Adam Schiff (7:23)

And are you the biggest state? So through every single list of the grant. Well, by the way, with. With that wind up, by the way, I understand that you were an aspiring fiction writer. I see why. Oh, yeah. Well, I understand your view that you can cut half of the agency and it won't affect people, people's health or their water, their air. That, to me, is a big fiction, Mr. Zeldin, you. And forget about cleaning. I have to think, Mr. Zeldin. I think, Mr. Zeldin, if your children were drinking water. If your children were drinking water In Santa Ana, Mr. Zeldin, maybe you wouldn't be so cavalier about whether there was lead in their water. Maybe you would give a damn instead of coming in here and suggesting that any grant that takes lead out of the water must be waste, fraud or abuse. Because. Because you need. Because you need the money for a tax cut for rich people, because you're totally beholden to the oil industry. You can give. You could give a rat's ass about how much cancer your agency destroyed. The gentleman's time has expired.

David Pakman (8:36)

You know, the thing that's tough about watching this is Adam Schiff is really trying. You know, we've had Adam Schiff on the show, and I've had some conversations with him. You can say a lot of things about Adam Schiff, but he genuinely cares about the things he's talking about. He genuinely is concerned about regulatory decline and crumbling under Trump's director here in the epa, Lee Zeldin. And the thing that is sort of a brick wall that Adam Schiff can't get around is that Lee Zeldin doesn't give a damn. Lee Zeldin is just. Lee Zeldin is not actually concerned with the substance of what Adam Schiff is talking about. Lee Zeldin just wants to do Trump's bidding and ease regulations as much as he possibly can and make it so that Trump's corporate cronies can make as much money as possible without being constrained, as they see it, by regulations. That's what this is really about. And so if you're Adam Schiff, you can't. No matter what you say, you can't get Lee Zeldin to care. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse also was getting in on the action during this hearing, and it's just all pathetic.

Adam Schiff (9:45)

You're insisting on the fact. I'm insisting on the facts. That's exactly what I'm insisting on. I'm insisting on the facts, and I now have three different versions of the facts that travel. Department of justice lawyers working on this, every saying, you're not going to waste dollars just because you insist on EPA lighting taxpayer dollars on fire. The American taxpayers, they put President Trump in office because of people like you. They have Republicans in charge of the House and Senate because of people like you, because you don't care about 99% of this story. You don't want me to go through the list of all the evidence of waste and abuse. No, what I want you to do in conflicts of interest, what I want you to do, qualified recipients, you don't care about. What I want you to do is explain why the Department of Justice lawyers representing EPA in court under a duty of candor, have said that everything you've just said isn't true. That's what I want.

David Pakman (10:44)

And of course, they only have one real narrative right now, which is we've all come in descending like angels from heaven, to find and root out all of the waste, fraud and abuse the fraud. We still haven't found a single perpetrator of that fraud. Fraud is a crime and we still don't have a single person they've identified as committing fraud, waste and abuse. You know, what's wasteful to a degree is in the eye of the beholder. But we know what this is really about, which is pushing a political agenda primarily, and it's very transparent. While MAGA diehards keep chanting we don't care every time someone points out the cost of Donald Trump's policies, international tourists are quietly delivering the one response that matters in Trump's America, which is they're not coming to the United States for vacations. We have new data now from the World Travel and tourism council. The U.S. is on track to lose over $12 billion in international travel spending this year. That's a decline of 7%. It's not because suddenly the sand on the beaches is no good. It's not because the theme parks got rid of everybody's favorite ride. It's because the rest of the world sees what the United States under Donald Trump has become. Expensive, hostile, and unstable. And they're voting with their passports. Of the 184 countries surveyed, the US is the only one with an absolute decline in international visitor spending. The According to the WTC CEO quote, the US has firmly got a We're not open, open for business sign right now. And that's correct. Germany has updated its travel advisory after several Germans were detained at the U.S. border. Canada, which used to be exempt from most of the short term visa requirements, now has to register and submit fingerprints for any Visit longer than 30 days. That's new. Under Donald Trump, you've got Canadian Airlines canceling routes due to declining demand. Vehicle traffic at land crossings is down significantly from Canada. So these are not anecdotes. This is an economic warning siren. The largest travel economy in the world is bleeding visitors. And maga's response is always, so what? We don't want sissy Europeans and liberal Canadians coming here. Well, one of the things that you have to understand is that overseas visitors spend seven to eight times more than domestic tourists when they come to the United States. Canadian visitors spend three times more than Americans when Canadians vacation in the United States and we're losing a bunch of them. So when conservatives and right wingers brush this off as, oh, globalists are scared and liberals are whining, they are not understanding the math. This isn't about politics, it's about dollars. It's about cities losing tourism jobs. It's about entire regional economies built on foreign travel drying up. And you can't own the libs with a bankrupt hotel. That is what decline looks like. And it is completely self inflicted because of Trump's policy of punishment, restrict and intimidate. He's making visiting the US feel like a gamble. What will happen at the border? What, how will I be treated? And for what? Because of unfortunately for TRUMP in the U.S. there are many other options for vacations and a lot of people are choosing not to come at all. So MAGA can pretend this doesn't matter. That's what they usually do, just like they pretend, you know, Trump's deficits don't matter, his tariffs don't matter, legal attacks on the press don't matter. But eventually this is going to get pretty expensive. So they might not care yet. Oh, it's only a 7% decline. But what about when the flights are empty and the cities are quiet and the economic fallout starts hitting red state economies that rely on foreign dollars just as much as the blue states. You really can't isolate yourself from the world in the way that Trump has done and antagonize allies and expect everybody to still show up and and spend money. So this is a real problem. We started getting an inkling of this two months ago. We now have more firm data. It is a major problem for the economy and it's going to become a major problem for Trump as well. We've got a great show for you today. Let's take a very quick break and continue right after this. One of our sponsors today is CB Distillery who millions of people turn to for safe, potent CBD. CB Distillery was founded in 2016 by a group of Colorado natives who believed people have a right to high quality, fairly priced US grown hemp derived CBD products. CB Distillery has targeted formulations meant for sleep, stress, mood, focus, pain. They even have CBD for pets. All made with the highest quality clean ingredients, no fillers, just premium CBD. With over 2 million satisfied customers and a 100% money back guarantee, CB Distillery is the source to trust. Their products are carefully distilled by expert botanists and rigorously tested. No artificial additives, just quality US grown hemp. And for a limited time my audience can get 25% off your entire purchase. And visit CB distillery.com and use promo code PACMAN. That's CB distillery.com promo code PACMAN. The link is in the description. Specific product availability depends on individual state regulations. The David Pakman show is an audience supported program and on that basis we depend directly on you for the sources of revenue that keep the show going. I invite you to sign up@join pacman.com Get a membership get the full David Pakman show experience with no commercials every day and access to the daily bonus show. If you like this show, my prediction is you would like the bonus show because it's just more show. Sign up@join pacman.com and you can use the coupon code. It will end soon. All one word no spaces. It will end soon. To save bigly off of the cost of a membership, let's stop pretending a huge chunk of the MAGA base does not care about freedom. What they really want is a daddy to tell them what to do and to tell them that they're being good boys and good girls. Someone to tell them what to think, who to blame, why everything wrong in their life isn't really their fault. Despite talking about personal responsibility, they've got a whole cast of characters you can blame if things aren't going well. Democrats, Marxists, anarchists, globalists, the whole thing. And where we find ourselves today in 2025, they have that in President Donald J. Trump, now back in power, doing exactly what they always wanted. Cracking down one, lashing out, throwing out the rulebook, throwing out the law book and telling you who you can blame for all of your problems. Is it China? Is it immigrants? Is it Joe Biden? Is it socialism? And the people that are cheering this on, they're not confused voters. They're not fighting for liberty. They are knowingly backing a strongman because that's actually what they want. I talk in my book the Echo Machine about how one of the greatest sort of wastes of time is talking to these MAGA people about their principles, as if they really care about their principles. The truth is that they will abandon them immediately when they are inconvenient. And while they claim to want liberty and freedom and all of this stuff, they want certainty. They want control. This often pushes them to conspiracy theories. If certainty and control mean less democracy to get there, fewer rights for people, a president who does whatever he wants, they're fine with that. This is backed by real research. Studies show that Trump's strongest supporters score highly on authoritarian traits, blind loyalty to authority, something they ascribe to the left. But they actually fit the bill for hostility towards outsiders, political outsiders, ethnic and religious outsiders, nationality outsiders, and an obsession with what they've identified arbitrarily to some degree as traditional values. Sociologists have studied this and they found that these traits traits not economic anxiety, as we were told. These traits are the best predictors of remaining loyal to Donald Trump, and especially when he abandons the principles that he set out. So, in other words, a lot of these MAGA people didn't turn to Trump because they lost their job or they were worried about Chinese trade. They turned to Trump because they like power and they want someone else to use it on their behalf. And right now, it's Trump. This is, to a degree, by the way they talk about how they're against identity politics. This is, in a sense, white, conservative, Christian, male identity politics. I know that that doesn't encompass everybody, but to a degree, that's the orientation of this. And the support isn't evenly spread. White men and women are most likely to show these authoritarian attitudes. Women of color, least likely. Why? It's because this isn't really about populism. It's about preserving old power structures. Trump promises to bring back the way things were or the way some of his followers remember things being. And for some people, that's all they need to hear. And so Trump is already acting like a dictator because he sees himself as one. Just look at what's happened so far. Trying to use the Alien Enemies act to rush deportations without due process. Supreme Court sort of blocked parts of it, maybe, but does Trump care? I don't know. Trump's response was, we're going to figure out a way around it, and we'll say it's an emergency and these are terrorists, and we're going to just do whatever we want to do. He fired civil servants that weren't loyal enough. He's demanded personal loyalty pledges from federal employees. He's floated suspending habeas corpus and says he has the right to do it if that's what he wants. So this isn't a theory. These are no longer campaign promises. This is the current President of the United States acting and behaving like an authoritarian. And the MAGA base loves it. Because what they want is a strict father to tell them what to do, what to think, who to hate, and who to go and bully. We look at polls from last year, and they show that nearly half of Republicans who believed. Half of Republicans believed the US Needed a leader who would break the rules to fix things. They didn't mean we need to reform the system. They seemingly meant bypass Congress, ignore courts, silence the media, and punish enemies. And that's what they are getting right now. And Trump is using the presidency to do what authoritarians do, consolidate power, crush dissent. And institutions so far are bending the guardrails, are breaking. The base is cheering, and they love it. So this was never about democracy. This was never about liberty or freedom. It was about obedience. And the reality is Trump supporters never really wanted a president. They wanted a ruler, a daddy, someone to punish the others and to make them feel safe. They say they love freedom, but what they love is domination, as long as they are the ones dominating other people. So we now are in a situation if the rest of us don't wake up to what that means, if we keep pretending this is Partizan politics as usual, which some people out there are still doing, we're going to lose more than just elections. I hope we start winning some elections, but the risk is that we lose way, way more than that. And some of the related ways in which this is playing a role I want to explore now. We have a public health disaster in the making right now, and it's all because of Trump's authoritarianism. I'm going to explain it to you right now. May 2025. Measles, hepatitis, salmonella and listeria are spreading in the United States. You might be saying, David, sir, with total respect and tears in my eyes. What are you talking about? I haven't heard of that. The reason that you haven't heard about it is that the cdc, the agency that's supposed to keep us informed and help doctors and warn parents and give guidance, is barely saying a word. There aren't comprehensive updates going out. There's no alerts and health warnings. The CDC's newsletters have stopped. Their social media channels have gone nearly silent. They've missed publishing their own flagship disease report, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, for the first time in over 60 years. So you would be right to ask, what the hell is going on here? What's going on is that since Donald Trump returned to office in January, his administration has slashed thousands of jobs at the cdc. Entire teams have been fired, including the people who handled public communication, social media, health alerts. The CDC can't post to its own Facebook account, to its own Instagram account, because the people who had the passwords are gone. And the kicker is that even when the CDC does try to get a message out, it has to be approved by you know who. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The vaccine conspiracy guy who has somehow ended up as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. So instead of telling you what, what foods might be contaminated? Where is measles spreading? How do you prevent it? Get a vaccine? How to protect your kids from hepatitis? The CDC's social media is posting vague fluff about Bobby Kennedy Jr's travel schedule. It's not a mistake. This is the plan. This is what they do. Step one, sabotage the agency. Look at the Postal Service. Republicans hated that the U.S. postal Service was a functioning public service. So they defund it. They cut routes, they put Louis Dejoy in charge, who seems to not even like the Postal Service, force them to prepay decades of pensions. And then you go, look, it's not working. Let's privatize the thing. That's not incompetence, that's proactive sabotage. Same thing with public transit. Gut funding to public transit, complain when the trains and buses aren't on time, and then hand giant contracts to private rideshare companies that don't serve low income neighborhoods. And I don't care about accessibility or the irs. Republicans gutted the IRS for years. They laid off auditors, they froze hiring, they made it harder to enforce tax laws. And then they pointed at rich people not paying taxes and saying, look, the IRS is broken. Let's cut even more and make it easier for the richest to continue avoiding taxes. Of course it's broken. You broke the thing. And finally, they do it with public schools. Starve them of funding, overload them with standardized testing and various requirements, force them to fire teachers, and then say, these schools really aren't working. Well, let's do charter schools, let's do voucher programs, let's promote private schools. So that's the process. Step one, make it work like crap. Step two, complain it's not working. Step three, say we shouldn't even be funding this. Let's just privatize. So they're doing the same thing with public health. Gut the cdc, make it nonfunctional, turn around and say it's bloated, it's useless, let's shut it down. And the most depressing part is that voters keep falling for it. People will get sick, some will die. As long as their side wins, a huge part of the country will cheer it and go, yeah, the CDC was just so bad on Covid. I'm glad it's failing. Americans will choose to suffer American as long as they think it's angering the left. And this is how democracy breaks down. It's how a country lets public health collapse in real time. Because there's a political movement, maga, that is more interested in controlling the message than protecting people's lives. So we've got to live with the consequences. And people keep falling for it. Now that's the Republican model. They're applying it federally. What can you do? I don't want to encourage people to abandon red states, but the blue, well funded functioning states have their own versions of the CDC that they can't do everything the CDC does, but they can at least work to keep people informed. Listeria, salmonella, measles, whatever the case may be. So I'm not saying go and move to a blue state, but there is no doubt that in a sense blue state governments are a sort of bulwark against the insanity that we are seeing at places like the cdc. Are you considering moving? I'd love to hear from you if you are guys in my audience, I know you're tired of the chafing with traditional underwear. Our sponsor Sheath makes the most comfortable boxer briefs I've ever worn. If you're sick of the boxers that are too loose or the briefs that are too tight, sheath is for you. Sheath underwear is designed with two special pouches in the front. Keeps everything separate in its own compartment with extra confidence that you will feel throughout the day. Keeping things separate and comfortable. No more sticking and chafing. I was skeptical about the dual pouch, I admit it, but it is game changing. Everything stays where it is supposed to be extra useful when working out at the gym extension. And even if you don't want to use the pouches, you don't have to. It is still the most comfortable pair of underwear I have ever owned. It will blow your mind how soft and stretchy these are. Made with moisture wicking technology to keep you dry. If you were ready to take underwear comfort to a new place, a place you didn't even know it could go, head over to sheath underwear.com/pacman and get 20% off with the code PACMAN. That's sh a thunderwear.com/pacman use code PACMAN for 20% off. The link is in the podcast notes well, they blew up a fertility clinic with a bomb. This actually happened in the United States in 2025. An explosion tore through the American Reproductive Center's fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California. On Saturday morning. A car bomb. A car bomb detonated in the parking lot behind the clinic. The roof collapsed, debris scattered across five lanes of traffic. Glass shattered in businesses that were blocks away and the FBI says this was not an accident, that this was terrorism. One person is dead, believed to be the attacker. Four others were injured and authorities say that they recovered an AK47 style rifle at the scene. There are even reports of possible live streaming of this entire fiasco. The clinic ended up closed for the weekend by chance. The there were no patients inside because it was a weekend. The Embryos and the IVF lab are off site so that spared what could have been an unthinkable additional horror. But this was really not luck. I mean, this was a failed mass casualty attack thanks to it being closed and embryos being stored off site. This was less tragic than it could have been. The clinic is not a random building. This is a place where people go to build families, where couples go if they're struggling with infertility. It's a place of science, it's a place of medical care. And someone blew it up. So this is not theoretical anymore. They will blow you up. If you've spent the last few years hearing warnings about rising far right extremism in the US from shows like this, this is what I've been talking about. Fertility clinics, LGBTQ centers, synagogues, mosques, schools, libraries, FBI offices, power stations. It's getting to be a very long list. The data from CSIS is that, as I've told you before, nearly all ideologically motivated terrorist plots and attacks in the US in the last many years come from the right wing of the political spectrum. In 2022, right wing extremists were responsible for somewhere between two thirds and ninety percent of all terrorist attacks and plots within the United States. So this is not really about one deranged person. We've talked about the radicalization pipeline. It includes right wing media, it includes social media echo chambers, it includes politicians who kind of wink and nod at violence. And they talk about vermin, they talk about purges, they talk about taking matters into their own hands and second amendment solutions. And then stuff like this happens at a fertility clinic in California which gets bombed. And if you think it stops at clinics, it's not going to. Because if you can blow up a fertility center and have parts of the media shrug, this didn't get that much attention. What won't some people feel entitled to do? They don't want you to start a family your way. They don't want ivf, they don't want reproductive freedom. They don't want bodily autonomy. They want control. They want to make the decisions. And they're proving to us that they're willing to use violence to get that to be the way others operate. And so if you're still waiting for some dramatic sign that this has all gone too far, this is it. They blew up a fertility clinic with a car bomb. And so the next time someone says, oh, this stuff would never happen, David, you're being hyperbolic. Show them this story, because it already did. And they feel justified in taking this sort of action. Ted Cruz, who, by the way, was not born in the United States has decided now that the Constitution is bad policy. Its inconvenient policy rather than the supreme law of the land. In a recent statement from Cruz on Fox News, he said, I think birthright citizenship is a terrible policy. We're going to look at the clip, but just think about the words he's using. It's kind of cute, right? It's bad policy. Birthright citizenship is not from some executive order or from bureaucratic rule. It's in the Constitution, the document that Cruz and his party treat like it's carved into stone tablets from Mount Sinai, except when it's inconvenient. And here is Ted Cruz on Fox News explaining why it's just bad policy.

Ted Cruz (34:14)

Ship is terrible policy. It is right now.

David Pakman (34:18)

Sorry, I think we cut off the beginning of that part of the argument is here.

Ted Cruz (34:23)

That is the absolute heart of the argument. And I think birth, birthright citizenship is terrible policy. It is right now current US Law before the Trump executive order, that if an illegal alien is here and, and she gives birth to a child, that baby is instantaneously a US Citizen. The problem is that's an incredible magnet for illegal immigration. You see people crossing the southern border, you see pregnant women crossing the southern border explicitly to give birth, birth in America, so their baby can be an American citizen. We also have this phenomenon called birth tourism, where you have people from foreign countries, people from China come to the United States when a woman happens to be eight or nine months pregnant.

David Pakman (35:04)

Yeah. You know, what Ted Cruz won't mention is that while, while that, of course, anecdotally has happened, and it theoretically could happen, immigration officers are trained to look for that. Now, you could say, well, they're not going to catch everybody. Some women don't look that pregnant. I get it. But the point is, you're not allowed to do that. Ted Cruz acts like, just because you can come here and there's birthright citizenship, people do this, do this all the time. If it is suspected that that's what you're doing, you are not allowed into.

Ted Cruz (35:34)

The country and come here to give birth. So the baby has American citizenship. That is an abuse of our laws. And so I have long since supported ending birthright citizenship. In fact, I filed legislation in the Senate to end birthright citizenship. And that's what President Trump is trying to do as well.

David Pakman (35:52)

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, guarantees that anybody born in the United States is a US Citizen. It was passed after the Civil War. Part of it was to stop Southern states from denying citizenship to formerly enslaved people and their children. And now because Republicans think immigration fear mongering is good politics. And maybe for them it is. I don't know. They're openly attacking that part of the Constitution. But this is much bigger than Ted Cruz's opinion because this is about how the entire MAGA movement slowly and publicly wants to erode constitutional protections. But they want to also pretend that they are defenders of the founding principles and see the Constitution as the law of the land. The irony, by the way, is, is that Ted Cruz was born in Canada. His entire eligibility to run for president is based on his interpretation of constitutional law. But now you're. Maybe it's you, maybe, maybe it's, well, not me. I was naturalized. Maybe it's someone else. Other people's citizenship is bad policy, according to Ted. So to recap, the Constitution is sacred unless it protects immigrant kids. Citizenship by birth is bad policy unless it applies to Ted Cruz and the MAGA movement is in favor of the Constitution, except when the Constitution gets in the way of their agenda. Sort of like if during the civil rights movement, a senator stood up and said, you know, I think the 13th amendment is bad policy. That's the amendment that ended slavery. Imagine calling that bad policy because it interferes with your political goals. That's the level of constitutional cherry picking that we're dealing with. You can't claim to worship the founding document and then treat it like a menu where you go, I like these and not those. Like it's doordash. Right? You don't get to opt out of the amendments you find inconvenient. It's the Constitution. Now if you don't like it, go look at getting a another amendment passed to undo it. I don't think there's any political will to do that. Mark Wayne Mullen is a Republican senator. He's a particularly vile and disgusting individual. And he says that the release of Biden's cancer, like they released it into the wild. The release of Joe Biden's advanced prostate cancer is a calculated distraction. He says, take a listen.

Mark Wayne Mullen (38:19)

It's interesting though, the timing of them releasing the cancer. Right. I said this while we were talking, kind of tongue in cheek while ago, but it seems like since her tapes were released, they were like, hey, wait, maybe a good time to distract the American people and talk about his cancer. Because we know that cancer has been there for a while. And then when you start talking, of.

David Pakman (38:39)

Course we don't know that. As we've said before, we've spoken to urologists, we've Already talked about it. Is prostate cancer typically slow moving and by the time it gets to stage four metastatic, it. It's been a while. That is often the case, but it is not always the case. And particularly with the Gleason nine score on Biden's tumor suggests very aggressive cancer. It is not standard of care to do a PSA blood test for men after age 70 or 75. Biden's in his 80s. If Mark Wayne Mullen has some evidence to present, I want to hear it. But absent that, this is pretty irresponsible.

Mark Wayne Mullen (39:23)

Speculation about the tapes themselves. I, I think as a special counsel he went as far as he could. But then you had the left media that was, that was completely covered it up. And I. You can.

David Pakman (39:33)

They attacked Robert Her.

Mark Wayne Mullen (39:34)

Of course they did. But you start looking at even Jake Tapper and who has now wrote a book on this. He wrote a book pretty quick. So that means that they knew this was being covered up for quite some time.

David Pakman (39:48)

That doesn't make any sense. The book was written quickly, meaning they knew his cancer was being covered up for a long time. Now I will be the first to tell you, if it is the case that Joe Biden knew he had prostate cancer last year and he was maybe already getting hormone treatment and maybe that treatment was responsible for some of his behavior on the campaign trail, as far as side effects go, we should know that and at some point maybe we will. At the same time, if they don't have evidence for that, how long can you insist without being required or asked to show some evidence of what you are saying? These people are being extraordinarily irresponsible. And of course they are furious. Furious that there might be sympathy for Joe Biden and his diagnosis. So that's where we are. And it's all pretty vile. I'm not going to lie. Data brokers are continually collecting extensive details about your online behavior. 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Go to incogni.com/pacman and use the code PACMAN for 60% off that incogni.com/pacMan for a huge 60% discount. The link is in the podcast notes. All right, it is time for Friday Feedback where we review what is on your minds. Love to hear from folks via email. You can write to info at David Pakman Dotcom will We will sometimes highlight Tik Tok replies, comments on The Spotify podcast, YouTube comments, Instagram comments. You never know what will be featured. Let's start with an individual who goes by the name Devalos Michael, who says it's insane that anyone would critique RFK for wanting to make things safer. There's no harm in looking into these things. He's not making it illegal to get a vaccine. It never will be. What he is doing should be applauded. If he finds no wrongdoing, then great. What does he have to gain from this? This is sort of how the Grift works. RFK positions himself as a brave truth teller just asking questions. He even recently said, oh, you shouldn't take medical advice from me. But he's just asking questions. But the questions have been answered over and over by actual experts. And one of the greatest grifts that exists is saying about something that we've already gotten answers to. Why am I not allowed to ask questions about this thing? I'm just asking questions. We should praise that. And the idea is that he's just doing this harmless investigation for the betterment of everybody, but it's actually sowing distrust in public health for clout and in some cases for cash. Although maybe not in RFK specific situation. He's not risking his life to save yours. He's building a brand. He ran this anti vaccine nonprofit that raked in donations and would get booked on major platforms. And, you know, now he's Secretary of Health and Human Services and he, he continues to amplify dangerous ideas all under the guise of asking questions. So yes, critique is not only valid, it's necessary. We love critique because the issue is that when you give conspiracy theories, you know, a suit and a famous last name, people mistake them for leadership. They mistake them for thought leadership and guidance on issues where we've already gotten the answers from people who are actual experts. So we, we don't want to just do the fallacious appeal to expertise. We want to actually find subject matter experts and review what's been studied and what has been determined. You know, the fluoride stuff is a great thing. Listen, there are tests associating higher fluoride with lower iq. And I'm just saying, if you want fluoride, great, But I don't know about putting it in water systems or. Because it's very, it seems to be very dangerous. Never included in that, just to take the fluoride example, is that those studies looked at places where the naturally occurring level of fluoride in the water is 50 to 70 times what we would ever consider putting in water systems. And it just, it takes you into this whole, wow, why can't we explore this? Why haven't we asked questions? Well, we have. We have the data. We've explored it already. And that. That's where we are. All right, let's go next to Beth Moore. Beth says, dude, you do nothing to help your country. You were lost. I could stand. I guess she means I couldn't stand. I could stand two minutes of this video. Please stop taking money to butcher the efforts of this presidency. The people involved are good people. You know, I'm trying to expose corruption. I'm trying to call out authoritarian grift and drift. I'm trying to hold elected officials accountable. If that doesn't help a democracy, then what does? Okay. Whether the people in Trump's administration are good people or not, it's not a defense against bad actions. You can be polite at a dinner party and still support policies that might rip families apart or enrich the ultra wealthy or gut civil rights or flout the rule of law. You know, the bar cannot be. They seem nice. We're not grading vibes here. We're trying to grade governance. And if pointing out that I'm evaluating action makes me lost to you. You seem to be completely off the map, Beth. So I would suggest that you maybe reorient yourself a little bit to the way that we do things here. Here on the show, Todd o' Brien wrote on Facebook, the Democrats don't have a populist little David. So the only way a Democrat could ever win back the White House would be corrupt elections. That's the left's only choice at this point. This is where we are now. Accusations of election fraud as a default when you lose. But the reality is that the Democrats have won the popular vote. What Is it seven of the last eight presidential elections? I might be getting that wrong. So, if anything, the real rigging is a system where the loser still gets to be president because of something called the Electoral College, something I'm against also. You know, I take issue with this idea that only a populist can win because that assumes voters want simple slogans over policy. And maybe some do. But as I've said before, populism is really more of a rhetoric than anything else. It's not a set of ideas. Bernie and Tucker both espouse populist rhetoric on policy. Their ideas couldn't be more different. And so the emotional appeal of populism I don't find to be particularly good. Trump used it to sell tax cuts for billionaires. Bernie used it to say we should have universal health care. It's not the same. Ok, so. So this argument that populism is the only way to win, I just don't know. And to Todd, you know, if your ideology survives only by denying election results, you might be in a cult, my friend. All right, Marcus, on the subreddit said, can anyone admit Trump has only done one good thing, the border. Marcus Wright's border crossings are down 94% since he took office. I agree he has effed up on everything else. But regarding the border, does anyone agree he has done good here in reducing the crossings? It's the only thing he's done. Am I right or am I misguided? So here's the. I guess here's the question. I would have the idea that Trump's border policies were and are effective really depends on what you're measuring and then what you're willing to ignore. Did the reported number of illegal crossings drop recently? Did it drop at some point during COVID Did it drop at certain points during Biden's presidency? Yes, the number of reported illegal crossings has gone up and it has gone down. And at one point, it was down partially to title 40 due to title 42, global shutdowns, pandemic, all these different things. If you acknowledge that border crossings being down is not necessarily because of something the president has done, although that can certainly be a factor, to me, it seems that we should really be evaluating immigration a little bit more broadly. If you do believe that Trump's policies of cruelty and dysfunction reduce the number of illegal crossings, if that. That's what you see in the data and you say that makes sense to me. You know, when Trump said only three people crossed illegally in March or something, I don't know anyone who believes that, but if you believe that, then I guess Trump gets partial credit. But then he's also got to get credit for the chaos and for the areas he has failed to deal with immigration on, you know, child separations, the ICE raids, chaos at ports of entry, detentions with no due process, deportations with no due process. You've got to do the whole thing. Okay? And if to some degree Trump's, Trump's responsible for the decrease in the illegal crossings, if we believe that, then he can get some credit for that. I don't see a problem. But then we've got to evaluate immigration in sum, total. Sum total. And in total, it's actually been one of the greatest fiascos. So if we just zoom out and we go, okay, overall, has the immigration situation improved or worsened under Trump? Arguable reduced number of illegal crossings, which were three months in. And you've got to look at that track record over four years. But arguable reduction in illegal crossings in the first three months. Okay. And then four months, on the other hand, complete flouting of law and order, ignoring legal court decisions, talking about ending due process, ripping people off the streets. In total, I think we're worse off than when we started. That's my view. OK. Mick Priestly says on YouTube, Imagine being a Christian and then going berserk because the Pope follows the teachings of Christ. Yeah, it's almost like some people don't really want a Pope. They want a culture war mascot. And the moment that the Catholic Church got a new pope who talks about refugees, who talks about poverty, who talks about peace, climate change, maybe suddenly the Pope's a Marxist rather than the messenger of Christ, that they wanted every. And this, by the way, every time the Catholic Church liberalizes just a tiny little, little bit. And we've covered a number of popes. Now every time that this happens, all of a sudden they go, oh, this is, this is not, this is not really Christianity. And of course, maybe the problem isn't the Pope following Jesus. It's that a lot of American Christians are following their political party instead of the teachings of Jesus. That. That's what I would, that's what I would propose to them. Okay, where are we at? On. Okay, here we go. Admiral Wit the with says yes, David, her we go, did you know that Barack Obama received 1 million in jewelry from Saudi Arabia? And that King Abdullah from Jordania give Michelle Obama and her kids $300,000 worth worth of jewelry? Those demerists think he means Democrats. Those demerests keep it. And nobody in The Demo Rats party. Say a word about it. Dear God. So this is all, of course, in the context of Trump getting a free plane from Qatar. Obama, while president, was the recipient of some gifts from foreign leaders. That's right. Every modern president has been the recipient of gifts from foreign leaders. It's part of democracy. And what happens to those gifts is that they go to the National Archives, they get reported to the State Department under the Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act. There's an entire federal process for it. It's public, it's cataloged, it's audited. If you're imagining Michelle Obama walking out of a state dinner with $300,000 worth of necklaces stuffed into her purse, that's a fantasy, not a fact. And there are two issues with what's going on with Trump. Number one, undisclosed gifts and payments emoluments. When foreign dignitaries would stay at Trump's failing D.C. hotel to ingratiate themselves with him so that when they go to the White House, they go, oh, we love the hotel. The mini bar was so good that they could. That. That's an emolument, okay? Something of value that is undisclosed. And further, the airplane, which then goes to Trump's presidential library after Trump's presidency. Presidential Library Foundation, I think it is, is just nowhere on the same scale as Obama getting some jewelry that he has no interest in that immediately is turned over to the National Archives. So give me a break, all right? Justin from Spotify says stacking up wins across the world so fast we can't even count peace, not war. And libs still laugh at sound bits blowing smoke all the way to the finish line. And you will thank him, meaning Trump, later. What wins is Justin talking about. Trump's main export is chaos. He didn't end wars. He's cozying up to authoritarians around the world, gutting the diplomatic core, mass firing federal workers, shaking up the economy and. And potentially imperiling American businesses with blanket tariffs. If your win is that, sometimes we on the left get mad. I don't know what to tell you, bro. You know, at some point, people stop laughing and we start saying there's something really dangerous here. And I don't know exactly what wins Justin is referring to, but they seem pretty few and far between. Miriam on Substack says, it occurred to me the other day, watching all this stuff about Trump and the deep money grabs he's doing around the world, that he fully expects to get impeached. He's making sure he gathers as much money in his pocket before it happens. Have you had any thoughts? I'd be interested. You know, it's an interesting theory, right, that instead of governance, Trump's doing liquidation, foreign deals, real estate, shell games, super PACs, paying legal bills, endless merch grifts, the meme coin, the entire thing. Because he's not running a country, he's running a fire sale before the feds close in or before he gets impeached. I just struggle, Miriam, to believe that that's what this really about. Because Trump has now found de facto immunity by becoming president. And if I were Trump, I would be feeling pretty damn good that they couldn't get me legally, criminally, they couldn't get me with two impeachments. They couldn't even prevent me from winning and becoming president again. And so if I were Trump, I wouldn't be assumed I'm getting impeached. And if I get impeached, I would assume I'm going to be acquitted in the Senate because that's what happened before, and I think it's what will happen again. So it's an interesting idea. But if I'm Trump, knowing everything we know about Trump, I don't think that that's really what he's thinking. I don't think he's worried about. I think about that. I think it's very clear that Trump sees having won as all the immunity that he needs. Let me know what you think. Info@david pakman.com Remember that my book, the Echo Machine, an instant New York Times bestseller, is available everywhere books are sold. Any bookstore can get it for you. It's on Barnes and Noble, it's on Amazon, it's everywhere. It's in too many places. And if you've already bought the book, please do review it on Amazon. Where we are now up to. How many reviews do we have on this thing? 1100 reviews. I absolutely love it. Make sure you review the book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Goodreads. We'll see you on the bonus show. Have a good Memorial Day.