The David Pakman Show - The warning signs are everywhere

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

-- On the Show: -- Donald Trump lays the groundwork for declaring martial law over an election emergency as legal experts explain what powers he actually has -- Donald Trump's Iran ceasefire collapses as gas prices surge above four dollars and fighting resumes -- Donald Trump issues a Truth Social military directive that potentially including war crimes -- Trump administration officials defend deadly immigration raids and rising prices while rejecting responsibility -- Donald Trump benefits from important stories receiving less attention and misleading narratives spreading online -- Donald Trump's refusal to ever apologize strengthens his political brand and reinforces an us versus them mentality -- Democrats face growing pressure to stop extremist activists before they gain greater influence inside the party -- Donald Trump's escalating attacks on critics raise concerns about the future of independent journalism -- On the Bonus Show: Trump photo bombs the World Cup trophy ceremony, the Tate brothers are arrested on rape and sex trafficking allegations, and much more... 💳 PDS Debt: Get your free assessment & find the best option for you at https://pdsdebt.com/pakman 🧠 Try Brain.fm totally free for a month at https://brain.fm/pakman 💻 Sponsored by Private Internet Access: 83% OFF + 4 months free at https://www.piavpn.com/Pakman 🛌 Helix Sleep mattresses: Get up to 27% OFF at https://helixsleep.com/pakman -- Become a Member: https://davidpakman.com/membership -- Subscribe to our (FREE) Substack newsletter: https://davidpakman.substack.com -- Get David's Book: https://bit.ly/m/attention -- TDPS Subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/thedavidpakmanshow -- David on Bluesky: https://davidpakman.com/bluesky -- David on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/davidpakmanshow (00:00) Trump setting up to declare emergency (07:56) Gas prices surge as the Iran war continues (17:52) Trump issues a military directive on Truth Social (24:15) Trump officials defend his failures (37:13) The most important stories receive the least attention (41:03) Why Trump refuses to ever apologize (45:59) Democratic socialists could take over the party (53:11) Trump is a threat to independent media Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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reality that Donald Trump appears to be preparing to declare an emergency in advance of the November midterm elections. Now, this sounds terrifying. This sounds authoritarian. This sounds dictatorial. It is all of those things. But I also want to mention that I'm going to need someone to kind of look me in the eye and explain exactly what that would allow Donald Trump to do without inventing inventing any new powers as if he's writing some authoritarian fan fiction where he gets to do whatever he wants. So I want to talk through with you how this both is a red alert concern, but also without an understanding of what exactly the president is able to do, we don't want to be scared for nothing. Now, all of this goes back to recent comments made by former Trump White House lawyer, Ty Cobb. Fascinating name.

if you've seen this guy fascinating appearance as well. And Ty Cobb weighed in on Donald Trump's Thursday night prime time to the extent that 915 p.m. Eastern is prime time. Wade in on Donald Trump's prime time speech and said that it is clear what the point of it is. The point of it is to officially start what we've suspected for a long time that Donald Trump wants to do, which is declare some kind of an election, some kind of an emergency in advance of the midterm election as a way to potentially shield or prevent Republicans from getting absolutely blasted into outer space by voters, which then will subject Donald Trump to maybe the most

humiliating final two years of a presidency in a hundred years, probably, maybe more. Ty Cobb said, quote, that the speech is intended to add the predicate that he needs to declare an emergency at or about the time of the elections. And Ty Cobb, of course, points to Donald Trump's attacks on voting machines, on mail-in ballots, on voter registration, saying it's all rigged, it's been rigged all of this stuff. They've been warning about ICE agents at polling places and Donald Trump's wet dream of seizing voting equipment that goes all the way back to 2020. Now, we should take all of that very seriously, but, but because we want to be informed, please, we also want to think about what voting rights lawyer Mark Elias explained to us last week,

which is that elections are fundamentally run by the states. And so Trump can shout emergency, but shouting emergency doesn't let him suddenly take control of every ballot box in the United States. States still run their elections. States would have to cooperate. They would need to be forced to comply or have their own authority taken away, which seems like it would be completely against the law because the Constitution doesn't give Donald Trump any power to suspend an election because the federal government doesn't run elections.

Even if you declare an emergency, which will get in a moment to what that means, means and what does an emergency mean? Even during a war, the president wouldn't be able to suspend elections in all 50 states. Even if he declared martial law, he would not be able to suspend elections in all 50 states. Marshall law has been declared many times in American history, mostly by state or local officials, and there were still elections. Presidents didn't suddenly become dictators. Now, as far as, as whether people believe this is going to happen. If you look at the betting odds on Kalshi, if you kind of add it all up, roughly 62% close

to two thirds of the country does believe that Donald Trump will eventually declare such an emergency. So what we need to think about is how we would react and what would actually happen. What can Trump do? Trump can say, I declare a national emergency. He could do that. Trump could flood the country with conspiracy theories. He could send federal agents into communities and scare people from going to polling places. Will you be scared off?

I don't think so. I certainly am not going to be scared off. His supporters could confront voters. They could confront election workers. They could get themselves into very serious trouble activating. and being deputized by Donald Trump in this way. And Republican states could also try to impose the deeply flawed Save America Act. They could on their own implement the voter ID and proof of citizenship rules that Donald Trump wants to implement. They could do that. Could that affect close Senate races? Yeah, it could. Could it affect Ohio, Texas, Michigan? It could.

But an emergency declaration would not allow Donald Trump to seize a single voting machine. it would not allow Trump to have certain ballots discarded. It wouldn't magically create any new powers that don't currently exist. So we should prepare for illegal behavior because that's what it would take to act on Donald Trump's hypothetical emergency declaration. But we shouldn't pretend that every illegal order is going to succeed and be followed because states can and should refuse. courts can and likely would intervene.

Election workers can just keep counting ballots and reporting them. And federal agents and members of the military still are responsible for obeying the law. My biggest concern is not that Donald Trump's emergency declaration will do specific things. It's that it will cause chaos. And that's probably what Trump wants. Trump could create enough fear and provoke confrontations and convince millions of supporters that any Democratic victory is a fraud and people could get hurt. Election workers could be threatened and maybe worse.

And some MAGA supporters could destroy their own lives committing crimes for a man who doesn't give a damn about them and would never take a risk for them. If Trump does cross that line from abusing power to openly trying to cancel an election, it may break MAGA because enough of these clowns might go out and get themselves arrested. So we prepare. Mark Elias and other lawyers are doing it. But we also understand the limits of what it means to say, I declare an emergency. And it could get other people to act. We'll see how Republican governors behave and Republican secretaries of state and attorneys

general, but it doesn't do anything. When if and when Trump declares that emergency, it's going to be up to everybody else to decide, well, where does that put me? And hopefully, this might be naive, hopefully there are enough people out there still with some common sense that it's not going to send them into any kind of a tizzy that will affect the election. But states run elections And Trump can shout and sign an executive order, do whatever emergency declaration he wants. It doesn't actually do anything unless the states allow it to. We are now, as we are about to enter August, in a situation where despite promises from this president of cheaper gas, cheaper energy, cheaper stuff, and no new wars, we've got gas back above

$4 a gallon. We have American troops dead because of Donald Trump's optional and apparently illegal war and Trump's supposed peace deal with Iran almost immediately collapsed. The national average for gas is now over four bucks a gallon again, 86 cents higher than a year ago. Diesel, which affects the price of practically everything that's delivered by truck, is up to $5. $0.11 a gallon. And this is not a coincidence. We don't understand. Oh, Trump's president and this is happening, but we don't know why. Gas prices briefly came down when Donald Trump signed that beautiful letter, the memorandum of understanding with Iran back in June. The agreement was supposed to extend a ceasefire, open a 60-day negotiation window to get the final peace deal in play.

J.D. Vance went to Switzerland, not even 48 hours, bailed out as it became. became clear it was going nowhere. Trump celebrated as if we had all succeeded, let the oil flow and all of this crap. And now we are here weeks later. The ceasefire is completely dead. Trump says the agreement is over. The MOU is over. And the United States and Iran are back to exchanging strikes.

Threats of destroying everything and everyone. American service members are dying. Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz is threatened and slowed down. Oil markets are reacting exactly the way we would accept. expect them to. And the master deal maker who understands everything better than everyone has produced a deal that barely survived one billing cycle of your credit card. And remember what Trump told voters in 2024. And it's disgusting to even think back. And we knew it was a lie. And yet people fell for it. Millions and they voted for him. He promised prices would come down fast. He said that

starting the day he took office, he would make America affordable again. He said that gas would go down rather than up. It was in the $3 range and now it's over $4 again. It's up who knows what percent, 27, 30 percent, something like that. Now, of course, presidents don't set the price of gas. We correctly explained that when Trump was blaming increases on Biden, it didn't have much to do with Biden. When gas prices were low under Obama, it didn't have that much to do with Obama. As I have explained many times, presidents can really only do three things to affect the price of gas. And most gas price moves have to do with business cycles and black swan events and all of this stuff. But things presidents can do are they can declare a gas tax holiday. That'll briefly bring gas prices

down for a little period of time. You do a weekend. Gas prices are cheaper for the weekend. Okay. You can release oil from the strategic petroleum reserve, which Trump is doing, by the way, out of a panic. When Biden did it, it was evil. When Trump does it, yeah, make America great again. And number three, you can go to war with a country that either produces oil, refines oil or controls the flow of oil. Trump actually did that. Presidents do make foreign policy decisions. And they decide, do we enter a war? Do we influence, do we put in sanctions? Do we impose sanctions? Do we affect shipping routes and global oil supplies?

Trump chose to do that. And he has failed to end the war after saying it would last two to three weeks. We're in week 21. And American families are paying for that failure every single time. They fill their tanks or fill their oil, their gas tanks, their oil tank in the basement for home heating or even just buy stuff that's more expensive. And so when we think back to those people who wanted to drill baby drill, oil is sold on a global market. You can't no matter how much you drill in the United States, you can't destabilize one of the world's most important oil shipping routes and assume that we can just produce our way out of the problem. We're protected because we're drilling.

Trump promised energy dominance. He has delivered whatever the opposite of that is, vulnerability. higher gas prices trickle down from the gas station. Diesel raises the cost of transporting food, medicine, building materials, just about everything. And Trump's war pushes the price of energy up. All of this spreads and trickles down to the average American. We are seeing higher grocery prices, construction materials and consumer goods, because diesel is around five bucks because of what Trump did. He told us affordability is a hoax, but I'm also the affordability candidate. And he gave us unaffordability and he gave us war.

The peace agreement is effectively dead. The war is back on. Gas is above $4 and American troops are being killed. The promises of peace and prosperity have delivered death, chaos, and everybody is paying more for it. What is the goal right now? Iran still exists. despite Trump saying it has no Navy, no Air Force, no nothing, it still seems to because they're doing strikes.

Its government remains in power that the family member in charge of the regime has changed. They can still control and threaten and affect shipping routes. And Trump has never really explained what a victory looks like now. He goes, they will never have a nuclear weapon. Well, maybe they will, maybe they won't. I don't want them to. But I think Trump's war probably makes it more likely so far rather than less. And I don't know how more bombing gets us to whatever the objectives are right now.

Without an achievable endgame, it's another one of these endless quagmires in the Middle East. That's what Trump promised to avoid. But more importantly, we are in a situation where we can decide who gets to remain in power in November. And if you were thinking, I don't like Trump's war, but I still like my Republican. your Republican has rubber stamped just about everything that Donald Trump has done. Your Republican, if he or she privately opposes this war, almost certainly has said nothing about it. So, folks, it's time to hold the people accountable for the things they either have done or have allowed Donald Trump to do. I know Trump's not on the ballot in November, but the people

rubber stamping everything he's doing are. So if you're a Republican voter, consider whether you like that your Republican representative, if that's what you have, has allowed Trump to get away with all of this. If you're not a Republican voter, consider whether it's time to get involved with a race in your district, in your state, to try to remove whatever hairbrained Republican is in power and put in an alternative. We've got to do it. We have an opportunity. If anyone is deserving of total destruction this November, it's this president and this Republican party. If you're in debt before you decide another month of minimum payments is just the price of getting by, take 30 seconds and find out what your options are.

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when Trump signs an executive order, it's basically a memo. It's I would like someone to do this. Or when Donald Trump posts something to truth social, it doesn't really communicate an order. But Donald Trump is claiming that he has when he says, quote, every time Iran kills an American soldier, they will pay for that killing many times over. This directive has been passed on to the Secretary of War Pete Hegsseth, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Daniel Kane, and every leader in the military. Now, acute psychosis is not so much a clinical diagnosis in this particular situation. It's a description of the deranged disconnect from reality represented by the president announcing military retaliation through a social media tantrum and potentially

doing it with a little bit of war crime in there. Trump is describing warfare in this context as like a personal blood feud, which is basically what it's become. But the part I want to focus in on is the for every American killed Iran will pay many times over. What does international law say about that? international law doesn't require one-for-one retaliation. They killed one of ours. We kill one of theirs. If Iran lawfully or unlawfully attacks American forces, the United States might respond against

legitimate Iranian military targets. A strike that kills multiple Iranian combatants in the pursuit of a legitimate target is not automatically a war crime. It's not automatically illegal because only one American was killed, but six of theirs were killed. Trump's language is pointing to something that's a lot darker. If Iran will pay means killing civilians as punishment, attacking civilian infrastructure without any kind of concrete military justification, inflicting indiscriminate damage to run up some predetermined body count that Trump has bloodlust for, then we are talking about war crimes. the Geneva Convention bans collective punishment and reprisals against protected civilians.

If you make an attack with the military, you have to distinguish between civilians and combatants. And expected civilian harm can't be excessive compared with the military advantage that the attack would give you. The problem here is that not only is Trump talking about many times over, like the revenge formula, just last week, he said, we're going to go after civilian infrastructure. We've heard Trump talking about we're going to get power plants. We're going to get bridges. Republican congressman Keith Self has even said, we have to go after civilian infrastructure.

If you put all of that together, it's starting to sound like war crimes. This is starting to sound like an administration that is saying we are going to do collective, out of control, punishment. And the most alarming word of Trump's post might be that word directive, because that means this isn't just another Trump truth rhetoric bluster that doesn't go anywhere. He is saying, I have given an order as the commander in chief to Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, and also the chairman of the joint chiefs. Every military leader has been advised. This is now what we are doing. American service members, I think it's important to remember, are legally obligated to reject unlawful orders.

The president told me to do it is not a defense if you are intentionally attacking a disproportionate number of civilians that are legally protected. The truth is that the truth social post could also become evidence. If unlawful attacks now follow the fact that Trump said that and said I've issued a directive, I've selected targets and we're anticipating civilian casualties, that could be used to determine is Donald Trump punishing Iran collectively rather than trying to achieve any military objective? And it's sort of funny to even go military objectives because it's not even clear what the objectives that this entire thing are at this point in time.

The real promise was I will end wars and definitely not start any new ones. And now he is publicly fantasizing about multiplying the body count whenever an American soldier dies in the war. He started. This is effectively what happens when the commander-in-chief views military power not as a tool of national security, not as a tool of deterrence, but as an instrument of personal vengeance. American troops face greater danger. Iranian civilians become targets of Trump. And Trump casually walks towards war crimes and more atrocities, one social media post at a

time. I am thrilled that when Trump tried to suck our NATO allies into this thing, it's at this point months ago, two to three week war, yet we're 21 weeks in and this was months ago. When Trump tried to suck in NATO allies and go, listen, you've got to come to our defense because we kind of screwed up the straight of Hormuz. They didn't do it because that was outside of their Article 5 responsibility for shared defense. And Trump lost it. Good for them. Because that was the right move. What we are seeing now is disgusting. And here at home, you have to see how Trump's suckups and dilettants are trying to defend the failing economic record. Let's talk about that next. These are some truly sick MFers that Trump has working for him. These are some of the

sickest people who have ever been in American government, I believe. Donald Trump has assembled an administration of people who can look directly at the damage that they are causing and blame absolutely everybody else as I almost knock my microphone off the table here. ICE agents kill people. Just blame Democrats because they criticized ice. Gas is up over four bucks a gallon again say Donald Trump has saved us billions of dollars. Here is a clip of Tom Holman saying he predicted that there would be bloodshed and he was right. Except the bloodshed is because of ICE. Take a look at this.

Is there any other procedure protocol on the ground changing stops? There's already, you know, the director of ICE decided that, you know, there needs to be at least one body camera and a same. And again, I'm a big supporter of the body cameras and that's more body camera can tell that they all happen. That's the only change. Let's be clear. You can talk to men and women at ICE all you want. It comes on to one simple fact. These people fail to comply with law enforcement.

Even some of the major chiefs in this country who don't necessarily agree with this administration says you always comply with law enforcement. But the hateful rhetoric that ICE isn't a real law enforcement agency, I see these signs that they will resist. ICE are the, you know, let's abolish them. They're fascists. When you keep that hateful rhetoric for a year and a half, there's going to be that percentage or that left population that it's going to be emboldened to take action because they're not real in law enforcement. See, I should resist them.

All they had to do is simply comply with law enforcement. If you don't like what law enforcement did you, then go to the court, sue, call the ACLU, do whatever you want to do. But you should always comply in law enforcement. If they did, they'd be alive today. Now, I'm not going to comment on the investigation itself and wait for it to play out. This is about complying with law enforcement and a lot of the negative hateful, and I said this a year ago, if a hateful redic doesn't stop, there will be bloodshed. And unfortunately, I was right.

Now, I'll tell you something out, it's not over yet. Unless they keep attacking and miscommunicating what ICE does every day, call them Nazis and comparing ICE to the Nazi regime. Are you kidding me? Notice what Tom Homan is doing here. He predicted bloodshed. He helped oversee the operations. that produces the bloodshed.

And now he goes, I was a prophet. He might as well have said, I will be directing ICE to create bloodshed because that's ultimately what he did. We have double digits of people fatally shot by federal immigration officers during Donald Trump's second term. Two men were killed by ICE agents just recently. It seems as though they weren't even the people ICE was looking for. Even if they were, it wouldn't have been right to kill him, but it seems they were

the wrong people. So when Tom Homan goes, unfortunately, I was right. He wants you to imagine anti-ice protesters attacking innocent federal agents. The bloodshed has been inflicted by ice and then comes the threat. Stop criticizing us. Stop telling people to resist. Let ICE enforce the law and the bloodshed is going to stop. Profoundly and disgustingly authoritarian. God. Government agents use deadly force and the government responds by blaming people who were criticizing the use of the deadly force. And it's a very clear message. Speak out against what we're doing. God forbid you act against what we're doing in a constitutionally protected way.

Anything that happens after that is your fault. And then we move from an absolutely disgusting lie about violence to an absolutely ridiculous lie about prices. Here is Doug Bergam, Secretary of the Interior, as gas prices are up over four bucks a gallon, again, Trump is a great leader who knows how to get prices down. Take a look. Got to start with the tough stuff, and that's the price of gas at the pump. One of the few things that Obama said that I agreed with was it does affect elections, and it is up.

Now it's still way below the $5 plus that it was under the Biden administration, where it went up in today's dollars up to $5.60, but it is moving in the wrong direction. Is there any way? I know it's all based on what's happening with the Strait of Ramuz and Iran. Is there any way to work around Iran, that is, to pump more, to develop more pipelines in the Mideast, to get around the Iranian hump, if you will? Well, yes, David and Jackie, there certainly is. And I had meetings earlier this week with leaders from Saudi Arabia and UAE, both of those countries are looking at major

infrastructure projects to try to look at land-based pipeline and other solutions to be able to ship their product and get it onto the world market. But here at home, of course, under President Trump's energy dominance policy, the United States producing more oil than we have ever produced, largest producer in the world of oil,

now the largest producer of natural gas in the world, largest exporter of LNG in the world. President Trump's energy dominance policy was always about selling energy to our friends and allies so they don't have to buy it from our adversaries like Iran or like Russia. And as you saw, the prices plummeted last year when President Trump was elected, they will go down again under President Trump's policies. He's the one leader that knows how to get prices down. It's increased supply. And his policies are allowing

American innovation to do that at record levels. We are back beyond $4 per gallon nationally. higher than a year ago. Diesel above five bucks a gallon. Prices are not down. Prices are up. And a huge reason is Donald Trump's disastrous war with Iran. The collapse of the very brief agreement that reduced tensions has spiked prices again. Straight of Hormuz is a complete and total mess. He campaigned on affordability. He said under my watch, energy prices will be cut in half. Americans are paying more. Fuel is up, home heating oil is up, and we're in the middle of another war and Americans are dying. Doug Bergam's defense is effectively ignore the numbers you see on the gas pump, ignore your gas bill, ignore your oil bill.

Trump knows how to lower prices. What? And it gets even more insulting as Bergam argues that billions of dollars are being saved because Donald Trump is in charge. Take a look. Back in for the same price. of already saving Americans billions of dollars because we've got business leaders like President Trump driving our energy policy.

That's fantastic. Saving Americans billions where? Come on, dude. American households have reportedly spent more than an extra $70 billion on fuel since the start of the war, which of course is now into week 21. Every truck delivering food is paying more for their fuel. The airline is paying more for fuel and these costs reach everything Americans buy. It's like the tariffs.

They are passed on, mostly to the consumer. Trump is not a business leader brought in to clean this up. He's the president whose decisions helped create the crisis. It's the defining strategy of the Trump administration. Create a disaster, announce you predicted it, but blame someone else for it, and then get credit when you partially fix it, even though big picture, it keeps getting worse. just a bonus one, Peter Navarro on beef prices. They now are going all in on beef. And he goes, it's the cartels that are the problem. Well, let's talk about that in a second.

The trends are down, which is not to say we don't have some issues. Beef has been kind of the holy grail of me trying to figure out the best ways to get it down. So we're cracking down on the cartels that run the beef processing. Things like that. So just a lot of things going on there. Got it. There is a legitimate issue with concentration in meat processing. That's real. Four massive companies control most beef processing in the United States. That it gives them huge power over the ranchers, over the consumers. Antitrust enforcement is overdue. We're not doing it. We have the legislation. We have the laws in place. We just don't do it. But Peter Navarro is taking a legitimate concern to distract from the real reasons that beef prices are so high. The American

Cattle supply is near its lowest level in decades. Years of drought made feeding cattle more expensive. And it pushed ranchers to reduce the size of their herds through various means. So rebuilding those herds takes a long time. You can't manufacture cattle overnight. And then Trump goes and he adds more pressure. He does tariffs. He does immigration crackdowns, which affect agricultural labor and labor for these meat producers. and a war that drives up fuel and transportation costs. So Navarro wants credit for cracking down on cartels, which they're not actually doing it. We should, but you're not actually doing it.

But it's not even really the reason that prices are so high. And a lot of the reasons that prices are so high have directly to do with Donald Trump. So Tom Homan does it with bloodshed. Doug Bergam does it with energy prices. Peter Navarro tries to do it with beef prices and Donald Trump does it with the entire country. They assume that if they speak this way to you, they assume you're stupid, that if you sound confident, it's kind of like the Ben Shapiro thing, speak quickly and confidently and people will believe you. They assume if they repeat it confidently enough, lie and lie and lie, people will stop believing,

I'm seeing the beef prices, I'm seeing the gas prices, I'm seeing all it. Don't believe that. Believe what Bergam and Navarro and Homan and certainly Trump tell you. I don't think the American people are falling for it. And if you look at the polling on the state of the economy and the direction it's going, it seems evident that they are not. Now we've got to punish them at the ballot box. There are a lot of VPN companies out there and almost all of them make the exact same promise.

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I'm far from needing to replace it. Go to Helix sleep.com slash Pacman for 27. percent off site wide, a discount they are only offering to my audience. The link is in the description. You know, sometimes the stories that impact what we believe aren't really the stories that we're choosing to go and think about and read about. And I've been thinking a lot about this lately. We'll do a segment, for example, on abortion rights or voting rights or labor organizing

or some other issue that's affecting millions of people. And afterwards, I'll hear from people in the audience who say, I had no idea this was even happening. I haven't seen anybody else covering this. And we see it in the algorithm too where some of these conversations just don't get the same level of distribution. And the people who are already interested often get fed these stories. But reaching people who don't yet know is a lot tougher. And when the issue affects millions of people, it's really important. If you weren't already looking for certain stories, the odds you get fed those stories. by the algorithm is close to zero.

Now at the same time, sometimes it feels like everyone is talking about the same celebrity feud or the latest social media outrage. And somehow those stories do seem to find all of us. And it's really easy to just focus on what's in front of us instead of looking for what might most affect us. And the reason that this happens is because the internet doesn't just show us what's happening anymore. Increasingly, these algorithms decide what will be amplified and then what stuff is going to fade into the background, even if it really affects your day to day life.

And most importantly, what'll just keep you scrolling? What'll keep you on these platforms? The most important question, I think, isn't just what shows up in your feed. It's what about all the stuff that never even gets the chance to compete for your attention in the first place. And after a while, that starts to shape more than just what we see. It impacts what we believe matters and what we talk about with other people in the real world and sometimes even how we understand the world around us.

And this is one of the biggest reasons that I wrote my book, pay attention. The book is not about, oh, we've got to throw our phones in a pond and delete all of our social media accounts or that stuff is not realistic. And technology, frankly, has done a lot of incredible things. What we need to do is understand the systems that are competing for your attention every single day. Once you understand, oh, here's how these systems work. You'll be able to recognize, ah, my attention is being guided here.

I'm not the one picking what I'm paying attention to. And once you know that, once you understand that, you can make much better informed decisions about what's actually worthy of your time. And you can become aware of what's happening while you're scrolling. Ah, I understand why I'm being fed this and not that other thing. I believe that's one of the most important forms of media literacy today, not let's reject technology. Let's understand these technologies well enough so that when we use them, we are using them instead

of being used. If that sounds at all interesting, if you're on these digital platforms, if you have kids who are on these platforms, I would really appreciate it. if you preordered my book, pay attention. The pre-orders make a huge difference. They help the books reach more readers. They encourage libraries to stock them. They encourage Barnes & Noble to get more copies.

They support independent work like the kind that I do. And it only exists because of your support. You can pre-order at Davidpackman.com slash attention. I've got signed copies available, limited number. audio book, ebook, I hope you'll check it out. If you create videos online about a particular topic, news and politics, investing, science, history, whatever, sometimes you're going to get things wrong. You're going to say something that turns out not to be true. Maybe you misunderstood something. Maybe you misremembered a fact. Maybe new information came out after you recorded the

video. Maybe you're expressing an opinion and someone just disagrees with your interpretation. All of this stuff is inevitable. The real question isn't, are you or am I ever going to be wrong? It's what do you do when you figure out you were wrong? Think about one of the biggest reasons Donald Trump has become so difficult for many people to take seriously outside of his hardcore supporters, of course. It isn't just Trump gets stuff wrong. Everybody gets stuff wrong.

It's Trump never admits it. matter how overwhelming the evidence is, the answer is he was right. Everyone else is lying. The media is fake. The experts are corrupt. And if you're trying to get Trump to correct something, you're an idiot. You're worthless. And you see the same thing with a lot of online creators.

They build an identity around I will never back down. If someone tries to correct them, it's an attack. If there's a disagreement, it's proof everybody else is biased and I know the truth. Now, I'll admit the people who play that confident character, for a while, that sort of confidence can look like strength. Eventually, it starts looking like insecurity. People aren't actually looking for someone who is perfect and always gets it right. What audiences want is someone who is trying to get it right, is always going to play it straight

with their audience and is going to acknowledge when they get it wrong. My approach has never been this I'm never wrong thing. I always try to say, listen, here's my understanding based on the information I have today. Based on the facts I'm aware of, here's my perspective. If I later discover I got something wrong, I'm going to learn from it. I'm going to correct it and I'm going to move on and hopefully I'll do better the next time. I don't think that that's weakness. That's the process of learning.

And in fact, I would go further. I would argue that the people who build lasting careers in. just about any field. Is it accounting? Is it medicine? Is it teaching? It's not the people who never make mistakes. That's an impossible standard. It's the people who when they make mistakes, they acknowledge them, they find out what led to them. They fix them and they keep doing the valuable work. What I find really unfortunate and sadly, it's just too common right now in the creator ecosystem is people who respond to mistakes in one of two really unhealthy ways. The first one is they make a mistake and they decide, oh, I'm finished.

So this, this, they stop posting. They stop creating. They're embarrassed. And so they stop participating, even if they have valuable things to contribute because they think, oh, I looked like an idiot. Very bad idea. You looked like a human being. Making mistakes is unavoidable.

The only thing people will really remember, I think, is how you handled it. The second response is the exact opposite. Someone gets something wrong. They never acknowledge it. This is the Trumpian model. They spend the next six months inventing reasons why they were actually right all along, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Ironically, that is usually far more damaging than the original mistake ever was.

One of the qualities I admire in creators isn't that they know everything. It's they're curious enough to keep learning. They're humble enough to admit when they got something wrong. And they are disciplined enough to keep creating content, correct. themselves when they can and making better and better content. I think that's how you build credibility. That is not the MAGA brand of alpha. We never back down. We never apologize. It is not about never making mistakes. You've got to demonstrate that to get closer and closer to the truth is what is most important, even if you got something wrong and you took a sort

of circuitous route back to the truth. It can't just be about protecting your ego. I think this makes a huge difference. Let me know what you think. Who do you think is in this? I'm never wrong camp. Who do you think is in the, I just want to get it right, even if it requires correcting myself camp. I want to hear from you. The David Packman show is an audience supported program. And the best, most direct way to support the show is by becoming a member at join packman.com. You'll get the daily bonus show, the daily commercial free show, and plenty of other great membership perks. Get the full experience by signing up at join packman.com. Come.

Watch the whole video. Listen to the whole segment before you send me hate mail. You know when it starts that way. It's going to be good. Listen, the Democratic Party is showing the early signs of the same disease that destroyed the Republican Party. I've got so many friends on the left texting me and saying, David, we're not going to allow the same thing to happen on the left that Trump did to MAGA, that's right, that Trump

and MAGA did to Republicans, are we? Republicans back in 2010, their leaders, laughed at the Tea Party. Conspiracy theorists, their far-right internet trolls, they're not going to do anything. And then the Tea Party took over local organizations, threatened primaries, built their own media universe, and eventually were part of a process that gave us Donald Trump. The left and Democrats can't make the same mistake. there is a small group of far left extremists gaining influence inside youth groups and party organizations because they spend all day online organizing and enforcing ideological purity and attacking anyone who disagrees. Now, let me be very clear.

I am not talking about people who want Medicare for all and affordable housing. I want all that stuff. I'm with all that stuff. I'm a social Democrat in the style of Northern Europe. Of course I want those things. These are folks who treat political warfare like a full-time job. And when they can't build their own coalition, they attach themselves to popular causes. They take real concerns about health care, housing, police misconduct and use them to sell

what is actually an authoritarian worldview. Now, there are things in DSA, for example, Democratic Socialists of America that are good and that I agree with. But there's also some stuff in there that I think doesn't make any sense. I saw their new platform promises a country where you have no debt. You pay no rent, no mortgage. You receive publicly funded housing, publicly funded retirement, food, education, energy, medicine, transportation.

And it sounds incredible because it is increasingly. How would they create it? Government ownership of the largest corporations and entire industries, universal rent control, abolishing police and prisons and abolishing the Senate and replacing our political system. Some of these ideas are reasonable to a degree. For example, I support universal healthcare, and I've talked about four or five ways that we could get to it. I want affordable housing, and I've done a dozen interviews with housing experts on what wouldn't, wouldn't work to get us there. I support progressive taxation. We need to collect more taxes from the very

rich. Voting rights have been hurt in this country. We need police reform. So there's elements of this that are great and any social Democrat like me will tell you we got to do that. But you bundle it together and this fantasy in which capitalism, private industry and major parts of the government simply disappear, most Americans don't want that. Most Americans understand that there is no way that you could impose that without extraordinary authoritarianism. My one hesitation about confronting this now and why I went back and forth is the midterms. Publicly exposing the rot could make moderate voters think the entire Democratic Party has been infected.

But I don't think silence is really going to hide it. I saw a crazy thing from the weekend where there was a college Democrats convention. which I was actually invited to participate in and I couldn't make it. Hassan Piker was dressed like Mao and I guess destiny tried to show up and he was banned from entering allegedly because the Mao dressed Piker didn't want him there. Republicans are going to put these clips everywhere. Like people seem crazy when they see this stuff and they are going to take abolish the police and abolish borders and abolish prisons and play the monoloupe for six months.

If I were an average voter with no knowledge of these online personalities, which most of these people are, most people don't follow this sort of thing. They're busy living their lives and working and doing all this stuff. If I were an average voter with no knowledge of these online personalities, I would find these images and a lot of this stuff very alarming. So I, as I said last week, and so many of you agreed with me, Democrats must act now and intelligently. The centrist don't really do anything.

Make very milk toast fringe suggestions that you don't even really push for. Not working. Okay. This other thing of like end everything. It's a sort of destructive accelerationism. That's also not going to work. So I think that what we need here are no apologetics for dictatorship, no, No apologetics for authoritarianism. No harassment. No anti-Semitism. No allowing online factions to decide which liberals may enter the room.

You know, would I even have been allowed at that college Democrats thing? They invited me months ago. I don't know. I mean, I couldn't go. So we didn't find out. So we just need normal people to participate, join. join local committees, attend conventions, get involved with state parties, and let's turn the DNC into something that works.

Many reasonable people doing a little can defeat both the centrist do nothings and the hardcore extremists who would get nothing done. Republicans believed they were going to control the extremists. They were like, ah, we got these people under control. The extremists took over the party. Democrats can still prevent that outcome, but we've got to get them to get things under control right now. I've said before, I've never been a Democrat.

I don't care about the Democratic Party beyond who offers the better candidates and usually it's Democrats over Republicans. But we've got to make sure that we don't allow that party if it is the vessel, at least for now, to something better than what Republicans are offering, to be high. This is about let's include, but not allow any extreme faction to take over. And that is what I think makes the most sense. Can it be done reasonably and without self-inflicted damage between now and the midterms? I don't know.

I hope so. The Trump White House has decided that criticizing the president should come with a price. And the target on independent voices is. now bigger than at any point in my career. You've seen some of the attacks on me. The White House media offenders list attempts to interfere with my first book, potential attempts to interfere with my forthcoming second book, smears amplified by Don Jr. and Caroline Leavitt and Steven Chung.

All of that stuff coming and being reinforced by the MAGA ecosystem. I'm not going to relitigate every incident. The larger danger is the system taking shape around them. It starts with publicly designating someone an enemy. That tells millions of supporters and government officials and businesses and tech platforms. We have identified acceptable targets. These are acceptable targets. Then comes the contamination campaign.

You associate the critic with something sinister. Is it communism? Is it terrorism? Is it treason? Whatever will work. Accuracy doesn't matter. They want publishers, advertisers, guests, casual viewers to wonder, is it worth the trouble to associate with Pacman or whoever, right? Eventually, the target starts wondering the same thing.

Is this worth it for me? Should I soften my critiques a little bit? Maybe there's a journalist that drops a story. Maybe a publisher avoids an author. The government never has to formally ban the speech, usually, because fear makes people self-censor. And we've seen a lot of examples of this throughout history. Vladimir Putin's Russia, brands independent journalists and outlets foreign agents, stigmatizes them as enemies before even needing legal and financial pressure to suppress them, but then they use the legal and financial pressure as well. Victor Orban's government in Hungary vilifies critical media and steers state resources to friendly outlets and allows political allies to totally dominate the information system, drown out the critical journalism. American institutions,

are stronger for now, but institutions only survive when people defend them. Authoritarian control usually starts through accumulation. We do a blacklist here, a little bit of economic pressure there, a bogus investigation, make people get lawyers and spend money, a threatening government letter. Critics start to think, man, maybe I should just shut up. And this is way bigger than me. We must support whichever independent journalists and creators and authors and organizations we value. I would love it to be me, but there's a lot of people out there.

It's a big ecosystem. Subscribe to them. Buy their books. Share their work. Donate if you can. Subscribe if you can. We have to make these attacks counterproductive. The biggest way to get these people beat back from the path to attacking us.

is to make it so that when they attack us, we get bigger and we get stronger. We have to make the attacks counterproductive. If someone has millions of followers and access to lawyers, they may be able to withstand the pressure and the attacks. A local reporter, a tiny creator, a whistleblower, an ordinary citizen may not be able to do that. In my new book, pay attention. I actually explain how propaganda and information overload weaken our ability to to recognize the process while it's going on. You get too far down the road. You turn back and you go,

damn, I should have noticed that when it was starting. I hope people will pre-order the book. Limited signed copies available. David Pakman.com slash attention. We expect the administration will come after this book. They came after my first book. My show was way smaller then. Okay. If you value this program, subscribe to the YouTube channel, follow me, whatever, et cetera. But we need to not play games with this because when people play games, you end up 10 miles down the road and going, how did I get here? I thought it was just a couple of steps. And then you're 10 miles down the road. And we've seen it in authoritarian countries. We've seen it in Latin America. We've seen it in Eastern Europe. We've seen it in Africa. And it's happening here in the United States. So we've got to turn that

around. And we have to the best way to diffuse the attacks is for every time they, do it for it to make the people being attacked even stronger. Now, on the bonus show today, the Tate brothers again are in trouble. Rape and sex trafficking charges. The manosphere. Terrifying stuff. Donald Trump and Gianni Infantino brutally booed before Trump tried to crash Spain's celebration at the World Cup. Totally humiliated. We will talk about that. and much more on today's bonus show, which you can get instant access to by signing up at join packman.com.