much more taller than it should be. I notice that. And that's not accurate, right? Right. So the Mercator map does preserve the shapes of the continents correctly. However, it does distort their sizes. So is the best path forward the equal Earth map? Sure, you can make that case, but also could we make the case that we should have all different sorts of maps? And this can be an opportunity to teach people about how, you know, different aspects of our geography. You can with one map show people the authentic size of Africa.

with other maps, you can use them for navigation a lot easier. Maybe it just makes sense to have a bunch of different varieties of maps in the classroom so people are aware of the different ways to view the world. And even maps that are unconventional, like those maps that are completely upside down to basically show that a lot of this is basically based on our interpretation and that there's nothing wrong with putting up map upside down, but we're not used to it. We're not used to that projection.

I think maybe that's a good path forward to do a bit of everything. From what I'm reading here, every map when you translate a three-dimensional sphere onto a flat map, you're going to have some combination of the shape will be distorted, which is what Pat's talking about, the area, meaning the size of elements will be distorted. The distance between elements will be distorted. It might look like two, it might look like there's a midpoint between two other locations and that's the distortion. Like in reality, that's not the case.

or the direction. In other words, the relative positioning of things. So like there's a map called the Winkle triple projection. Winkle triple minimizes area distortion, meaning size, direction distortion and distance distortion, but it does distort the shapes of things, right? That's like an example. So I don't know. There's sort of two questions. There's like a geographical question. And then there's, what are the political implications of distorting Greenland versus Africa versus whatever? Do you accept the argument that if Africa was portrayed on the maps to have its actual size, that the world would maybe pay more attention to the continent, invest more in, no, you think everything I don't.

And you know why? Even if Africa were bigger on the maps in the West, we mostly look at maps where they're kind of centered. The default is they're centered over the Atlantic. And so you see North America and Europe most clearly. And yes, if Africa were bigger, Africa would be a little bigger on that map. But I really don't think it would make a difference. I don't.

I've even seen maps here in North America where North and South America are the exact center of the map. Yeah. And they put Europe towards the right, Asia, towards the left. And like that giant landmass is broken up on either side of the. image. It just doesn't make any sense whatsoever, but it goes to show that, you know, we have a very U.S. and America focused viewpoint in a lot of our school systems here. Well, I want to hear from the audience. Where are the Mercator stands? And then are there, is there a contingent

of the audience that is in the triple winkle fan club? And then depending on how much follow up we get, we can, we can do a story about it. We could even look for some equal earth enthusiasts. That would be something yes and there might be some in the audience i suspect that there might be all right let us know what you think back tomorrow new show new bonus show