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- [00:00]
David Pakman
It's confusing because you turn on Fox News and there's a thing that spins and says live and it looks like news. But a lot of that stuff is just opinion. And so really focus in on primary news sources. Reuters and Associated Press are examples. Once you've done that foundational stuff, now you're ready to listen to opinion content and say, I am prepared to evaluate what I'm getting from these opinion people. As you can probably imagine, between people being busy and not having the skills or know how to do this stuff, most people are not doing this. They're just tuning into the opinion stuff and that's it.
- [00:45]
Lee McGowan
Hello and welcome to the Politics Girl podcast. I'm your host Lee McGowan. Let's get into it. While the country appears to be in free fall, Trump's insane. On again, off again. Tariffs are disrupting everything from consumer prices to American business success to the stock market. Our national security is compromised by incompetent and dangerous leaders who don't understand secrecy or the responsibility of their jobs. And mass goons are snatching people off the street and sending them to torture prisons in El Salvador without trial. American children are dying from long ago eradicated diseases while our water and air are allowed to be poisoned for profit. And Republicans are trying to strip people, particularly American women, of their right to vote using both executive orders and the recently passed in the House Safe Act. And yet 30% of the countries still seem totally on board with the Trump leadership and party doing this to us. It's like they don't even know what's really happening. Because they don't. Which is why I have asked David Pakman to join us today. David is the host of the nationally syndicated independent progressive talk show the David Pakman show with over 3 million subscribers on YouTube alone. And he is also the author of the new book, an instant New York Times bestseller, the Echo How Right Wing Extremism Created a Post Truth America, which addresses how the fall of critical thinking and the rise of reactionary politics has done such destruction to this country and what we can do about it. If there is One thing the 2024 election cycle showed us, it's how the right wing benefits and capitalizes on disinformation and the polarization of US Politics. Critical thinking and media literacy are almost non existent these days and if our country is unable to agree on facts, how do we possibly start to fix our ever growing litany of problems? To give us his insights on this problem, please welcome my guest talk show host and progressive political commentator and author of the echo machine.
- [02:35]
David Pakman
David Pakman. Welcome David, so good to be with you. Well, thank you for coming. I can't believe you haven't been here before. We share the same ecosphere. We're both big picture people. So I'm really glad you came today.
- [02:46]
Thank you. Yeah, no, it's great. And I've been looking forward to this.
- [02:49]
Yeah. Well, as I was saying in the introduction, there is obviously so much craziness going on in the country right now at the hands of this, I don't know, inept and self dealing president with the support of his inept and self dealing cabinet and enabled by a completely corrupt Republican Congress. So. But we didn't arrive here overnight. Right. This is a 50 year plan come to fruition that was only made possible because of a collection of events that included rampant disinformation from our media and the toxic polarization of US politics. You know, so Americans are at this point where the vast majority have lost what you call their critical thinking skills and our media literacy. So we don't even know what's going on. We can't even agree on what the facts are anymore. So how do you fix problems when you can't agree what the problems are?
- [03:40]
One of the first parts of fixing is we do have to take a look at what are we teaching kids and when are we teaching it. And as I've said before, if you come across a 30, 40, 50, 60 year old who's struggling to make sense of the messages they're getting from media, you can deal with that, we can deal with that. But that's what I call a retail solution. One on one, to really solve this problem, we have to be teaching some of the things that many state school boards of education like in Texas have gotten rid of. Starting at probably 8, 9 or 10 years old. This means media literacy really basics about am I watching reporting or, or opinion right now? I mean it sounds so basic, but it's not being taught and it's much harder to learn. It's sort of like learning a new language when you're 40 is difficult, when you're 10, it's very easy. We do need to go back to that. And then in addition to that, I think it's important to understand that what we're seeing right now is sort of the consequence. It's, it's not like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it's like a pot of coal at the end of the rainbow. Of this process that started with the radicalization among those who oppose, opposed the Civil Rights act starting in the late 50s. That, and I trace that story in the book, led to Trumpism as a consequence, and in a sense, a sort of predictable one.
- [05:07]
I mean, that's kind of why you wrote the book, right? I mean, to address what happened to our country, what happened over the course of time, what happened to our critical thinking, why the right keeps winning, and how we can responsibly consume media. Because we're not doing that anymore. Right. Because if we want to return to a place of rational analysis of facts of truth as the default rather than the exception, we have to do something differently. Right. And you're talking about starting from the ground up with the youth, but also having people understand how we got here in the first place.
- [05:42]
That's right. And then the third part, we've sort of talked about, like, two of the three main points, which is media literacy, critical thinking, epistemology, number one. Number two, trump as a consequence rather than as a catalyst. And then three, don't allow yourself to be convinced that the problems we're dealing with don't have solutions. You know, very often we'll hear from Republicans, oh, what Denmark does on health care we can't do because we're too big of a country. Or what Sweden has done with education, we can't do because we're too diverse a country. Sweden's all white people. The point here is a lot of these obstacles that are placed as to why we can't do what other countries have done, they're really bogus. And if you think about us as 50 states, at the state level, we can do all of the things that we see Denmark and Sweden and other examples doing. And that's point number three, which is we do know of the solutions, and if we disengage, we definitely won't get them.
- [06:42]
Yeah, that's so true. I mean, you know, I was born and raised in Canada, right? So it's a very multicultural country. Yes, we have way less people, but Canada is about the same size as California, so you could very easily have universal healthcare. I always talk about universal healthcare because we're one of the only countries that doesn't have it, along with things like paid family leave and paternity care and this kind of thing. But healthcare is such an obvious one because we would not be inventing something from scratch. It's being done by easily 75 peer nations. We could take the very best of everything and say, this works there, this works there, this works there. That's not working for them. Let's not Bring that we could make the very best universal health care system in the world. We're just choosing not to. What I find interesting in your book is one of the ideas that you focus on about how the media itself uses a tactic that makes our problems like you're talking about with universal health care, like saying, well, we can't do it because Denmark's all white and they're such a small country. They use this tactic that makes the problems appear to have these multiple sides when that's not really the case. You use the example of climate change where the idea is presented as up for debate rather than an established scientific consensus. Right. You write about this concept of false balance, this idea of pretending you're neutral just by standing there in the middle when you're there's actually a glaring difference between the two sides. You want to talk to me a little bit about this concept of false balance?
- [08:10]
That's right. This is super common on corporate media, which is in an effort not to be labeled as biased or partisan, every topic gets 50, 50 time to the empirically based position and the non science based or sometimes conspiratorial position. And this really leads people who listen, I sympathize with folks who just have to get up and go to work and pick up their kids and then make dinner and then get the kids to bed. You're not necessarily going to be following every single issue to the degree that you or I would. And so if you're the average person and you turn on a three letter news network and you see a six minute debate about climate change, three minutes are someone telling you what the science says and three minutes are someone saying humans have nothing to do with climate change, there is no climate change, et cetera. I forgive those folks for saying, I don't know, it sort of sounds controversial. Maybe it's one, maybe it's the other. And this is one of the biggest problems with legacy and corporate media, which is this false balance. And another layer on this is neutrality and objectivity are two different things. And sometimes in this effort to appear neutral, what we see from corporate media is that they lose all objectivity. And it would be sort of like if after a Super bowl, no matter what the scoreboard said, half the time was analysts talking about how the team that lost actually won. We would all say, hold on a second, that's not objective. You're neutral, but you're not being objective. And this is the problem that we have.
- [09:44]
Yeah, neutrality is not objectivity. That, that makes a lot of sense because what the public really needs is objectivity. We need the facts, we need the truth, we need the experts. Right. Like I'm not some sort of epidemiologist. I don't want someone's opinion on how a virus is spreading. I want the scientists to tell me how the virus is spreading. It reminds me a lot. I keep thinking back on that Isaac Asimov quote, you know, that there's this cult of ignorance in the United States and there always has this strain of anti intellectualism that kind of winds its way through our political and cultural life. And it's nurtured by this false notion that democracy, one person, one vote, means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. Right. And he said that years ago and he was making a point about our rejection as a culture of expertise and evidence in favor of our own opinions. And he believed that we should value, you know, we should value reasoned arguments and evidence based knowledge over unchecked opinions. That democracy, while it is important to engage with diverse perspectives, we should always do that in combination with critical thinking and a commitment to truth. But that's not what's happening now. This kind of death of expertise, this maligning of science and facts and getting rid of books and history is detrimental to our society as a whole. And then we watch the Republican Party right now making that death of expertise policy, you know, like getting rid of the Department of Education, banning books, you know, firing scientists. It's terrifying. Right? And it just makes me think of Donald Trump saying, I love the uneducated. Right, because they're much easier to control.
- [11:26]
That's exactly right. And there's often they love to talk about the fallacy of appeal to expertise. It's only a fallacy if they're not really experts or if they're outliers and completely rejecting consensus. And this is why it's always a little harder than just what are, what are, what's their degree? Right. What are the letters after or before their name? Because on the one hand, we don't want to allow someone who is, you know, just to pick something. This is not to insult those who have a PhD in education, but if someone has a PhD in education and they're weighing in about epidemiology, we should be suspicious about applying that supposed expertise to the subject matter. But on the other hand, if we're looking at the consensus view of epidemiologists, it's not a fallacy to say they really do have expertise and we are looking at the consensus. And so right away we're already in A gray area in terms of what counts as expertise and what doesn't. And there was an earlier battle line on this, which is now we have the crisis of expertise. I remember Rick Santorum 10, 12 years ago starting to acknowledge we're never going to have the highly educated on our side. And his argument was that it's because higher learning educations are indoctrinating people. My interpretation was when people are educated, they're not going to fall for the tax cuts for the rich will trickle down because they'll know there's no historical basis for that. And in a sense, Rick Santorum was right. The more educated you are and the more you can think for yourself and analyze who's an expert and who isn't, the harder it is for Republicans to sell their policy ideas.
- [13:17]
Yeah. And also, you know, higher education also leads to getting to know different people from different races, different cultures, different mindsets. Right. So that's another reason why the right really doesn't like higher education so much. Because they say, oh, well, my child went off to college and she got indoctrinated by the left. And you're like, no, your child went off to college and had her mind open to different cultures, different people, different ideas of thought. And she thought, oh, well, maybe everything I've been taught in my small town America wasn't exactly what's true. And now my mind is more open. That's not indoctrination, that's education. And that's what they don't like. You know, and I think about your book, the Echo Machine is kind of exposing this rot in corporate media, right? This idea that we're allowing unsubstantiated claims to stand on equal footing with empirically supported ones. And like you're saying, it's no wonder that people are then understandably confused because it's hard for them to differentiate between what's real and what's not real. Especially if we're not, as you were saying, taught to develop this critical thinking, to develop this media literacy. And now our government, of course, doesn't want it. I think of my own time on cnn, right? Like I would spend a lot of time on CNN fighting with people like Scott Jennings. Right? You pair an expert in something with a lobbyist or a professional contrarian, Right? And that's not a fair fight because those people are there. They are paid to get at as many talking points as possible, to muddy the water, to change the subject, to talk a party line. And they make the experts look like they have to stand on equal ground with them when they don't. And often the liar is given more time and more oxygen because there's drama that comes with what they say, because the expert is saying what you're saying is completely wrong, you're lying, that's outrageous. But that leads to more clicks and views, and then that's detrimental to the public sense of what is true and what is false, you know, And I find that so. Problem.
- [15:11]
That's right. And sometimes it's important to understand that the goal isn't necessarily for the professional contrarian or the lobbyist to convince the people that are watching that he or she is correct. It's merely to say, oh, this is not resolved, there's controversy. Let's not make any policy just yet. And that can be enough. It's not necessarily to convince everybody that there's no climate change or that humans have no role. But it's. If you plant enough doubt, you can get people to at least say, let's not move forward on any regulations just yet. Let's resolve the controversy first. I'm not convinced, but I'm skeptical enough to say, I don't know that I want to vote quite yet. And that can sometimes be their goal.
- [15:53]
Yeah, well, I mean, I think one of the good things about your book, too, is that although you point out all these problems, you also sort of offer a path forward this way to restore media integrity, to rebuild the fourth Estate that. You know. The fourth Estate, that elusive journalism of the past, what was holding government and people accountable. How do you propose we do that? Can you talk me a little bit through that?
- [16:18]
Lee McGowan
I'm not gonna lie. I have a bougie dog. He likes what he likes, and he's not always easy to please when it comes to his eating. He's picky. And we accept it. Which is one of the reasons I am so crazy about Sundays for dogs. Chips goes in and out on foods, but he has a sensitive tummy. So even when I try homemade from scratch dog foods, he likes it for a couple of days and then he rejects it. Or I buy really expensive dog food that's supposed to be the best, and we go through five poop bags a.
- [16:43]
David Pakman
Walk, it just doesn't sit well with his tummy.
- [16:45]
Lee McGowan
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- [18:37]
David Pakman
And I literally said to her, have.
- [18:39]
Lee McGowan
You tried Honey Love?
- [18:41]
David Pakman
It doesn't do that.
- [18:42]
Lee McGowan
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- [19:05]
David Pakman
You never have to be that woman.
- [19:06]
Lee McGowan
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- [20:09]
David Pakman
You also sort of offer a path forward this way to restore media integrity. Can you talk me a little bit through that?
- [20:16]
There's a few different aspects to this, and my answer to this question is a lot different today than it would have been 10 years ago because the sheer portion of the population that now is getting their news from short form video platforms, for example, or algorithmically based platforms is so much higher than it was. But the pillar of it, the base of this kind of pyramid, for lack of a better term, would be we need to be teaching critical thinking and media literacy to kids no later than third, fourth or fifth grade in places like Finland, they do it even earlier. And these, these kids are really good at this stuff. I mean, it's shocking when you see some of the news coverage of how they're doing critical thinking and media literacy in Finland. So you start there. Then you really want to encourage learning of the fundamental concepts of a lot of these fields to really understand tariffs. You're not going to understand that from watching cnn. You're not even really going to understand what the battle lines are when you watch cnn. Unless you have a foundation not only in critical thinking but also in basic economics, you then want to primarily be getting news from news reporting agencies. It's confusing because you turn on Fox News and there's a thing that spins and says live and it looks like news. But a lot of that stuff is just opinion. And so really focus in on primary news sources. Reuters and Associated Press are examples. Once you've done that Foundational stuff. Now, in my opinion, you're ready to listen to opinion content and say, I am prepared to evaluate what I'm getting from these opinion people. As you can probably imagine, between people being busy and not having the skills or know how to do this stuff, most people are not doing this. They're just tuning into the opinion stuff. And that's it.
- [22:02]
Yeah, because I mean, like, you started with, you have to have a basic knowledge of economics. And I was like, whoa, you lost me right there. You know what I mean? Like, most people don't have that. I do not have that. You know what I mean? Like, they do not teach that in school. And I think about that with media literacy, there's also financial literacy. Like, most of us have no idea how the stock market even works. So it's like, oh, the stock market's up, the stock market's down. And people are like, okay, that doesn't really affect me, except their 401k is in there, pensions are in there, that kind of thing. If you don't understand, you don't understand. So you have to have somewhere to go that they're telling you the truth. You know, I, I think Brian Cohen had a really great quote about your book. He said it was essential reading for anyone who wants to stand up to disinformation and deepen their understanding of politics without getting lost in jargon, which I think is really important because we all get so overwhelmed with the jargon. Obviously. That's a wonderful compliment, but does that resonate with you? Is that what you were hoping to see?
- [22:54]
Absolutely. And I, you know, you sometimes hear these catchphrases, like, if you can't explain it like you would to a 5 year old, you're probably on the wrong track. And it's sometimes a fallacy, sometimes it's true. You know, there is complicated subject matter, there's no question about that. But on most of the issues, there's a kind of lowest common denominator reality with a lot of the issues that corporate media is dealing with. And we really should be able to explain most of these issues. I mean, a tariff is a tax on imports. The importer pays it, not China. That's basic fundamental stuff. And we should be able to communicate with that level of simplicity, at least to open some of these conversations.
- [23:36]
Yes, but we should have a president and a head of the trade policy that tell us the truth as well. They can't say China's going to pay for it when the truth is a tariff is something we're going to end up paying for because they're going to pass the costs along to us, the consumer. So it is very hard when you have your leaders blatantly lying to you for their own personal well being. Right. And that's where it comes down to these ideas that I talk about all the time. And you mentioned in your book too, which is like how American politics got so broken in the first place, how we ended up with leaders that could blatantly lie to the American people and be held unaccountable for that. Now, of course, I want people to go out and buy the book, but give us your short take on the history that you kind of take us through in the book that got us to where we are now, where we can have a president just blatantly lying to us in insider trading. And we're all like, geez, what do we do?
- [24:27]
So the guideposts basically are Post World War II, post New Deal. We start to see this emerging civil rights movement. Civil Rights act was 1964, but it really got going in 57, 58. The people who started to oppose racial integration and the Civil Rights act in the late 50s became the folks who eventually supported Reagan, became the folks who did not, like Bill Clinton, supported Newt Gingrich's takeover of the House of Representatives. In 94. That group morphed into those who supported George W. Bush, opposed Obama, and by the time Obama's two terms were up, were ready for just about anything that was questioning what they really felt about Obama, which included some policy disagreements and some racism. Right. I mean, I think there's a mix of different things. Trump, with the birther stuff, was perfectly positioned. Trump did sort of connect with genuine concerns about economics, including what is happening with offshoring. Trump, you know, with his I'll fix the trade stuff, he identified something real. His solutions were bogus, and he was seizing also on xenophobia and racism. Fine. But that's a trajectory that really frames Trump as like the opportunistic person positioned in 2015 to seize on this, rather than someone who created this movement out of nowhere. This is a movement that was 50, 60 years in the making.
- [26:00]
Yeah. Much like Trump in regular life. He's just riding the wave that was already there. He didn't create it. He is, as you keep saying, a consequence of what happened. He's not the be all, end all. He's what came from it. And it also kind of shows you that the birth is way back. As you said in the New Deal, where we started giving people unemployment insurance and we started having welfare and we started having workers rights and this kind of thing, Social Security is created these kind of things, because it's not just rolling back civil rights or women's rights or DEI stuff that they don't seem to like. It's also rolling back workers rights. How you could treat your worker, what you could do, how much money you could make, how much you could poison the water besides your factory, all these environmental regulations that the corporatists hate. This is all part of the wave that Donald Trump is riding, undergirded by.
- [26:52]
Lee McGowan
This idea that if you didn't get.
- [26:55]
David Pakman
What you wanted from the American dream, it was someone else's fault, it wasn't your fault. This kind of grievance culture. And I think that makes a lot of sense that we were sort of ripe to be taken by any charismatic entertainment type figure with popular rhetoric and those people were just scooped up by him. And he's unapologetic, right? He really is very dynamic when you talk about leaders that are authentic, Donald Trump is authentic. He's an authentic asshole. But people like that, right? And our history kind of shows us that this was sort of the way we were going. But you've said that none of this is inevitable. Right. The same forces that brought us here can be countered. It's the question is, do we choose to counter them? Right.
- [27:39]
I think that that's absolutely right. And in the aftermath of the November election, I saw some people on the political left disengaging and they were understandably, I mean, disappointed is not strong enough. It's more despondent, I think, is the way that I would put it. Ye. And it makes sense to me. And in the book I talk about consuming media in a healthy way. That includes breaks, that includes the realization that you can't fix every problem personally and there are going to be problems around the world that you're just not going to be able to do anything about. But then after taking some time and very quickly, by the way, seeing how the first 75 days of this administration have been a disaster, it makes sense to then say, okay, I'm not checking out, of course I will continue voting, but I'm also going to keep engaging on the issues. Most important to me, maybe I can make more of an impact locally or at the state level than federally. That's all completely fine. But the point here is if we get so disappointed and despondent that we exit, we're ceding power to the absolute worst instincts of the worst people. And that's not a Winning path.
- [28:45]
No, it's not a winning path. It's an understandable path because you want to just be like, forget it. I'm lying down. I'm going back to bed. I can't deal with any of this. This is a nightmare every single day.
- [28:53]
Right?
- [28:53]
But. But we can't do that because we really do have to fight back. So I think it's important that we. It's not like we pretend things aren't fucked up, but the choice is we either throw our hands up in the air and say, well, that's it. We can't fix it, or we roll up our sleeves and say, well, that's it. Let's work to fix it. I think those are the two choices. I often think when I sit down and I try and think about this country, I get overwhelmed, too, just like everybody does. And especially if you're like us and you're taking in so much news all the time, it's hard not to feel demoralized by what's going on. But the whole thing kind of reminds me of. Do you know what kintsuki is? It's a Japanese art of repairing broken objects where they use gold to fix ceramic pottery or glass to make it more beautiful through repair. Right? So kintsugi is a repair technique, but it's also a philosophy, right, that encourages us to embrace our imperfections. Right? It's this process that highlights the cracks and the repairs that were made, and it celebrates the history of the object to find beauty in healing and renewal. And I have a kitsugi bowl, and I love it because it reminds me of, like, something can be broken and fixed again and be more beautiful. And I think we can do that to America. But it takes work and effort and putting in the gold to hold things together again. And I think that's what we are. I think of it all the time as a metaphor for where we're at right now. I'm like, oh, just try and be the gold. Like, try and pull things back together again. Because I believe we could repair it, but I think it's gonna take real effort on our parts.
- [30:25]
I think that's right. And, you know, I do talk about, in the book how I'm more of an incrementalist than an accelerationist. Accelerationists often favor totally destroying a system to then, quote, rebuild it from the ground up the way they would want it. And this often gets people to oppose advances because they're not. Not perfect. The late Senator Ted Kennedy was excellent at explaining how historically we've made the Biggest advances on the political left through incrementalism. And I talk about in the book the Progressive Era, 1890-1920 or so, the New Deal era and the Civil Rights era. At the time it felt like slow progress. Looking back, we now realize these 10 to 30 year periods, so much progress was made. But importantly, a lot of the stuff, for example, around the New Deal was because of who got to appoint Supreme Court justices 10, 15, 18 years before the big accomplishment gets signed into law. Progressive era, including women ultimately getting the right to vote, Civil rights era, it's the same. And the risk of doing the accelerationism is sometimes when you break the whole thing down, you think it'll be rebuilt by the people you want rebuilding it in the way that you want it rebuilt. But those power vacuums often lead to even worse people with even worse ideas actually getting to do the rebuilding. So for me, the proof is in the incrementalism of those three eras that I talk about.
- [31:53]
So Aesop, fables style. Slow and steady wins the race In a sense, yes. I think I just keep coming back to this idea that people can't discern news from opinion anymore. They can't discern fact from fiction. And that the people in power don't want us to be able to because it serves them for us to be media illiterate and unable to tell the difference. What do you think we can do about that? Aside from telling people to fact check original sources, that kind of thing? Cause I think it comes back to your idea about younger people. You started off as an author writing a number of books for children. You wrote Think Like a A Kid's Guide to Shaping Our country and Future. Think Like a Scient, A Kid's Guide to Scientific Thinking. Think Like a Detective, A Kid's Guide to Critical Thinking. And you started by addressing the young, which I think is really important because I often. We know that the young should be taught earlier you're talking about countries like Finland. But I also think like, gosh, I wish we'd done it with people like my parents. Like my dad is a boomer, right? He often says to me things like, well, this thing is happening and I'm really outrageous about it. And I say, well, where did you read that? And he's like, I don't know, somewhere. But you know, it has to be true. He heard it from his friend or he read it from a right wing news source. And I end up saying to him, well, you might want to double check that, because I don't think it's right. And you don't want to be spreading that as disinformation. And I think my father has become open to that because he lives with me in his life. But I think there's a lot of older people that used to be able to trust the paper, used to be able to trust the news, used to be able to turn on the tv and the person that told them the thing was the facts. I feel like those people are they lost to us? Do we just assume, do we take responsibility for our older people and then we try and do better with our younger people? What do you think would be the best there?
- [33:46]
Lee McGowan
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- [37:21]
David Pakman
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Lee McGowan
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- [37:37]
David Pakman
Are they lost to us? Do we just assume? Do we take responsibility for our older people and then we try and do better with our younger people? What do you think would be the best there?
- [37:46]
I really see this as a retail versus a wholesale strategy. Like I said earlier, we still engage in these conversations, but we recognize that these conversations are about one person who yes then may inform others by what they reshare on Facebook or whatever the case may be that's but it's a retail approach. But then we've got to do the wholesale approach too, which is, let's prevent folks from even falling into this stuff in the first place with the education changes that I'm advocating for, et cetera. You do both, right? It's sort of like if you have a business, you're selling a granola bar, you might do some selling directly to consumers and you sell to some big box stores and then they're the ones who sell. I suggest we do retail and wholesale simultaneously, but we understand that they're two.
- [38:28]
Different things and it might be good to get the youth on board with it. Like, I have a 17 year old and I can see how essential it is. Like he's being taught some modicum of media literacy and how to check original sources because it's so easy to trick them through TikTok and these places that they're getting information. He'll often say things to me and I'm like, that's a lie. Where'd you learn that? And he'll be like, here. And I'm like, no, that's totally false. But I do the same thing. You know, I will say, I said to my husband the other day, I showed him a video and he goes, that's AI. And I was like, it is like, I had no idea. So it's. Now we've added that element of AI to everything too. So I think you're right that the sooner we teach the kids, the more they will be able to discern truth from fact. And then at the higher level with people like our parents and our grandparents, we do that on a one on one basis. We take responsibility for our people on a one on one basis. And I always go into it with curiosity instead of being like, that's totally wrong, dad. You're a moron. You know, you go like, huh? Where'd you learn that? And they're like, I don't know, I read it somewhere. You're like, did you read it in this paper? Cause that's kind of right leaning. And he's like. And I'm like, here's what I would take a look at. Then he doesn't feel so attacked and it's easier for him to find out the truth. And then you can start changing people's ideas. But as you're saying on a wholesale level with the kids, we have to start way younger so they can discern truth from fiction.
- [39:49]
I think that's absolutely right. And I'm seeing this a lot right now when I do a live stream and I get these people who go, I'm glad that they're getting rid of all of these DEI programs. And I go, okay, good. Let's talk about a specific program. Which specific program are you glad that they got rid of? Usually they don't even know, first of all. And if they can name something, usually they have the details wrong. And then if we really talk about it, most of the people I talk to, they're really not against generating an equality of opportunity. And a lot of times it's confusion as to whether the point of some of these programs is to create equality of outcomes, which I don't think is even possible because human outcomes are normally distributed. You're not going to get a quality of outcome. But once we talk a little more and they acknowledge equality of opportunity is not a bad goal, all of a sudden I'm thrilled we scrapped every DEI program becomes. Actually, some of these specific programs do seem to make sense. And so a lot of it is engaging in these conversations.
- [40:49]
Yeah. And we have to do that. We can't just be like, let's not talk politics. We have to be like, let's talk. This will be fun. Let's do it. I keep saying, I said it in my own book, I've said it up throughout my life. Like, we were literally trained to not talk about politics, to not talk about political ideas, to not talk about religion. And those are the things that cause us the most problems in the history of the world. Now, listen, you're not just an author, right? You are a producer of an independent media station. You've had it for two decades. You were someone who is actually really ahead of the game in new media, I would say a pioneer in digital media. And you're really reshaping the way political news is presented. And you started doing that really early. Now you're mostly on YouTube. You have a huge following on YouTube. Before you go, tell us what you think the future of truth in broadcasting is in news in media. Where do you see us getting our news in the future?
- [41:40]
So my hope is that as people get better at discerning fact from fiction, news from opinion, et cetera, my hope is that it essentially eliminates the market for a lot of the propaganda, misinformation and disinformation information. So that's one side, that's my hopeful side. The other side of it is because of how good AI is getting. Yeah, because of how really excellent synthetic content is getting. My concern is that soon the technology will be good enough for a Video of someone that looks and sounds like me saying things I would never say and it being so good that it's indistinguishable from me. And we're going to have to deal with that. Now, usually the truth, like Neil Postman was a great technology theorist. His view is every one of these advancements comes with the good and the bad. So if we're going to get the good side of it, we're also going to have to deal with regulating or limiting the bad side. I think that that would be a more balanced view. I think there are major opportunities for the media landscape to improve. And I think the way the technology is changing, there are some real concerns where guardrails are going to be needed.
- [42:48]
Yeah, well, I mean, I think we could have used guardrails about 25 years ago when the Internet started being created. I mean, I think that's the thing. When it comes back down to it, it's politics. And government really do have a job here. They have a job to regulate these new industries. They have a job to bring us back to some sort of form of the Fairness Doctrine, you know, for the new millennium. They have a job to regulate AI. They have a job to regulate what media networks can say. And there, that isn't a free speech issue. It's a like we used to call them slander laws. We used to say you had to tell truth in broadcasting.
- [43:22]
Lee McGowan
You shouldn't be able to lie to.
- [43:24]
David Pakman
The American public and get away with it. You shouldn't be able to pay a CIV suit $728 million instead of, you know, because you lied about the results of the election. That shouldn't be what, what we have in our broadcast and have that many people believe lies because they're profitable. I think we need much more regulation that says, you know, even if it's civil, you know, legislation that tells us like you will, you will get a fine for lying to the American people. You get a fine for spreading misinformation online. But I do think that the future is people like you and hopefully people like me and Brian Tyler Cohen and people out here not working for corporate overlords who aren't answering to people who tell us what to say, but are telling people what the actual truth is. And I do think that there is a growing group of people who believe that they want to get their information from independents rather than corporate owned media, because they see now that corporate owned media is playing them for advertising dollars and for eyeballs rather than giving them the information they so desperately need.
- [44:25]
I agree with that. And I think if we want to find something optimistic as we wind down the conversation and this is serious, I think that the degree to which the left ecosystem in the first quarter of 2025 has been growing is like no other period since I've started doing this. And the number of genuinely large players, medium to large medium, the number of new people that are, that are entering the space on the political left, if there's anything to find here, a sort of like glimmer of, I think it's.
- [44:58]
That, yeah, people are seeking real information and they should continue to do so because that's the only way we start fixing things. And I think it comes back to what you said, like, don't let yourself be convinced that there aren't solutions because there are. We just have to kind of work for them. I want to thank you so much for joining us today, David. Before you go, tell people how they can buy your book and how they can follow your show.
- [45:18]
You can find my show@davidpakman.com and then the book's available everywhere you would assume books are available. And any local bookstore, if you want to really work with a local bookstore, any local bookstore can get the book.
- [45:29]
Amazing. Thank you so much for joining us and keep up the amazing work. And congratulations on your New York Times bestseller.
- [45:36]
Thank you. And likewise.
- [45:39]
So that was David Pakman reminding us.
- [45:41]
Lee McGowan
Neutrality and objectivity are two different things.
- [45:44]
David Pakman
That we don't need our media to.
- [45:45]
Lee McGowan
Stand in the middle of two ideas. We need them to stand outside the two ideas and lay out the facts. And if legacy media won't do that anymore, then we must choose independent media who will. That while we might have to address certain people's disinformation in a one on one way, we need to be addressing our children as a whole. Young people must learn how to discern truth from opinion, AI from humanity, and refuse to allow unsubstantiated claims to stand on equal footing with empirically supported facts. David's book reminds us, us that what we're living through is a consequence of decades of action and that Trump is a result of that action rather than the creator. But we can't just be convinced by the people who brought us here that there is no way out. There's lots of ways out, plenty of solutions if we choose to implement them. But that starts with our consuming media in a healthy way and teaching the people around us to do the same. I want to thank David for joining us today and you for caring enough about democracy to be Here, here. Now go check out the echo machine and start being the change you want to see. Until next week, pgm. Before you go, I just want to thank the premium members of this podcast and encourage you, if you're not a member, to consider supporting my work. As David said, the independent media space has never been growing faster and those of us who are actually supporting the truth and working for the collective good really need your help. In a world of propaganda working for profit and power, we need to support those who offer the opposite it. So if you aren't a member of Politics Girl Premium, Please go to politicsgirl.com and consider signing up. You will get this podcast ad free, along with my rants and bonus content sent directly to your inbox. So even if my work is silenced on social media, you will still get access to the truth. There is a link to sign up in the bio of this episode, but also@politicsgirl.com and as always, please like and share this podcast so we can grow our audience. The more people who have access to real information, the faster we can change the collective consciousness to do something better. As always, thank you for your time and support. Politics Girl Podcast is written and performed by me, Lee McGowan in partnership with the Midas Media Network and produced and edited by Happy Warrior Entertainment. All rights reserved.