David Pakman DESTROYS Dr. Phil's entire slavery argument w/ one question

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Hope you guys are all good, cuz I'm definitely not after hearing Dr. Phil's insane claims. I have watched this clip a few times now because it's honestly one of the funniest examples of somebody confidently walking into their own destruction without realizing it. Dr. Phil comes into this interview with that smug MAGA common sense America is dying and casually throwing out insane right-wing claims about and all these dumb talking points like he expects everyone to just agree without question. I never really saw you as a guy who delved into political issues per se. You seem more willing, interested, and I must say maybe more conservative than I thought you were. Is that a fair assessment?

[00:00:40]Uh not at all. Okay. Because I am I am so not political, you can't even believe it. And I'll tell you why. I don't nothing about politics. I And I know why you say that. It sounds like it. Right.

[00:00:56]>> about these things as cultural issues and from a psychological, psychosocial standpoint, how they affect families and people. And they do overlap with some of the things that politicians talk about, but they talk about it from a political standpoint, funding standpoint, how they can get this bill or that bill through. Couldn't care less, but I am interested in those issues in terms of how they impact families in their day-to-day pursuit of life and and peace and being able to raise their family in a healthy environment. So, there's a lot of overlap, but I don't talk about it from a political standpoint cuz I frankly don't know enough about the politics of it all. That's interesting.

[00:01:43]>> to admit that. I'm just willing to admit it. I I don't think a lot of other people know either. I'm just willing to admit it.

[00:01:49]What most people don't even know about this guy is that he literally got sued after his own embarrassing decisions.

[00:01:55]And listen to this carefully. His last media partnership completely fell apart after his partners dragged him to court for financial mismanagement, and they actually won. The funniest part is he was the one who filed the lawsuit first.

[00:02:07]Oh my god. In July 2025, Dr. Phil McGraw's company ran into massive money problems and filed for bankruptcy. At the same time, he sued his partner by claiming they sabotaged the deal and left him drowning in over $100 million of debt. He is not a medical doctor, firstly. He was always a fraud. His partners and creditors basically came out on top when the judge shut down his bankruptcy plan and ruled that he tried to dodge his financial responsibilities the wrong way. Again, he's not a medical doctor, and his license to practice clinical psychology was revoked back in 2006 due to professional misconduct and ethics violations. If that's not enough, when I saw him trying to interview ICE agents, I thought to myself, "Wow, Dr. Phil has really hit rock bottom."

[00:02:51]Deservedly so. We've got people that are just trying to change uh some of the core values in America, core values of family. Okay.

[00:03:02]>> Trying to rewrite history.

[00:03:04]Um and we we've got people that are coming in saying, "Well, we want to change history. We want to change what kids are being taught in history. We want to change biology. We want to change uh all of the things that we have for a hundred years uh had empirical data to support. But tell me more about I don't want to gloss over this. I I want really want to understand this.

[00:03:26]Changing history. Okay, what what was the history that used to be taught that now has been changed by the tyranny of the fringe?

[00:03:34]Well, you know, pick an area. We can talk about biology, where we have always had two sexes. But what about history?

[00:03:42]Just to pick history, not biology cuz you said history, biology. What about history?

[00:03:48]Well, there's a lot of history to biology, and you would be missing a big point to pretend that there's not historical biology. Uh, but if you want to talk about history, we can uh, not in biology, but just talk about the history of mankind. Yeah. We've got areas where they don't want to talk about slavery.

[00:04:10]We we had one uh, a group of people that wanted to start describing slavery in history books as involuntary relocation. Right. This was not involuntary relocation. This was slavery. And we've got people that are wanting to rename schools because people that were doing what were the mores and folkways of the times now would clearly uh, be doing things against the law, certainly against mores and folkways because they were slave owners at the time uh, are saying, "Well, now we have to tear down these statues. We have to rename these schools and we don't want to teach about them. We have to learn from our mistakes as a society. We can't pretend those things didn't happen. They did happen. They were dark and ugly times in American history. We don't want to pretend those things weren't there." So, let me see if I understand because there's a bunch of stuff So, if I hear you correctly, you're not in agreement with those who want to minimize the tragedy and brutality of slavery, but you also want to keep the school names if a school is named after a slave owner, you're also okay with that because it will remind us and we will learn from it. Am I understanding that correctly?

[00:05:42]I I think you're oversimplifying what I'm saying. What I'm saying is if you're wanting to change American history to pretend that these people did not exist, and you want to measure them by today's yardstick, rather than the yardstick at the time, that's what is referred to as presentism.

[00:06:06]And that's like saying, "Okay, you're going to drive through a neighborhood and the speed limit is 20.

[00:06:14]And you drive through that neighborhood doing 20, and then they come along and say, "You know what? We're going to change the speed limit to 10, and we're going to give you a ticket for speeding when the speed limit uh was 20. It's now 10, but you weren't speeding when you were doing 20, but now it's 10, we're going to give you a retroactive ticket for doing what was acceptable at the time.

[00:06:45]That's called presentism. We're going to take what was done back at the time, pull it up into the current time, and condemn you for not knowing what was going to be acceptable 200 years later than when you did it.

[00:07:02]And I think that is really narcissistic and arrogant and rewriting history instead of letting people learn from the mistakes that mis- what were made in America, and that we need to learn from so we don't make those mistakes again."

[00:07:20]Bro really thought he sounded smart here.

[00:07:24]This guy's basically saying that we've got people trying to change core values and rewrite history, but he never once tells you who these people are. Just this vague shadowy people doing bad things. And that's actually a very clever trick, cuz if you can't name who you're talking about, nobody can fact-check you. It's just fear with no address. The history argument is where it gets really embarrassing for him.

[00:07:45]David asks him point-blank, "Okay, so what history was being taught before that's now being changed?" And Dr. Phil just dodges. He instantly runs to biology and starts talking about two sexes. David has to pull him back and say, "No, no, you said history specifically. Talk about history." Then Dr. Phil brings up the example of people wanting to describe slavery as involuntary relocation to soften it, which is a real problem, sure. Except the people actually caught doing that were conservative state governments.

[00:08:13]Florida's curriculum under DeSantis literally suggested enslaved people developed skills for personal benefit.

[00:08:19]So, Dr. Phil accidentally described something his own side was doing and tried to blame it on the other side.

[00:08:24]Then he brings up this word presentism, which basically means judging people from the past using today's values. He uses that argument to defend schools being named after slave owners. But then his comparison really doesn't make sense. He says it's like driving 20 miles per hour, then later the speed limit changes to 10 and now you get punished for it. But slavery is obviously way more serious than a traffic rule. Speeding is a small law violation. Slavery was millions of people being abused and treated horribly. Those things are not even close to being the same. And also, nobody is really punishing these historical figures. Renaming a school just means a community decides they don't want that person's name on the building anymore. Nobody's getting arrested or erased from history. It's just people making a choice about what they want their community to represent.

[00:09:09]Dr. Phil [clears throat] really needs to replay this interview and listen to himself explaining away the reasoning behind renaming schools or institutions named after blatant white nationalists like Robert E. Lee. I can absolutely see how uncomfortable and imposing it would feel for students of color to sit in classrooms at a school named after a white nationalist. His view that we should leave the names of white nationalists on monuments and buildings just to remember history really shows how detached from reality he is when it comes to systemic racism still existing in America. He talks as if racism and prejudice are things of the past when they clearly are not. And for him to claim he knows nothing about politics is I mean I think we've seen um church membership drop below the 50% mark Mhm. um for the first time in our country's history. And I think that that's a problem for a variety of reasons and one of them being that that's one of the times that families tend to spend quality time together.

[00:10:12]Mhm. Uh it's time that they put their phones down. It's time that they um usually got together um and would go do something as a unit and focus on values that were constructive to the family. Uh there was often meditation time involved. There was often discussions about what was discussed in church that day. Uh they often had Sunday dinner together afterwards and spent quality time like they did no other time during the day.

[00:10:46]And I think it also is a product of our lessened um our lessened uh birth rate which has dropped because a lot of people join church uh when they have children because they want their child to be baptized or christened or whatever and the fact that we've seen our birth rate drop to around 1.6 uh from 2.1 which is necessary to sustain Yes. um our infrastructure right now uh is a problem and it seems that that's one of the main reasons that church membership has dropped off. There's fewer kids to go get baptized, christened, or whatever.

[00:11:31]Uh so people have less reason to go to church, and that's a byproduct of the of the of the lesser birth rate. So, Dr. Phil sees church attendance dropping below 50% for the first time in American history and reacts like the sky is falling. And then his actual reasoning is basically people put their phones down and have dinner together. That's it. He's basically saying church is valuable because it's a scheduled family activity, which okay, but that's not really an argument for religion specifically. That's an argument for having a family game night. You could get the exact same benefits from a weekly dinner tradition or a sports team or literally any other communal activity. He indirectly argued for the importance of community bonding while thinking he was arguing for God. Then David hits him clean by pointing out that as church attendance has been going down, violent crime has also been going down at the same time. So, the whole idea that removing God from public life leads to moral decay and chaos, the data just doesn't back it up. And Dr. Phil's response to this is genuinely evasive.

[00:12:30]He says, "Well, some crime is going down and some is going up." And then just starts talking about shoplifting and gang exploitation of young kids. He completely sidesteps the actual point David made and redirects to a totally different conversation. That's not engaging with an argument, that's running away from one. He also tries to tie falling church attendance to falling birth rates. Like fewer babies somehow automatically means fewer people in church. So, his chain of logic is basically fewer kids, fewer baptisms, fewer church goers. And look, that's an interesting observation, but it kind of undercuts the alarm he's trying to raise. Because if people are going to church less simply because they're having fewer children, that's not some moral collapse happening. That's a demographic and economic shift playing out over time. You can't really frame that as a spiritual crisis when the simplest explanation is just people aren't having as many babies, so of course there are fewer baptisms. Dr. Phil built his entire brand on being a straight-talking truth-teller who calls people out on their nonsense. His whole TV show was about confronting people with realities, but in this interview, when David confronts him with hard realities, Dr. Phil folds almost immediately. He can't name professors who lost tenure. He promises to send a list he clearly doesn't have ready. He dodges the crime statistics question.

[00:13:44]The guy who made a career out of saying, "How's that working for you?" completely falls apart when someone applies that same energy to his own arguments. Dr. Phil spent years presenting himself as a non- partisan straight-shooter who just cared about families and psychology.

[00:13:58]Then gradually, he started appearing more and more on conservative media, started talking about woke culture and tyranny of the fringe, and America losing its soul, started using the exact language and framing that Republican politicians use, and then wrote a book that reads like a conservative culture war manifesto. And through all of it, he kept insisting he wasn't political. That level of dishonesty about your own position is actually more troubling than just openly being conservative. At least open conservatives are being straight with you about where they're coming from. He also at one point seriously explored running for Senate in Texas as a Republican, not as an independent, not as some outside the system candidate, as a Republican. And then he quietly dropped the idea. But that alone tells you everything about the "I'm not political" claim. You don't explore running for Senate as a Republican because you're a neutral cultural observer who just cares about families.

[00:14:49]His relationship with the truth is also genuinely problematic beyond just the political stuff. His show over the years has promoted or platformed some deeply questionable things. He gave significant airtime and credibility to anti-vaccine adjacent ideas. He had guests promoting debunked psychological and medical treatments. He used pseudo-scientific framing to make entertainment look like therapy. And because he had that doctor in front of his name, audiences trusted it as legitimate when a lot of it simply wasn't. And the biggest irony of the whole conversation is this. Dr. Phil's entire argument is that one fringe side is trying to force their values on everyone and control what people can say and think. But then in the same breath, he's saying communities shouldn't be allowed to rename their own schools, certain topics shouldn't be taught to kids, and professors should be protected from consequences for their speech while apparently students and institutions shouldn't be. He's not defending openness. He's defending the specific status quo he personally agrees with and calling any challenge to it an attack on America's soul. That's not a cultural observation. That's just conservatism with a psychology degree attached to it.

[00:15:55]If you want strong families, you fight poverty. If you want to reduce crime, you fight poverty. If you want an educated empowered population, you fight poverty. If you want to reduce racism and climate change, you fight poverty.

[00:16:07]If you want better housing and health care, you fight poverty. If you want a strong, happy, healthy country, you fight poverty. This is all I have. Now, let me know what you think about all of this, and please don't forget to share this video so we can grow as a community.

[00:16:22]What up?

[00:16:25]>> [music] >> What up?

[00:16:28]What up?