Hello, I'm Dr. Stephen Hassan with another episode of my book, Cult Conversations,

The Influence Continuum, and I'm so excited to have a celebrity on my show.

I'm kind of joking in a way, but not really.

David Pacman has a new book out, and as soon as I heard him interviewed,

I'm like, hey, Dave, would you come on my show, the Echo Machine, how right-wing extremism

created a post-truth America? And Dave, you are a media monster. You have 3 million subscribers to your YouTube channel. And I just, I find your

approach so down to earth, practical, human, you know, avoiding a lot of polemical, you know,

things and trying to get at the meat of things.

And we just, before we started recording, I said, I'm on chapter 8 on the audible, but I bought

the hardcover too, because I wanted to hold it up for this. But thank you for writing this, because it's really important now, especially important,

that people protect their minds and understand this media landscape echo chamber.

So with that, I'm going to pitch the ball to you about this fine book. I mean,

I can ask you more specific questions, but you are an expert. And you used to having an audience

to say the key points that you want to convey. So for listeners who may not have listened to your show or seen me on your show,

like, tell us about you and why you wrote this book and what you hope to accomplish.

Well, I mean, I think to start with the book, there are really, if I were to summarize it,

very succinctly. There are three kind of main points in the book.

Number one is that I see Trump more as a consequence of a process that started with opposition

to the civil rights movement in the late 50s.

So it's sort of like the pot of coal at the end of the rainbow, to use a metaphor.

If I can interrupt you for a second and just say that, I had a similar approach with the

cult of Trump that this is a symptom that's been developing for 50 years. I went a little bit

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