So now comes the difficult part for the left to admit. And quite frankly, the sad part,
and I'll get to the conclusion upfront so you know what we're talking about.
We are losing the battle of ideas. The left is losing the battle of ideas in the United
States right now. And it is not because our ideas aren't good. Many of the ideas are good
and other countries have already figured out that not only are the right ideas, are they
the right ideas but they work. It's because the Wright's ideas only need to spread a little
for them to be quote effective and have an impact where the ideas of the left often require
because they are progressive, uh, uh, Galitary and ideas, the ideas of the left often require
institutional support and legislation and much more infrastructure. And I hate to admit
this, but if we don't accept this and understand it, we will never win. Okay. So again, context,
just to remind everybody today we are talking so much about the shootings that took place
and related issues.
We are going to get fully demonetized for covering these issues. Now, if we were a weaker,
what we would do is just pick stories. For today that would be monetized. But these issues
are so important that we are just doing an entire show that will be monetized on youtube
up. Please help us out with that. Support us directly, ideally with a membership@joinpacman.com
any discussions of gun safety or whatever else after an incident are uh, always the
monetize by youtube. So we have these shootings and then immediately the pro gun movement
goes into effect. Any discussions about gun safety after a shooting are called politicized
by the pro gun, right? This isn't the right time to talk about those things. And then
if we wait a little while and they say, uh, and then we say, let's talk about them now,
let's now do, now that we're not right after a tragedy, let's do some of this gun safety
stuff.
Then they say, we don't even have a problem. When was the last mass shooting that we had?
And usually it's only like a couple of weeks, but it doesn't matter. That's their argument.
And one of the ideas that we have sort of lost on is the idea that guns shouldn't be
seen as a way to solve problems. There's the debate, which I'll talk about in a second
about specific gun safety regulations, but the left has lost a bigger culture fight.
This country has a sickness, which is that too many people see guns as a way to solve
their personal problems. They see guns as a way to solve societal problems. They see
guns as a way to solve cultural and economic problems. We will win until we root out that
malignancy and in the meantime we're not even going to reduce the, the mass shootings until
we make it more difficult to carry out some of these ideas by making the guns more difficult
to come by.
And this is where we have to understand that even just within gun safety, there are such
simple things that we just can't get done because ultimately there isn't enough overwhelming
support for them where it matters. Universal background checks. Okay. We couldn't pass
a universal background checks after the sandy hook shooting with Democrats controlling the
White House, the house. And the Senate. If we can't do it, then I don't know that we
can ever do it without some wholesale realignment of American culture, period. Stricter mental
health or psyche valves for all gun sales, with restrictions based on outcomes, depending
on the outcome of those psyche valves, restrictions on firearm ownership that are stricter and
apply to all gun sales period. We just can't do it. Focusing bans on certain ammunition
types and modifications that make it even harder for law enforcement to subdue a shooter
before they, or really when we talk about shooters, we're talking about he before he
can do more damage.
Our takeaways have to be the goal must be the total destruction of the political movement
known as modern republicanism, which now includes Trumpism because we can talk about bipartisanship,
we can listen to some of the Democratic candidates, uh, you know, talk, talk about how they're
going to get things done with Republicans. We will make no progress while these people
controlled the White House or the Senate or the House of Representatives. This is not,
by the way, a pat on the back to Democrats. We still won't get a ton of stuff if Democrats
are in power, but we might get some basic things, some guns, safety, some more funding
and access to mental health treatment, but now we on the left need to look at ourselves
as well as the platforms that we're on. Okay. This is a responsibility thing as well. If
you look at the manifesto of the El Paso shooter and you consider that he posted something
to the radical right message board eight Chan before the shooting, you come to realize something.
Those calls I get from young people who say, hey, I was radicalized by the right wing online
echo chamber, but then I found the David Pakman show and then I found Kyle Kalinsky and I
found others and it's so great. You guys do radicalized me. That is great, but just as
it was merely by chance that some of my audience was deradicalized because they stumbled upon
my videos, or Kyle's or Sam Cedars or someone else's, those same people once they were in
the rabbit hole could have just as easily been brought even further down the other side
and been pushed from being alt writers who were not willing to do actual violence. They
could have been pushed into the people that do actual violence and ultimately, uh, end
up in the news the way that shooters over the weekend have. So what I'm saying is there
are so many people in society right now whose ideology is so malleable.
I mean, it's like putty that merely by chance, by algorithmic coincidence, it could be they
go from Ben Shapiro to Stefan Molyneux and off to the right and committing violence in
the real world. Or they could just buy that same possibility of Algorithmic Echo Chambers,
go from Ben Shapiro to David Pacman to Kyle Kalinsky. And that could actually be the difference
between someone committing real-world violence or not. And I'm not saying that this is now
it's David Pacman and Kyle Kalinsky who will be the undoing of violence in society. That's
not what I mean. What I'm pointing out is in the same way that by chance some people
get de radicalized by these online echo chambers and algorithms totally beyond our control.
Some will just as easily be radicalized into violence. Uh, I'm always careful not to say
any two extremists are the same or that anything is like the Nazis or that anyone is Hitler.
But we also have to look really specifically at pre World War II, Germany in the twenties
and thirties and the current circumstances in the United States. There are too many similarities
to ignore. That doesn't mean another holocaust is coming, but what we need to understand
is when we talk about fascism and authoritarianism, there are too many similarities here that
are more evidence that we are losing in a great way on the left, the use of the propaganda
technique of repeating lies until people believe them, Trump relies on this and it works and
we are losing around it. We are merely playing catch up around it. Hitler like Trump was
sort of like an ignorant, uneducated showman who lacked a lot of basic knowledge about
the world but pulled people in with catchphrases and simple ideas because he at least had a
sense of what got people's attention. That's very similar to Donald Trump.
Similarly, anti internationalism was a big thing in post World War One Germany, which
mixes with isolationism. Germany had this in that period before World War II. We're
seeing it again in the u s in Trump with the idea of separating from Europe and our allies,
building walls, keeping Brown people out, protectionism on trade. We are seeing that
as well. Self victimization. Trump is the victim of everybody, right? The Democratic
Party, Trump's the victim. Journalists trumps the victim. The fake news media trumps the
victim. Everyone is victimizing Trump the way German propaganda claimed that Germany
was being victimized in the period before World War II and we can't ignore what we're
talking about here in the context of these mass shootings. In the same way that we saw
it in pre World War II, Germany. Donald Trump is using the thinly veiled promotion of violence
through these coded messages and the suggestive vocabulary he uses. This is another similarity.
So we on the left need a full accounting and plan here because this needs to stop, but
we're only going to start being able to do that if we first recognize that yes, we're
losing the battle of ideas because they win much more easily than we do. Example, we want
healthcare for all. We want to reduce income inequality. We want to stop pointless wars.
We want to totally take apart the military industrial complex. How do we do that? Well,
we've got to be activists for that for years working to change public opinion such that
we will elect people who will ultimately do those things, but the other side just needs
some radical nuts to on the same weekend go and open fire because they hate immigrants
and it's a win for them. So when I say we're losing the battle, I don't mean we have the
wrong ideas.
I don't mean we aren't communicating, communicating them effectively, even though we could probably
communicate them in a better way. What I mean is that the threshold for winning is so much
lower for them and I don't know how we fight that so that, that's where my commentary ends.
I would love to at this point say, and then here is what we do. Unfortunately, I don't
know what we do. Uh, and I want to hear from you about it. We will have a poll about this
on our Instagram page at David Pakman show. Follow me on Instagram while you're there
at David Dot pacman. It will be,
um, a very long week of trying to sort out which a lot of this and I'm glad that you'll
be here with me. In order to do that