But I'm going to try.

I was so disappointed when David said this. It's so highly manipulative I find it disgusting. David invents an equivalent to US population death count to then say Israel is justified to react and there's 2 problems I can immediately see.

First, it's not necessary to say 'estimated 35,000 people being killed' and then quickly quip 'US population adjusted'. While factual, I would expect this tactic from any number of right wing outlets and even some cable news pundits. From David, it was a punch in the gut.

Second, I can do the exact same exercise with Palestinian deaths. Adjusting for US population size, I can thereby claim Palestine is warranted in defending itself because 'an estimated 15m-16m people were killed'.

The fact is Israel has cause to defend itself even if no Israel civilians were killed and 10/7 was an abysmal failure and no number of civilian casualties.

The claim 'Israel has the right to defend itself' is so broadly used and in this episode Pakman uses it to with the context of inflated death counts.

Using this tactic, what then is Palestine able to claim is 'defending themselves'? Or worse Hamas?

I know I'm just ONE viewer and I'm going to get dogpiled to some extent for this criticism but I've been an avid daily listener since at least 2014 and this is how I see things.....David loses subscriptions for saying obviously(at least to me) problematic things like this that seem skewed towards Israel and as he says '500 people unsubscribed' and emailed him. Are some of those people unreasonable and some kinda ridiculous? Sure. I grant that without question. But then it's fine because 1000 new subscriptions? OK. Well again I can grant some of those are reasonable people and some just want to be supportive etc etc but some of those people are going to also be nutjobs that just hear pro-Isreal rhetoric coming out of his mouth whether that be the intent or not.

I feel like David is sacrificing one type of audience member for another and it's having an effect on how he's willing to frame things like this conflict and death counts. I think he sees this tradeoff as confirmation bias. A month ago, I wouldn't even be able to imagine him making this kind of argument so casually like it was nothing and now it's just a quip.

Again I'm not a paid member but I'll tell you why too. My pet peeve as a transgender person is trans and LGBTQ issues when I digest media. It's difficult to find media that actually makes the effort to represent these issues in a concise and informed way and that requires effort and research. I get one has to really dig into it to really understand the constantly evolving talking points and break down the dishonesty from conservatives in real time and this is where David consistently fails me. I often feel like he doesn't care about being more informed whenever he approaches the topic of gender identity, particularly in interviews with guests that are adjacent to or outright transphobic. Vivek Ramaswamy was one such guest. If David was simply more up to date on the talking points, he could have dismantled that in real time. He repeats these failures from time to time and I let it slide but I don't buy a membership. I do recommend his content though and just want the quality that seemingly exists on so many other topics he covers

Now he's inflating death counts and it honestly upsets me so much I had to listen to it again just to see if I was hearing things.