The David Pakman Show - BONUS FREEBIE: Trump to classify Antifa a terrorist organization, Luigi Mangione terrorism charges dismissed

Episode Date: September 20, 2025

-- On the Bonus Show: Trump says he's going to classify Antifa as a terrorist organization, Luigi Mangione's state terrorism charges dismissed, House Democrats weigh whether to support legislation honoring Charlie Kirk, 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 Donald Trump is designating Antifa as a terrorist organization, or at least so he says. One of the problems is that Antifa really isn't an organization. And I know that you can make the case that there are lots of loosely defined groups.

But Antifa really is even more loosely defined like, you know, proud boys, for example, you could say, well, what's the designation really? But Proud Boys is really much more of a group than Antifa, which is really at its core, anti-fascist. I don't I hesitate to even say organizers, Pat, because it's like it's a very unorganized kind of movement. Yes. And it has been associated with people who aren't simply protesting, right? who are maybe more unruly or willing to use tactics that mainstream leftists aren't willing to use.

But to be honest, it's not even something that crosses my mind all that often because they don't seem to be all that relevant in our political space. The only relevance they have is the relevance that the right tries to attribute to them. The other aspect to this that I think is important is if it were a designatable group and Trump did designate it as such, what does it? that even really mean? Because the way that we prosecute stuff is based on the actions and sometimes intentions, right? Like when you talk about hate crimes or possession with the intent to distribute, when you think about how the system works, you're really basing it off of the individual.

And I just don't even know that simply saying they carried this out as a member of an organization. I mean, maybe there's like a conspiracy angle or they could look at throw. throwing RICO in there, but it's not like totally obvious to me what the importance of that would be. Yeah. My sense is it's to tack on terrorism charges with the idea being if you can prove that they're associated with Antifa or whatever terrorist group, then you can amplify the charges. I wonder if the Trump administration is going to go that route and just call anyone that they

don't like who happens to be on the left part of Antifa in order to bring about those terrorism charges and up the ante with what they want to do here. Or if this was all just inspired by a reporter asking Trump whether he was going to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization, he thought it was such a great idea, posted about this on truth social, and then we never hear about it again. That could also have it. It's funny because you can lead Trump by asking questions really easily. This is sort of a cartoonish example, but to some degree, I imagine that if he went to Trump

And you said, sir, are you considering labeling bananas, you know, just like some completely random thing. And to a degree, I think just planting the seed, Trump is smart enough to, to not go absolutely not because he probably would assume I don't necessarily know everything about this to say no. So you could probably get Trump on some pretty silly stuff to go, well, listen, I would consider it. Oh, the way to talk to people about it. Absolutely.

The way to do it would be to start out by flattering him for a couple. of minutes, talk about such how great of a job he's doing, how he won the 2020 election and how he always gets a hole in one on every single hole that he plays in golf. And then you can move on to whatever you're trying to accomplish mainly by suggesting it, but also making it seem as though he came up with the idea. So you can talk about how you've alluded to this over the years. You've mentioned this and that and your social media posts with your big brain. Would you go the extra step in making Antifa terrorist organization or whatever the hell else they want to accomplish over there?

Would you consider designating your lawsuits against the fake news media, Nobel Prizes for literature? You know, I think I think that you could get him to go, well, listen, I think we should consider that. I want to talk to some people, but why wouldn't we? And that's why he's so easily manipulated by Putin and others were meant to believe that he's some great businessman, a terrific negotiator, but he's the easiest person to manipulate because he succumbs to flattery so easily.

It's sometimes hard to keep your murderers straight or alleged murderers, but I want to speak briefly about Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. He just had some state terrorism charges dismissed. And this is only, we are still in the pretrial motion phase of this particular case. It was a packed courthouse. There were protesters and supporters and all sorts of stuff. He is facing a ton of different charges here. The 11 state charges included murder and terrorism.

The federal charges carry the possibility of the death penalty. Lawyers have been fighting to get state charges thrown out entirely saying it's a parallel case. It's essentially double jeopardy. You're trying him twice for the same thing. The judge in the case ruled against it overall, but did say, did say that the two terrorism charges, murder in the first degree in furtherance of an act of terrorism and murder in the second degree as a crime of terrorism.

He wrote that those are legally insufficient. No evidence was presented to say that the point here was to terrorize the public to inspire fear or engage in a broader campaign of violence, nor did he conspire with an organized terrorist group. You know, I actually think I'm just following this superficially, Pat, I kind of do think that this could be argued to be an assassination alleged to inspire broader fear. Like, it certainly kind of had that effect where other CEOs of these healthcare companies were like, we need to ramp up security.

I don't know whether that's what Mangione intended. It's the sort of thing that would have to be proven in a trial. I'm not going to die on this hill. But at least colloquially, like, I don't know, it kind of did seem like it had a broader goal. Yeah, I see what you mean. With a terrorist attack like 9-11, for example, the goal was in part to instill fear in all of Americans, and that's why we believe it to be terrorism, right?

Because it's meant to change our behavior, make us feel not safe when we go to work or go out to eat or what have you. So clearly, this doesn't rise to that level because there's no way to argue that Mangione was trying to instill fear in everyone. But if you talk specifically about those healthcare CEOs and maybe. heads of companies who do similarly shady things to healthcare companies. Maybe you could argue that he was, in a sense, terrorizing them, but maybe not by the letter of the law. There are still nine state counts here and the federal charges. This is a guy who is going to be caught up

in legal proceedings for a very long time. Hearings on subsequent issues are scheduled for December 1st. Those are still pretrial issues, Pat. So we have a state. trial and a federal trial to get through. I haven't, you know, sometimes you hear that the federal charges are dropped if federal prosecutors believe that the matter has been resolved satisfactorily at the state level. Like, if this guy were to get life in prison without the possibility of parole, you might see federal prosecutors go. We don't really need to proceed because he's never getting out regardless. But sometimes they do anyway because if the state conviction were overturned for whatever reason, all of a sudden they would want to backstop that with federal.

But the point here is further down the line, we've got the federal trial, we're working towards the state trial. We have months until more pretrial issues are dealt with just for the state trial. Like this is this is going to be years. It's going to go on for a long time. And maybe the federal government in this case would actually want to prosecute despite the state charges because in New York state law, I don't believe there's a death penalty. Louis G. Mangione certainly isn't facing the death penalty, but federally, he is. So maybe they would

figure life in prison isn't good enough, especially with this Trump Justice Department. We don't know how long the case is going to drag on for, but presumably Trump will still be in charge. They may still want to pursue this case. And yeah, this will be one that follows us for a long time. I want to talk a little bit about Democrats being put in a genuinely sort of politically fraught situation. There's a resolution in the House of Representatives still controlled by Republicans. Hopefully that'll change in January of 27, but still controlled by Republicans. There's a resolution to honor conservative activist Charlie Kirk and condemn his assassination. Now, Democrats are trying to figure out what to do with this. And some lawmakers have said, I'm worried that we are being

set up. Because on the one hand, the resolution praises Kirk as a courageous American patriot who wanted to elevate truth and blah, blah, blah, personified the values of the Constitution and all of this stuff. And naturally, Democrats are like, I don't want to do that. We can be against murder, but not glorify this guy as anything beyond a hyperpartisan agitator. On the other hand, there are Democrats worried that if they vote against this, that it is going to be framed by Republicans as these Democrats don't even condemn the killing. And of course, we know that they do, Pat, but once you're explaining, you're losing and once

you have Democrats who will be asked, why did you vote against this bill? Are you, don't you think that we should be condemning the murder? And they go, I do think we should condemn the murder. But the bill went further and said that we need to honor him as an American patriot and all of this different stuff. So Democrats are actually trying to figure out what to do here. Yeah, absolutely, because you could boil this down into just saying, why didn't you support the bill that would honor Charlie Kirk? But of course, when you take a look at the language, it is more complicated than that. And it's a trick being pulled by Republicans. I think Democrats should hold firm if they disagree with the language, if they don't believe

Charlie to have been a courageous American patriot. If they don't believe that he elevated the truth, fostered understanding, or strengthened the republic, then they should vote against it. And they shouldn't just accept that this is a trick that Republicans are pulling on them and go along with it. Certainly, if there's legislation to condemn the murder or to condemn all acts of political violence, yeah, go along with it. There's nothing wrong with that at all. But to pretend that Charlie Kirk was a great guy on all these political issues and rewrite history, I'm not going to support that. No. And I think that there are some more astute Democrats who realize

that simply I'm voting forward or I'm voting against it is pretty unlikely to actually tell the full story or to even make sense as like the totality of the response to this. But the problem is that at the end of the day, Republicans are just going to make it about how you vote. And you know, people like Jasmine Crockett and others have been making statements and pointing out like what the deeper goals are. But you know that at the end of the day, Republicans are planning to make this simply, which way did you vote?

That's it. Yeah. And I don't think it's going to end here. I wouldn't be surprised if they try to turn Charlie Kirk into a Martin Luther King type figure, someone who spoke their mind and was assassinated in part because of the viewpoints they shared, they could make it seem like Charlie Kirk was someone that we should study in schools that maybe we should have a holiday for. I wouldn't be surprised at all if that's the approach that they took.

No, so we're going to keep an eye on it. And a lot of this stuff is very obvious posturing and it's not really going to achieve anything. And it's for virtue signaling and all of it. But we're used to that at this point in time. And I don't expect that to change it anytime soon. Slightly shorter bonus show today. We've got a lot happening at the studio, including some substack lives and different things that I'm recording for the next couple of days.

Very excited to have you with us today, including welcoming our newest members. We will be back tomorrow with a new show and a new bonus show.