David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism | Lex Fridman Podcast #375

I tweet that, and then I finish the day. And I wake up the next morning and I glance at my phone. I'm seeing all these verified accounts that are, you know, quote-tweeting it and demanding a retraction and whatever. And I go, "Uh-oh, okay, this looks like it's getting, looks like it's getting some attention." Um, I then continue about my day. Around noon, I hear from my dad that he got 100 messages from, "You should have aborted your son," to, "We're gonna find all of you," to whatever else. My dad has no idea what's going on. He's like, "I don't know what this is, but I have 100 DMs," to everything else you can imagine. Um, and I start to get emails about, you know, "We... you know, uh, your Jewish faith," this and that and the other thing. And so at that point, to me, I thought, "This is just going to get worse and worse and worse," and so I deleted the tweet. And I really regret doing that, because over the 48 hours that followed, yes, the attacks escalated, it went through Candace Owens and then at foxnews.com, Newsmax, kind of peaking with, with Donald Trump Jr., and it was horrible.

The following is a conversation with David Pakman, a left-wing progressive political commentator and host of The David Pakman Show. I hope to continue to have many conversations on politics with prominent, insightful, and sometimes controversial figures across the political spectrum. David and I have been planning to speak for a long time, and I'm sure we'll speak many more times. This conversation was challenging, eye-opening, and fun. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's David Pakman. Are there interesting differences to you between terms like liberal, Democrat, left wing, leftist, progressive, socialist, communist, Marxist, far left, center left, all of these labels? Is there interesting distinctions between them?

Yeah, there's two sets of distinctions. One is, if you just want to say, let's define each of these as political terms, they're all different terms. You can be a progressive ideologically, but not be a member of the Democratic Party. Many say the Democratic Party isn't even really very progressive. So these are certainly terms that we could define, uh, in order to have a conversation about the next thing, kind of as a precursor to a conversation. Sometimes the terms are used in order to tag someone with a certain ideology that's not really linked to policy or any particular political question. But they can be used positively or negatively to just kind of say, "Here is the image of this individual that I have in my mind." So, like Marxist is right now very popularly being used by some on the right, um, to attack Democrats. There's very few actual Marxists, certainly not in positions of power in the United States, but even among the general population. Um, so I think it's important to distinguish, are we defining these terms because we want to compare and contrast the ideas that a particular group might bring to the discussion? Or are we using them as insults or to stifle conversation? There are terms that can be used to start a conversation or to stop it.