In this 165th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. This week we discuss mis-, dis-, and mal- information, and terrorism, in light of testimony before Congress regarding the Twitter files and government interference in the exchange of information. We learn how the government would like us to quash narratives that it finds displeasing or inconvenient. We discuss the nat...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number one.
Precisely.
Excellent.
165.
165, alright.
No need to discuss the primeness of that.
165. 165. 165.
All right.
No need to discuss the primeness of that.
No, we don't.
It's actually 50 episodes to the episode past one that we will be discussing today, when we, maybe not for the first time, but for the most extensive time, discussed myths, dis, and malinformation, which we will be coming back to today, in part because of some of the latest revelations in the Twitter files.
Excellent.
We're also going to be talking about The Nature of Respiratory Viruses, Pandemics, and Iatrogenic Harm, which we will define when we get to that section.
And we'll be reading a few short excerpts from a theologian, a German theologian, who was a chaplain in the German army in World War I and later sent missives into Germany from America during World War II to try to wake the German people.
Excellent.
I am looking forward to this.
I do have to say to our audience, we are once again working, Zach is looking out for us remotely, but we are running the podcast ourselves.
If I appear to be distracted momentarily, I'm just trying to make sure that there is nothing I need to know about what's going.
Right or wrong, and I should comment, we didn't mention an idea that Zach had before he left was this light bulb, which is a bit meta.
I mean, in any case, let us know what you think of it.
All right, we have...
Also, I just launched right in without saying, you're Brett Weinstein?
I am.
Dr. Brett Weinstein, and I am Dr. Heather Hying, and let's do a couple of, a little bit of logistics up front.
Thanking you all for your support in various ways, and telling you where else you can find us and our sponsors, and then we will get right into some of that mis-dis and mal-information that you have all come to enjoy so much.
So, once again this week we will not be doing a Q&A.
Next week we'll be back, same time, same place, and we will do a Q&A, and maybe, maybe I'm not promising, but maybe we'll make it a little longer since we will have missed two weeks in a row.
Apologies for that.
I know a lot of people really appreciate being able to ask us questions, and we were in a situation this week when we were able to be asked questions with a live audience, and it was just so wonderful to remember what that's like.
Yeah, it really was a reminder of just what an awesome experience that is Yeah, indeed.
So we will be back with the Q&A next week.
You can find my writing weekly at Natural Selections, my substack.
This week I republished a piece that was originally published in the essay anthology Iconoclast.
It's called Me, She, He, They, and it's an exploration of sex and gender and transness and specifically also non-binaryness and whether or not that makes Any sense at all as an identity?
Spoiler alert, no, it does not.
I'm proud of this essay and a lot of people have truly enjoyed it, so I encourage you to go there if that is one of the topics that you are interested in or thinking it is a harbinger of the apocalypse, one of the horsemen, I think it is.
And I do think that we can reverse at least that part of it.
And maybe once we turn one of the horses around, maybe we can get them all turned around.
Yeah, we can just be done with harbingers altogether.
Done with harbingers.
Whatever harbingers are.
Yeah, whatever a harbinger is.
Any harbinger in a storm.
No.
Maybe.
That's not how that works.
Probably not.
So we are supported by you, and we appreciate you subscribing to the channel, liking whole videos that you find here on YouTube and on Odyssey and on Spotify, and if you're listening only in whatever form you are taking in your podcast, please subscribe.
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You can also comment.
There's no reason just to shake your fist idly at your screen.
You can tell us.
Yes, you can.
Yes.
That suggests that we manage to look at the comments, which we don't.
Sometimes we do, but... But commenting does...
In a fair world, commenting would help with the algorithms that would then put what we're doing in front of more people, but it's patently not fair in that way.
So I don't know that your comments do, but they say that.
If there isn't any sort of shadowy stuff going on behind the scenes, that the more comments, the more likely the work is to get spread.
Yes, in our case, we know that YouTube is there, that they shake their fists at the screen and then they start pressing buttons that sabotage our content, which is, you know, I can't say we appreciate it because I know that we don't, but we also seem so far not to have been able to stop them from doing that.
All right, so also we encourage you to join one of our Patreons.
On both of them you can get access to our wonderful Discord server where you can join conversations in a variety of formats on a variety of topics across a whole swath of humanity who are enjoying being there and doing things like happy hour and karaoke and book clubs.
And at my Patreon you can join a monthly private Q&A that we do together the last Sunday of every month and the first usually first Saturdays and Sundays of every month you have conversations one of which you just finished uh for the month uh from at your Patreon.
Indeed, quite provocative, and actually some good stuff may have come out of it.
So anyway, it was a good conversation, and people who are looking for a good group of folks who are actually interested in figuring out how the world might be improved, it's a great place to come join us.
That's fabulous.
All right, and of course we do have sponsors.
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Out of ads.
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It's a totally standard kind of transition.
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The kind that is actually possible in reality land.
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Which is where we hope to... It's where we're broadcasting from.
That's right.
We are here talking to you from reality land.
Hopefully you're there too.
Okay, so we wanted to start by talking, by returning to a topic we have discussed many times.
But as I mentioned, we talked about in depth 50 episodes ago on episode 115 in February of 2022.
and missed this and malinformation.
But maybe you want to introduce it, because we're talking about it, because of some of the stuff that's happened this week, with the Twitter files and Congress.
Yeah, we have new Twitter files.
And even more importantly, we had the testimony of Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi to the House of Representatives, where it was a remarkable hearing.
I actually recommend that people go back and just start listening to what is said.
It is so amazing.
In Matt Taibbi's case, we have one of the most Decorated journalists of our era being slandered as if he was some sort of pretender, a grifter, not a journalist at all.
The so-called journalist is in fact what he was accused of being.
And it's just, what planet is this from?
But nonetheless, the hearing... It seems to be from planet blue.
From Planet Blue, it seems to be.
Somehow, somehow the party that you and I remember as the party, the anti-war party, and the party that would defend liberal principles like free speech, is now the party attacking these very things.
It's the party of this newfangled racism.
It's hard to believe what's happened, but nonetheless, we are where we are.
And so Matt and Michael testified about what they have seen in the Twitter files, which are basically files that Elon Musk has made available to select journalists in order to reveal what has taken place behind the scenes with respect to the control of information.
And the central feature of what was revealed in the most recent Twitter files and in the testimony of Matt and Michael to the house was the massive network of collusion between various pieces of our security state and the tech platforms to suppress various viewpoints and
I was particularly struck to see a discussion in the Congress by Matt of misdisc and malinformation.
Misdisc and malinformation is something you and I have been trying to raise the alarm about Since episode 115 back in February of 2022, and the context is nothing if not alarming, and I was a little bit shocked to see that the full weight of it actually had not yet become visible in the context of the Twitter file.
So, missed us and malinformation, you will all remember, are three categories that were seen together, I think for the first time, On February 7th of 2022.
Can I show my screen?
Yeah, let's show your screen if I can remember how to do that.
So this is a bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security from exactly as you said, February 7th, 2022, and we showed exactly this as well in episode 115 in February of 2022.
stating that they have issued a National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin, suggesting, and as to why they are doing that, because there are continuing threats against the homeland, apparently, right?
And you may have to undo my screen in order for me to get to the right place to show, but you were about to define the terms, but I think we can also get there directly if you want to start defining miscadism and malinformation as I go.
Yes, you will all.
Yes, those of you who watched episode 115 will be reminded that misinformation is information that is incorrect but accidentally.
There you go.
I'm going to interrupt you for a moment and say, so the Department of Homeland Security site, which we were just on, the bulletin from February 7, 2022, links to a MISTIS and malinformation site here, exactly this, and we'll put this in the show notes, which is at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency branch of the federal government of the United States.
And here they have terms to know.
Some tactics of foreign influence, they specify here, include leveraging misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.
Definitions for each are below.
Can we just read these or you want to define them?
Well, I'm a little concerned because I know that some of their sites, they have modified these definitions, perhaps in part because we called attention to what they were up to.
These have actually remained the same.
They have remained the same, okay.
Even though this site looks very different and it appears to be living in a different place, You can't get there the same way you could get there 13 months ago, but the definitions that they have used here are the same ones that we shared in February of 2022.
All right.
Misinformation is false but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm.
Disinformation is deliberately created to mislead, harm, or manipulate a person, social group, organization, or country.
And malinformation is based on fact but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.
An example of malinformation is editing a video to remove important context to harm or mislead.
So that is one sentence that I don't think was in the original.
Yeah, I don't think it was in the original.
And there's been a lot of skullduggery behind the scenes, including the deleting of what amounts to evidence of this extra constitutional behavior on the part of the Department of Homeland Security.
But the upshot is this.
Before we get to the upshot, because that is the final bit here, can we just spend some time talking about the mysticism of information?
Yes, I want to go through the taxonomy.
Misinformation And one of the things that we said in the episode, and we'll share actually the clip that I think, the 25-minute clip in which we talked about it a year ago, is that actually in education, and when you teach, at least if you are teaching well, if you are actually trying to get your students to be able to go out into the world and assess what is true and what is not, and have a response, when people are trying to manipulate them, Yeah, I would say it differently.
provide to them forms of mis-, dis-, and malinformation in order to allow them to learn how to recognize it when it comes at them.
Yeah, I would say it differently.
I would say they have gone out of their way to formalize things as if they are a threat that are actually a normal part of various kinds of discourse, comedy, teaching, etc.
Misinformation, errors, errors.
Disinformation, intentional errors.
Malinformation, things that are not in error, but that might lead to the distrust of the government, distrust of things like vaccine safety.
Now, there are two parts to this.
There are two parts To the problem here, and one of them was clearly outlined in the hearings by Michael and Matt.
That is the draconian nature of these definitions with respect to a systematic campaign of propaganda and censorship, right?
They fully recognize the horror of your government defining things like information that is Based in fact but causes distrust of the government entities themselves to declare that worthy of some sort of control is a unconstitutional and be very troubling because it is part and parcel of propaganda and censorship which are at the core of tyrannical state power.
What they did not say So we do have a few more things to say about this.
Go ahead.
One of the things that we talked about a year ago, but did not actually share a link to, and we're going to this time share a link.
You can actually show my screen again.
This is a PDF from Uh, the same, um, the same cluster of sites, of government sites, in which, uh, they give advice to organizations or people who might want to control misdisc and malinformation.
And they call this the Rumor Control Page Startup Guide.
And we did talk about this some a year ago, but they again have mis-dis and malinformation defined, this time with handy little infographics in which the bullhorn is spreading out true things that the government wishes would not be said, and that is malinformation.
And if you come down and try to learn, what is it?
What should you do?
What does the government want you to do if you think that you have determined that there is some misdisc or malinformation out there?
Well, here, how do you communicate effectively on a rumor control page?
Remember, the government thinks that rumor control pages are good because rumors in this taxonomy are bad things.
You know, errors, intentional errors, or things that the government doesn't want you talking about or knowing.
Well, you could preemptively debunk or pre-bunk, was the phrase that we found amusing a year ago, because what are they talking about?
Lead with the truth, not the rumor.
Keep it simple.
Hey, they've got a light bulb!
Look at that!
And be consistent in the types of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation narratives and activities that you debunk.
You know, don't be too much of a generalist.
Stay in your lane.
Wait, wait, go back.
I just want to point out that lead with the truth doesn't mean lead with the truth.
It means lead with that fraction of the truth that does not cause distrust of the government.
Now, I just want to point out, as a patriotic American, how unpatriotic this is.
This is a violation of Arguably the most central principle at the heart of the Free West, the ability to discuss that which is true, especially when it involves things that cause the government to be untrustworthy and therefore need to be corrected through the natural mechanisms of democracy.
So I will say you said, uh, I want to point out as a patriotic American just how unpatriotic this is.
I would also like to point out as a scientific American just how unscientific this is, okay?
And scientific American doesn't mean anything in particular except it used to be a popular science magazine of some repute but has since fallen into the ideological rabbit hole.
But this is the opposite of how one understands the world scientifically, because okay, government, define truth.
Oh wait, no, please don't, because you keep on getting it wrong.
And science does, right?
Science is a process by which we constantly refine our understanding and hopefully get closer and closer and closer to a true understanding of what is actually going on in the universe.
And on balance over time, if you take the long time horizon, we certainly do get there.
But any given change may have actually moved us backwards.
You can't know in the moment.
And we have seen in the last three years of this unending, fear-mongering SARS-CoV-2 landscape that we live in now, and will forever probably, that when the government changes its opinions as to what is true or what is the right policy or what it is that you're allowed to talk about, they always kind of Vaguely wave their arms and say, well, of course, the science has changed.
And in no case so far that I have seen them do this and that we have talked about this, have we found or have they supplied any evidence that the science just changed?
And of course, the science change isn't what they mean.
What they're suggesting is that the scientific evidence is now pointing in a different direction, which would be fantastic if that was actually what was going on.
But in fact, either they have lost control of the narrative and they have to admit something they didn't want to admit before, or they are simply changing up what it is that they want you to believe now, and in neither that case nor the former case are they actually going to provide any evidence because you know you wouldn't understand or something like that.
Yes, and it eliminates the natural remedies.
Should government fail in its attempt to do science or to foster science, certainly the way we would find that out and do something about it would be to discuss the failure of our government with respect to a scientific question.
And if you're not allowed to talk about things that contravene The government's current scientific perspective, then that can't be done.
So this basically assumes that the government will be right.
It is a religious position that they are selling the public.
Exactly.
You remember when Facebook's fact-checking arm, PolitiFact, declared you and Robert Malone purveyors of their worst level of unfactiness, liar, liar, pants on fire, for claiming a few things, including that SARS-CoV-2 may have actually leaked from a Lab.
That earned their Liar Liar Pants on Fire rating, uh, because that was not true then, but it maybe later became a little bit less true because, or a little bit more true, because they rescinded their rating without saying anything about it and said, well, maybe we don't know.
Well, let's just look at what's happened.
Now that the Washington Post is able to talk about the probability that this virus emerged from a lab, you and the public are clearly licensed to talk about it, which is basically synonymous with saying that the government has dictated when you can talk about this, which is obviously a violation of the First Amendment.
Right.
You're no longer guilty of malinformation if you talk about it, but we will let you know when you are.
Malinformation.
Terrorism, I should point out.
We haven't gotten there yet, remember?
Oh, right.
So just one more thing from this page.
They offer a rumor control checklist if you are an organization or a person who wants to go into rumor control mode and fight the good fight with the government against mis, dis, and malinformation.
Here are some things that they suggest you consider.
And if most of your answers are yes, you're probably in a good position to put up one of these rumor control sites of your own.
Is the narrative around a contentious or disputed topic where information is changing or not widely known?
There's a good chance you should probably fact check that.
If the information is changing, Okay.
Are multiple narratives or artifacts converging into a single narrative or conspiracy?
Well, look, if there's a lot of stories and we're getting a refinement as to what we think is true, that's a good sign that you should put something up to pre-bunk or, what was it?
It was like debunk in advance or in advance pre-bunk.
They went like pre-pre-bunk.
I can't remember which ones are preposterous jokes and which ones were official proposals.
It may be re-bunk?
Re-bunk?
Yeah, no, but they asked, they suggested that you should debunk and pre-bunk.
And then, uh, if the narrative or artifact focuses on upcoming major milestones or events where early fact-checking could proactively disrupt the spread, So, major milestones or events.
They don't say anything about whether or not those major milestones or events are true, not true, good, bad, and they're like, we know that the government has some idea about what it does and does not want you to be resisting here, but there's nothing in here about what is actually true.
Because, because, if there were, then that would take, that would pull the rug out from under this plan.
So, now, you would like to come back to Yes.
The fact of the government being involved in a massive propaganda campaign in which they are going to sell us narratives that contravene the truth and they are going to silence voices that point this out is bad enough.
But it becomes 10 times worse when they do so under the guise of preventing a kind of terrorism.
And what most people do not understand, and what was not mentioned in these hearings as far as I know, is the fact that when they say mis-dis and mal-information are a form of terrorism, they are saying something with absolutely profound legal consequences, or I should probably say extra-legal consequences.
Because of changes that were made to the structure of our laws under the Bush and Obama administrations, when the executive branch, of which the Department of Homeland Security is a part, declares somebody a terrorist, it triggers all kinds of provisions that in the panic after 9-11, we allowed to be installed into law.
Things that effectively end your constitutional rights.
So it is important that people understand.
We, presumably by their definitions, have been guilty of spreading malinformation in this podcast because what we're telling you is that your government is now behaving as a rogue state, that it is declaring people terrorists who are doing nothing but speaking the truth...
We don't know that it has done that.
We don't know that it has done it, but the point is they've set out a definition and the definition involves true things that cause distrust.
And this is something that should cause you to distrust your government.
It's also true.
So the point is by using that term, they're not just saying malinformation is bad.
They are saying malinformation meets a technical standard that then causes you to lose your rights.
And the most important thing about this is it's not that they, there is no obligation that they tell you that you have triggered this provision in the law.
You do not have the right to challenge it in a court.
You do not even know that it has happened.
And so we are talking about a level of tyranny well beyond propaganda and censorship and That is something that should truly alarm us, so I really hope that we will start to understand their private language.
The executive branch has powers that they are not supposed to have, that have not been tested by a court, and those powers Um, have everything to say about our information environment, what we are allowed to discover, who we are allowed to listen to.
And, um, it really, it could not be a, a more frightening turn of events.
I'm glad that we are finally having a conversation at the level of, uh, congressional hearings in which we're talking about malinformation, but let's not underrate the danger of, of that provision.
Indeed.
All right.
Is that where you wanted to go?
I think so.
With this section?
All right.
Actually, there is one more thing I wanted to say about it.
Actually, I'll save it for later.
Sorry.
I think that's a good place to leave it for now.
All right.
So we also wanted to talk about the nature of respiratory disease, pandemics, and iatrogenic harm.
This is prompted by an excellent piece on a substat called Bad Catitude by an anonymous scholar, writer, who goes by Gato Malo, in which he writes, I assume it's a he.
I think it has to be a he, because otherwise it would be Gata Mala.
Maybe.
Maybe not.
Maybe he's misgendering himself in the substack.
I don't think that's how it works anyway.
I think all cats are male.
In Spanish.
In Spanish.
You know, it's not even binary.
It's like mononary.
Oh, where have we landed?
I don't know.
No, this is fine.
I'd rather land here than a lot of the places that seem to be where people are spending time.
Yeah, I agree.
So, the piece is called, and we'll link to it in the show notes, The Greater Than Again is Bad Catitude with two t's, like cat and attitude is a portmanteau word.
Word is not a word.
No.
It's called the greatest lie told during COVID and the one they will undoubtedly try to tell again.
So the lie is, as Gatto Malo argues in this piece, pandemics are dangerous to modern societies.
Now, that's going to sound like an extraordinary thing to call a lie, isn't it?
How could they not be?
We all know, we all know of pandemics like the one we are supposedly still living in.
And the Spanish flu and how, you know, how completely dangerous they are.
But he lays it out, and I'm going to lay out some of it.
And again, I recommend that you read the piece, but let's just lay out a few of the pieces here.
What do we actually know?
Well, one of, actually before I lay it out in an organized way, one of the past pandemics of that last hundred years that he points to is the Hong Kong flu.
In 1968-69, which I had actually not heard of, except that we were both born in 1969, and your mother actually had it when she was pregnant with you.
She had it.
That's right.
Right?
Which may explain everything.
It may explain everything, absolutely.
But it was pretty bad.
People were taking it very seriously, and yet what happened near the end, or in the middle of the Hong Kong flu, the so-called Hong Kong flu, being one of the worst pandemics in America, well, Woodstock happened, right?
You know, instead of the response that we had during COVID, which is shut down everything and instill fear in the hearts and minds of everyone that you can possibly instill fear in, we let, we let.
That's a terrible way to put it.
But, you know, the American government and the American people apparently never considered, or if they ever considered, it never got past some very small meetings doing anything like disrupting society at the level that has happened during COVID.
Woodstock happened, one of the greatest known public displays of human ecstasis in the 20th century, right?
And what happened?
Gosh, well, Woodstock, that's got to have been a super spreader event.
Well, no, it was fine, right?
It was fine.
So similarly, as I was reading this piece, sort of before I lay out his argument, he mentioned Zika, which was a virus that shows up in South America as something that causes, if I remember correctly, microencephaly in babies born to mothers who were exposed to Zika while they were pregnant.
And we were about to go on our 11-week study abroad with 30 students, you know, half of whom were women and all of whom were of reproductive age.
And we felt compelled, we felt honor-bound, and that it was required of us to talk carefully with all of them about what we could tell about this new emerging pathogen, what the risks were to them.
And to advise that if any of them were actually thinking of, you know, getting pregnant, becoming mothers anytime soon, they should maybe consider not going.
That it was, you know, there seemed to be some kind of a latency and it was this emerging virus we didn't know, but it was our obligation to talk about what What that was, and it seemed like it might be something that would take over the world, and then it fizzled, right?
Like, people just stopped talking about it at some point after some number of months.
And this, in part, is the argument that Gato Malo is making, that these pandemics that we are told to be terrified of, if there is no big governmental response, they tend to burn themselves out.
So respiratory pathogens almost never cause pandemics in the modern era, basically since penicillin.
That penicillin and other antibiotics, depending on what the pathogen is, have done a fantastic job of controlling the kinds of things that might once have actually done widespread fast damage in human populations.
So, effectively, the argument is that there is a trade-off.
Maybe you want to jump in here before I get into the public policy measures.
So effectively, the argument is that there is a trade-off.
Things that spread highly effectively aren't highly pathogenic or highly virulent.
And so the point is, yes, things can spread across civilization.
A respiratory virus, though, requires you to, as we've talked about many times on Dark Horse, it requires you to be up and about in order to do the spreading, and therefore it can't make you all that sick, which means it's not likely to be all that deadly.
There are diseases that are exceptions, but they have other modes of transmission, and so So just to fill that in, if you do not transmit directly, if the pathogen doesn't go from host to host but uses a vector to get between you, something that is malaria, that is mosquito-borne, for instance, mosquito vector diseases like malaria, like yellow fever, like West Nile, like dengue,
Um, may actually benefit from making its host sick enough to be non-mobile such that mosquitoes are better able to find hosts and then carry them to other not-yet-infected, um, potential hosts.
Not only, um, not able to move around, but, uh, you know, let's take dengue.
Yeah.
Uh, the colloquial name, breakbone fever.
Yeah.
The reason?
Because of the profound pain in the bones.
It happens after a person's been infected a second time by dengue.
So this is a complex phenomenon that involves somebody who already has immunity, which the pathogen then utilizes.
But anyway, the point is, oh, your bones feel like they're broken?
Well, you're not very good at swatting mosquitoes, even if, you know, you're lying flat, right?
So anyway, some pathogens can be profoundly debilitating and very dangerous.
And dengue, the second time you get it, is one of these pathogens.
And at least one of the species of malaria, of which there are four, right.
These diseases can kill you.
They can be very, very, very destructive.
And they can kill you and still win at being the disease, at being the pathogen that they are that causes the disease.
Whereas if you don't have a vector or some other mechanism by which to spread, making your host very, very, very sick so that they can't go out and infect other people is an evolutionary dead end for the pathogen.
And so pathogens that do that won't persist.
Yeah.
The other thing to say, and this is proper context, we've been fed an overly simplistic model of all kinds of things, including the damage that comes from pathogens for this entire pandemic.
One of the things that happens, even if you had a comparatively high case fatality rate, in large measure, what's happening is those are, it's pulling deaths that would occur soon, so they happen sooner than they might.
But the idea that we've been sold is that somebody's life was lost and that's not the right way to think about it.
It's how many years of life were lost, right?
So you might actually be able to see that if you look at excess mortality for, you know, five years before through ten years after.
Exactly.
And see if you have less than expected afterwards because some number of people have already died a year, two, three years before they might have.
That is exactly right.
So anyway, it's not a simple calculation.
And also, if you were doing something like comparing unknown harms from a transfection agent, you know, an untried gene therapy, and a disease with an unknown risk to human life, If the risk is to young people, then the number of years lost for every life lost is huge, right?
Whereas when somebody is dying of COVID and they are at their life expectancy or beyond it, they're losing very few years and these things should, it's not a difficult thing to calculate the amount of loss, we just refuse to do it because something
Wanted us to think these were deaths as if these people were going to live forever, you know, absent the virus, when in fact what mostly happened was people who were very old or quite sick had some years potentially lost, but not a huge number.
So the argument continues, again this is in the Bad Catitude substack piece that I will link to, that many public policy measures like lockdowns, and although this wasn't a public policy measure, this was a widespread medical measure, particularly in some places like New York, the use of ventilators, lockdowns, ventilators, did more harm than good.
And many if not most of If not, maybe even the vast majority of COVID deaths during COVID are attributable to what Brett was just talking about with regard to hastening the demise of someone who was already near the end of their life, which doesn't make it a wonderful thing to have happened, but it's less tragic than when a child dies or a young person dies.
But even, you know, if we look at 2020, before the transfection agents, before the so-called vaccines were charted out, at which point we have other reasons to consider what excess deaths are about, the argument laid out here is that many of the Um, many of the harms, many of the excess deaths and other injuries that people were experiencing, uh, were iatrogenic.
And iatrogenic means, and I'm just going to read exactly the definition, uh, that, uh, that he writes in his book, is relating, in his book, in his sub stack, relating to illness caused by medical examination or treatment.
So if what we have are largely harms caused not by the pathogen, but by the treatment brought on in order to treat the pathogen, then certainly it could have been avoided.
And there's a lot of evidence that comes in a variety of forms in this piece, including, for instance, that Sweden, which almost uniquely in the West, responded very quickly, very early in a couple of ways, but then mostly just let its society be.
And a lot of people in the West were confused.
I mean, I was confused.
It's like, wow, that's amazing.
What are they doing?
I would have expected Sweden and all the rest of the Scandinavian countries to be doing sort of what the U.S.
is doing, but more so.
And the fact is that what they did worked.
And what they did was not much.
They let society be, right?
They let society do what it was supposed to be doing.
And Specifically, ventilators.
The ventilators which were widespread in ICUs in New York and not in several other states correlate.
You see extremely high death rates during the period when ventilators were being used on COVID patients in ICUs in New York and not at the same time controlling for almost everything except the exact location in these other states where ventilators weren't being used.
That suggests that the ventilators were the cause, the primary cause, rather than the COVID.
You have, of course, sending COVID-positive people into care homes, where, you know, care homes are already people who are at risk because of their age.
Because they are somewhat infirm, because they're not being allowed to go outside, because they're not moving much.
You send COVID-positive people into care homes, you spread COVID, and some of those people are not going to make it.
And keeping people inside rather than letting people go outside and be active and be healthy and make D while the sun shines and do all of the things that we're supposed to be doing outside, of course, was another iatrogenic harm as a result.
Yeah, I have a number of things to say here.
harm from during COVID, which can be attributed to not the virus, but the policy in response to the virus.
And then we'll talk about Spanish flu in a moment, but you have some things to say.
Yeah, I have a number of things to say here.
One, there is a question.
The deaths occurred as a result of medical treatment that was a mistake, or it may have I think the ventilators, for instance.
The ventilators, yes.
The ventilators, for instance, sending sick people to care homes, all of these things had a negative impact.
Well, I was just saying, with regard to a mistake, I hope that the ventilator use was a mistake.
I cannot fathom how sending sick people into care homes ever made sense.
Yeah, but this is the point I want to make.
The striking thing about our behavior at a medical level during COVID was that we did essentially everything we shouldn't have done and none of the things we should have done.
Right.
People should have been outside.
We locked them inside.
We took sick people and sent them to places they would infect other vulnerable people.
We hooked them up to ventilators.
When the ventilators didn't work, we turned up the pressure.
Right, we denied them drugs that are safe and do work.
We gave them things, medical treatments that don't work and cause harm.
It's across the board and I keep trying to call attention to the unlikeliness of you landing on every wrong answer.
That's really improbable, right?
So I don't know whether that is just a matter of we have a few morons who think upside down and Land on the wrong answer all the time, and really all you got to do to find out the right answer is do the opposite of whatever they say.
That seems super unlikely, but could be.
But the point is, we did all these things.
Whatever their nature, they caused a lot of people to die.
And then we counted them as COVID deaths.
And so the counting them as COVID deaths then amped up the panic.
Help stoke fear!
Right.
And the panic then justified the draconian measures that were inflicted on us.
So, again, I don't know how this worked or why it happened, but Gatomalo's point is we inflicted this harm on ourselves.
It caused a lot of fear because it created numbers that left the impression of an extremely dangerous virus.
Now, of course, you and I believe that the virus is very destructive, but it doesn't have a high case fatality rate.
And so the fear that it was going to rob us of, you know, our friends and relatives at some high rate was always nonsense.
But we created this fictional pathogen that was doing that.
And those, had there been a force behind the scenes that had been looking for an excuse to increase its own power to control the behavior of the population, what could be said, where people could go.
This became that excuse and it deployed it at an incredible rate.
The other thing from the points you've used to, is that the virus was going to be a very good thing.
You've highlighted so far that I thought was very strong in this piece was it suggests that in some sense as bad as a disease that's circulating in society is and I think we underrate the harm of all the things that circulate but as bad as they are It may be that the best thing you can do is as little as possible.
You can treat the symptoms.
You can take, you know, basic rational precautions.
Isolate very sick people.
Yeah.
If you're sick, don't make contact with other people.
Wash your hands.
These sorts of things.
You know, you can treat acute cases.
If you've got a really good safe drug that seems to prevent transmission when one person in the household gets it, you could give that drug to the others.
You know, and there are all sorts of basic things you could do.
Now, with a new virus, is that the moment to introduce other new medical technology, or is that not the moment?
That's the amazing thing.
And the last thing I want to say at this stage in the discussion is we have two basic models of medicine in competition.
And I believe that we saw something like a coup unfold by one against the other during the COVID pandemic.
The coup was by the public health approach to the medical health approach.
Now, I certainly agree that there are questions to be raised about public health.
There are things that happen at the population level that matter that are not best addressed at the personal level.
However, personal medical health with respect to illnesses that an individual comes down with are comparatively well addressed from a bottom-up approach.
That is to say, doctors seeing patients, discovering what works, what doesn't work, talking with each other, improving their own techniques, pooling their information, right?
That system.
But treating patients as individuals.
Right.
Not as temporarily disaggregated members of some vague population.
Doctors don't treat populations.
Doctors treat individuals.
Individuals.
And pools of doctors get smarter because a doctor who sees a pattern will discuss that pattern with other doctors who will decide whether they are seeing that pattern And what it might mean.
That emergent intelligence grows in medicine.
And what has happened here is we have decided instead that what we want is the highest quality information, sourced by the people in the position to see the most, who will then hand down the information about the standard of care.
And in this case, they handed us every wrong idea there was.
They did massive harm, and they basically handcuffed the doctors who otherwise would have done much better.
And so anyway, the comparison between a bottom-up approach, doctors seeing patients and discovering what works, versus a top-down approach where Anthony Fauci tells you what he was given on the tablets on the mountain and This thing, right?
There's no comparison between these in terms of how much harm was going to be done.
We tried, during COVID, we tried the Anthony Fauci version, and we got an absolutely unmitigated disaster.
We got a disaster that we amplified.
Yes, we did.
Yeah, we made it worse.
Every day, week, month, year, we continued to listen to the public health I didn't even know what to call it.
Machine, I guess, at this point, because it's fundamentally doing the opposite of what it should be doing.
So what might have been going on with Spanish flu?
This is 1918-19.
And it's usually trotted out as the example in the 20th century of like, okay, but we, you know, we had penicillin, like what, why?
That, that was huge.
And we obviously can't afford another, another Spanish flu.
And, uh, and, um, here's the thinking.
And I will walk through a little bit of, um, just walk through a little bit of what Guatemala says, and then go to the paper that he's, he's citing here.
Apparently, aspirin, which was a relatively new drug at the time and seemed like a wonder drug, but not much was known about the dosing and high dosages, of course, now are understood to be toxic.
Aspirin was a primary drug used in the treatment of Spanish flu, especially in the military.
And specifically, Spanish flu was preferentially treated in many areas with doses of aspirin between 8 and 31 grams per day.
8 and 31 grams per day.
Today, most aspirin is 325 milligrams.
per day.
Today, most aspirin is 325 milligrams.
It's a third of a gram.
And the max dose recommended, this is from a 1977 FDA guideline, I don't know if the FDA ever made sense, but it made more sense then than it does now, presumably.
1977 FDA guidelines, they said, you know what, about 4,000 milligrams, about four grams per day, is really as much as you can safely take.
And the toxic dose is now understood to be about 200 to 300 milligrams per kilogram of weight, which is about 20 grams per day for a 180 pound person.
So, reminder that the treatment for Spanish flu in many areas was between 8 and 31 grams per day, where the toxic dose of aspirin is now understood to be about 20 for a 180-pound person.
Lethal dose.
Yeah.
The word lethal isn't used here, so I'm being a little squidgy with my language, because I couldn't find the precise language I was looking for, but yes, I think so.
So, As Gautam Wala writes in this piece, this is why incredible caution should be exercised around large departures from tested and true medical practice and new pharma modalities and products.
Aspirin in 1918 was a new product, relatively new product.
And his primary source is this paper called by a woman named Starco from 2009 called Cell Acylates and Pandemic Influenza Mortality 1918-1919 Pharmacology, Pathology, and Historic Evidence.
It was published in Clinical Infectious Diseases.
And it is presented as a hypothesis, which is pretty fantastic.
And if you want to show my screen, I just have a couple little sections to read from this paper.
So again, this is published as a hypothesis.
It's published under the title Viewpoints, again, by an MD who appears to be an independent researcher, in which she argues that it was indeed the widespread use of aspirin as a treatment for Spanish flu, which actually explains The mortality rate for Spanish flute.
Here's a couple of quotes.
I'm sorry, this is going to jump around.
I'm going to try to scroll slowly so I can show it to you.
Okay, here we go.
Sorry, guys.
This one first.
A confluence of events created a perfect storm for widespread salicylate aspirin toxicity.
The loss of Bayer's patent on aspirin in February 1917 allowed many manufacturers into the lucrative aspirin market.
Official recommendations for aspirin therapy at toxic doses were preceded by ignorance of the unusual non-linear kinetics of salicylate, which were unknown until the 1960s, which predisposed to accumulation and toxicity.
Tins and bottles that contain no warnings and few instructions, and fear of Spanish influenza, an illness that had been spreading like wildfire.
So those are some of the, we're going to stay on this for a little bit, those are some of the reasons that she thinks we had a perfect storm in 1918 for Spanish flu to get treated so aggressively and so wrongly and dangerously and tragically as the hypothesis goes for Spanish flu.
Four lines of evidence support the role of salicylate intoxication in 1918 influenza mortality.
Pharmacokinetics, mechanism of action, pathology, and the spate of official recommendations for toxic regimens of aspirin immediately before the October 1918 death spike.
So I'm not going to go through all of those all of those lines of evidence but there's just one more little piece I want to read to you I think.
Oh and just this the title of this section here.
Aspirin advertisements in August 1918 and a series of official recommendations for aspirin in September and early October preceded the death spike of October 1918.
And so you have, much like you do with COVID, Where, you know, the big spikes after the mRNA vaccines were introduced, the big spikes right as people were rushing to get these treatments, which they thought would free them from the fear that had been inculcated in them.
In this case, you had a blitz campaign to encourage everyone to buy aspirin and to treat with aspirin.
Doctors were giving it between 8 and 31 grams per day, when 20 grams per day is now known to be a potentially lethal dose.
And people were able to buy it over the counter.
I'm actually not sure about that, but people were able to get it much more freely than they had before because it was no longer under patent.
Which, it makes sense with the pathology that was observed with Spanish flu, where the dead had lungs that were saturated, soaking wet, right?
And, you know, aspirin famously thins the blood, and the idea that it was leaking into their lungs is consistent with this.
So just to encapsulate this so far, the question is, if the initial supposition is right, that respiratory pathogens tend not to be that serious, they tend not to that respiratory pathogens tend not to be that serious, they tend not to be that virulent, because in order to succeed they have to keep you more or less on your feet, then what the heck happened
That one was pretty damn virulent, and it had a very high case fatality rate.
And now the question is, could it have been aspirin?
Could it have been the insanely high doses that were being given at the time?
And the fear that stoked people, including doctors, to use and to prescribe these very, very high doses, and when they weren't working, to amp them up the way we did with the respirator pressures.
Yeah, the ventilator pressures.
Precisely, and apparently doctors, military doctors, We're early adopters of aspirin as treatment.
And maybe there was some evidence some places that what I've seen in my relatively brief look so far is that once you were on the aspirin is going to be useful to treat Spanish flu game, at the point that your patient started to get sicker, the response was almost always, we'll give them more aspirin, which then actually accelerated the demise of the patient.
Yes, and the fact that this was happening in a military context, which is again very top-down, right?
So, you know, whatever the high-ups are saying, you know, the high-up doctors in the military are saying should be used, it's going to spread like wildfire.
The point is that also stokes fear by giving the impression that it is these young, highly fit soldiers.
What the heck kind of pathogen is this?
Yes.
Right?
So, the anomalies are Many, surrounding 1918, and I would also point out that just as, you know, every death was counted as a COVID death, which amped our fear, which caused us to react with, you know, basically like a panicked, like a drowning person, rather than a rational person.
The idea That the 1918 flu was haunting us during COVID.
Fear of that flu caused us to behave irrationally with respect to COVID when it emerged.
And frankly, there's more reason to be concerned about COVID because, you know, it came apparently from a lab.
But nonetheless, either it's going to be able to spread, in which case it's going to abide by at least some of the things that limit the the virulence of a normal respiratory pathogen.
And here goes every bad policy and mandated them from above. - Right, and I think you said it, but iatrogenic causes of death and illness will be 100% conflatable with the illness itself, the pathogen itself being the cause of death and illness.
Because iatrogenic harm only comes when you go to the medical establishment for treatment of the thing.
And so of all of the things that could possibly be conflated, this is the easiest one to do.
And that doesn't mean that the conflation was necessarily intentional, right?
But if a pathogen causes something, and the treatment of that something is far more dangerous for you than the pathogen was, You need to not be surprised at the point that you have a hard time teasing those two effects apart.
And the way to tease those two effects apart is to look at the different healthcare practices in places like New York versus Delaware with regard to ventilators.
Or military bases versus cities with regard to aspirin during Spanish flu, right?
And I think, or, you know, or Sweden versus, I think, I think Norway, but I don't know.
But Sweden versus some other northern European country with regard to effects of lockdowns and letting a society be, you know, be as it is.
So, you know, you look for the place that did the different thing that you think may have been causing the iatrogenic harm, and then you can begin to see pattern.
And there will be those who will say, well, There's no RCT.
There's no randomized control study on that, randomized control trial.
Like, of course there can't be, because that's not the way this research could possibly work.
And that is not a damning of the hypothesis or the suggestion that it could be atrogenic harm.
That is just the nature of the harm that it causes.
You cannot do an RCT on this.
So, I will say, before I was aware of this argument, on my last Joe Rogan appearance, I mentioned this possibility.
I mentioned that I was now increasingly dwelling on the early use of the ventilators and the fact that that would have amped up the apparent case fatality rate and caused us to react ever more strongly.
I worry that in an environment where behind the scenes governmental authorities are actually licensing themselves to shut down truth, that they would also potentially, who knows, in what ways they might be willing to cause panic in order to get us to surrender to their authority.
Yeah.
There's just another couple of things before we move on to our final segment for today.
As I said, this paper is presented as a hypothesis.
It's got a lot of suggestive evidence.
But I looked at the, I think it was a little bit more than 100 papers that cite this paper, the Starco 2009 paper that we've been talking about.
And I find no attempts, successful or not, to discredit it, to discredit the argument.
Indeed, I find, and I did not look through all hundred papers at Sayadet, but a couple of the more recent papers at Sayadet were interesting in different ways.
Love It All in 2020 used the argument by Starco about the use of aspirin as the cause of so much of the death and destruction of the Spanish flu as a cautionary tale.
This is again in 2020.
They use, they accept as fact what Starker lays out as aspirin having been a considerable cause of the death from Spanish flu and use that to argue against the use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID.
Without, as far as I can tell, any reason for doing that, but they say, ah, this can happen, therefore this is happening here.
Okay, so that I found interesting.
And then there's another paper... When in fact the study that caused hydroxychloroquine to be dropped from the list of possible treatments Had the dose turned up so high that in fact it did toxify people.
This very safe drug was given in such high doses that it caused this effect, which certainly raises some questions.
Yes.
Why?
Given that unlike aspirin in 1918, hydroxychloroquine has been on the market, has been in use for decades already.
We know.
We know the levels.
You know, not perfectly, of course, and it will vary by individual, but we have a really good sense of what toxic levels are.
So why would you have turned that dial all the way up?
Yep.
And so then there was another paper that cites, again, the Starco 2009 paper, which argues that aspirin, widespread use of aspirin to treat Spanish flu was actually the cause of many of the deaths during the Spanish flu epidemic.
Short et al.
in 2018, this is before COVID, is a highly cited, much more actually is more highly cited than the original Starco paper.
article called Back to the Future Lessons Learned from the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, and it's published in Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology.
So I thought this was promising.
But, fascinatingly, this paper completely ignores her conclusions while citing her.
I've seen that happen many, many times.
Right?
So they don't respond to the arguments in her paper at all.
They simply cite her to say that aspirin was used as treatment during the Spanish flu, and I have to wonder why.
So they basically got, in both of these two papers that I've just said, cite Starco 2009.
And again, I went looking to see, okay, this is a hypothesis.
Let me see if anyone has tried to debunk it, right?
To falsify it, right?
And on full display in both of these papers that are some of the most recent, most cited papers that cite her, you have this reductionist, hubristic approach to humans that doesn't understand anything about complex systems.
The complex system that is the human body, that is our immune system, that is human society.
And you know it's standard, it's gosh, it's something we've been saying over and over and over again.
Welcome to complex systems.
Why aren't The researchers, including the doctors and the scientists who are publishing in these medical and scientific journals and who are presumably, therefore, helping to set policy for the next time?
Why can't they understand complex systems?
Why are they working with this arrogance and this reductionist model that will continue to destroy people?
Yes, they're doing it well.
I don't know.
I think what we really need is a body that is capable of investigating the question because we are persistently left with multiple possibilities.
Some new kind of hyper virulent incompetence?
Something that exceeds all previous examples of incompetence?
Or do we have something worse than that?
Because it's really hard to fathom how you could do this much wrong and be this consistent about it, right?
It's hard for incompetent people to pull that off.
But this was, you know, potentially something else.
It's really impressive if it's incompetence.
Yeah, it's really, it's a stunning level of it.
It's, you know, connoisseur level.
It's some of the most competent incompetence that I've ever seen.
Very well said.
Thank you.
I had two last points that I wanted to make here.
One, I was fascinated by this Gatomalo piece.
I also thought it was a very good companion for the piece that I wrote for UnHerd.
Boy, I don't remember exactly when it was, but I wrote a piece about the question.
I had, of course, been a bat researching biologist.
I handled many bats bare hands.
That was the way we handled them so as not to injure them.
Their wings are very fragile.
Um, and I had wondered at the point that COVID emerged, I wondered, well, geez, I was handling wild bats and I, you know, certainly took basic precautions, but was it possible that I was going to pick up a virus A wild bat and I was going to be patient zero in some massive pandemic and I just got lucky.
And in considering that question, I realized that no, in fact I wasn't.
It's much harder for viruses to leap from nature than we've been told.
We have been sold a bill of goods that has caused us to be much more frightened of this possibility.
And in fact, so frightened that we apparently funded research to study the viruses that we thought, or claimed, or pretended could have leapt out of nature, and then turbocharged them to see what would happen if they did, right?
This is a self-inflicted wound, and my point is, no, I wasn't running a big risk of, you know, spreading a pandemic by accident, because it's much harder for, you know, I could have died of something, but the point is, something in order to become a pandemic has to leap into a person, and then it has to leap from person to person in some way.
Those are difficult evolutionary steps for them to accomplish.
We talked about this early on when we were first talking about the possibility of lab leak back in spring of 2020, right?
The rapid ability of this virus to move between people suggested that it already had experience doing something like that, if not in people, then possibly in mink with, what was it, the similar ACE2?
ACE2 receptors, right.
Mink, human airway tissue, humanized mice, right.
All of these things would have given it the training, essentially the lab playing the role of the intermediate host, which we've never found because it probably doesn't exist.
But anyway, I thought, okay, so Gatomalo makes an excellent argument that what happened is we spooked ourselves about a virus that, even though it is very destructive, was not likely to be that deadly by virtue of the fact that it is a respiratory virus and they abide by this trade-off.
They have to, if it had been a super deadly virus it wouldn't have spread around the world this way.
That's right.
So that's one point, and then my point is, and we also got scared by a bunch of Ghost stories about how the next virus was going to leap out of nature any minute because humans are doing something new and that's going to result in some terrifying pandemic with an extremely high fatality rate, right?
Also not likely.
So those two things together, you know, how worried do we have to be that A, a virus is going to leap out of nature and have a huge case fatality rate, you know, well, if it's a respiratory virus, pretty low.
And pretty low for things to jump between species.
When we're talking about things like bird flu, we're actually talking about things that do jump between species regularly, not something that jumped from nature that had never been seen in people before.
Let me just pick up.
I know you have one more point, but you said with regard to, you know, were you likely to become patient zero in a pandemic that you could have picked up from a bat and then spread?
And you had a little asterisk there and said, well, you know, I could have gotten sick.
Like I could have come down with something.
And of course, you know, one of your mentors did exactly that, I believe.
No, we don't know what she died.
Oh, okay.
But bat biologists do, especially not so much with the kinds of bats that you were working on, because you were working on making bats and you weren't anywhere near caves, right?
But, you know, bats do have respiratory viruses, And being in a cave where the air is famously not refreshed and a person working in a cave with a bunch of bats may well pick up something.
Well, they do.
It's not viruses.
The thing that bat biologists sometimes get is histoplasmosis, which is a fungus.
Um, but yes.
But it's, but it's basically another reason, you know, like, should you, if the bats weren't at the cave, you know, should you be spending time in the cave or outside of the cave?
You're better off with regard to keeping clear of respiratory infections being in fresh air, outside, Moving around, right, where there's a lot of airflow and, you know, not in a, you know, a cave or a room or care home or, you know, something else where whatever is floating around, you're probably going to inhale it at some point.
Yeah, yeah.
No, from the point of view of, you know, there are these three miners who appear to have picked up something cove-like prior to the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 potentially having been taken into the lab in Wuhan.
Who died of it, but they didn't transmit it to anybody right and frankly the exposure level needed for them to get sick Was apparently incredibly high.
They were working taking guano out of an old mine.
And so the point is they were, you know, knee-deep in a highly dusty, destructive environment of the lungs.
They picked up this disease and did not transmit it, right?
So the point is, getting something from nature is possible.
Transmitting it is unlikely to other people, unless there's some path for that to happen.
Okay, the last point I wanted to make is we have said here, we have bridled when people have accused us of quote-unquote killing people by discussing reasons to be concerned about things like the safety of mRNA transfection agents.
Which makes no sense at multiple levels.
For one thing, nobody seems particularly eager to give us credit for having saved people, given that these transfection agents appear to be dangerous, right?
They don't want to give us any credit.
They just want to say, you're killing people by raising hesitancy, when in fact hesitancy may have been life-saving.
My point is, I don't want credit for saving people.
I don't want to be accused of killing people.
I want the recognition that the conversation saves people.
That you can disagree with us, and you may be wrong, and we may be right.
That doesn't make us the lifesavers and you the killers.
The point is an honest participation in a conversation about what is true amongst people who have something reasonable to contribute.
Everybody is contributing to the thing that saves lives, right?
On the flip side, Were you a governmental official who decided that it would be okay to pollute the stream of information by pretending that people who have died from abuse of a ventilator are actually deaths due to COVID?
Right, pretending that a death of, you know, a child is equivalent to the death of somebody in their 80s.
People who have not only polluted the information stream, but saw fit to silence those who were trying to unspin their story.
Right?
Those people actually did kill folks, right?
They were not participating in a collective effort to figure out what was true so that we could lose fewer lives, so that we could, you know, protect people who were in a position to be protected.
They did exactly the opposite.
They blinded us.
That's what they did.
They intentionally blinded us and then they demonized us by claiming that even if we were saying true things, if they went in the direction of making you distrust vaccines or your government for mandating them, that you were a terrorist.
Right?
That is the kind of diabolical stuff that we have been dealing with.
And it is time for everybody to wake up.
A government that could do that to you cannot be trusted, and it must be cleared of people who participated in that, and it must be restored to protecting the basic principles that still apply as much as they did when the founders outlined them.
It's a perfect segue to our last section.
Theologian Paul Tillich brought words of warning and passion to the German people during World War II.
We're going to share some of those words here today.
This week, librarian Keith Waddell, who is a frequent listener of Dark Horse, sent us one of Tillich's short essays that was broadcast by radio into Nazi Germany.
And I want to give you a little bit of background on Tillich first, and then read a couple of short excerpts from one of his radio broadcasts.
So he was born, Tillich, was born in 1886 near Berlin.
He was a German soldier during World War I. He was acting as a chaplain at that time, but that didn't protect him from seeing, you know, he was on the front lines, he was in foxholes, he saw hell.
He was in the trenches.
Didn't he bury his best friend?
I don't know that.
I think I read that.
Sounds plausible.
After the war, among other things, he became a professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, and he was the opposite of stuffy.
He was socializing, he was dancing, he was womanizing, much to the chagrin of his wife.
He was sort of a bon vivant.
He left Germany for the United States as the Third Reich ascended and continued his life there.
In fact, Brett, who has been a photographer all of his life, has this wonderful book, Jump, by the philosopher...philosopher?
Photographer?
I don't know, maybe he was.
Photographic philosopher.
Photographer Philip Halsman, and he's just got a lot of famous people jumping in it, and... Including Nixon and the Pope.
And Marilyn Monroe, and here we have Dr. Paul Tillich right there.
I did not know that.
Yeah, I didn't know that either until this morning.
Uh, so, um, he's, he's jumping, as are all of the people in this, in this book of, um, of philosophical photographs.
Um, so he was in, he was in the U.S., but, uh, he was watching from afar.
God, there's so much fur in our world.
Um, he was watching from That may be a local phenomenon.
Yes, I think so.
He was watching from afar as the Third Reich continued to ascend, and from March 1942 to May of 1944, he recorded 112 addresses in German for secret broadcasts by Voice of America, which fell under the control of the U.S.
Office of War Information.
And his aim was, and I'm quoting here from a book against the Third Reich, Tillich's aim with these radio broadcasts was to divide the will of his German listeners from the mania of their Nazi rulers and to spur people in strategic positions to muster the necessary courage to stand against the terrorizing police state of Nazism.
And I will just, I will remind us that it is very easy to look back to the 1940s and feel righteous and like everyone would have seen what was going on.
But we can be quite sure, given what we have lived through in the last three years, that the vast majority of people don't see it when it happens.
And the radio broadcasts that he made, these 112 broadcasts that he made with the help of Voice of America and the U.S.
government, are collected into a book, this book called Against the Third Reich, Paul Tillich's wartime radio broadcasts into Nazi Germany, and the one I'm going to read a few excerpts from is called The Intelligentsia and Germany's Conquest, and it was originally broadcast on September 4th, 1942.
And I can show my screen if you like, although it's going to be so small, hold on a second, that I'm actually going to read from the paper here.
So, okay.
I'm just going to read the first two paragraphs and then the last one.
My German friends, wrote Paul Tillich, Today I want to speak to a group of people that is perhaps small in its supporting circle, but great in its consequences and its effects.
I mean the bearers of the scholarly work, of art and literature, of music and public discourse.
Even if they were a hundred thousand, they would be few in proportion to the millions of German people.
But among these millions, there is no one who is not influenced in any way by this group, even if only in the language that he speaks and the technology that he uses.
For this reason, the leaders of the intellectual life of a nation are infinitely important for its destiny.
This group of intellectually leading Germans is more responsible for the tragedy of Germany and the misfortune that it has brought on the world in itself than the masses of the nation are, and nearly as responsible as that small stratum of landed proprietors and large entrepreneurs who handed over weapons and capital to National Socialism because they trembled in the face of social reorganization.
Why did a great portion of the German scholars, writers, and artists make common cause with the forces of reaction, which held the stirrups for the present regime?
Many will say, what many of these stirrup holders are saying today, we did not know that the rider whom we helped into the saddle would ride the German nation and many nations with it into the abyss.
We were in error, and we have made amends for that.
Such an admission is certainly valuable, and more promising for the future, than the attitude of those who, even today, when the abyss has already become visible, pronounce their attitude at that time to be correct.
And yet, the admission of error is not enough.
One must understand how the error could come about, what roots it had, and one must exterminate these roots in order that new errors and new harm may not grow forth from them.
Wow.
What are the routes from which one can account for the breakdown of the German intellectual leaders?
How can they be exterminated?
And what mission does an intellectual bearing stratum have in the reconstruction of Germany?
Every thinking German should put this question to himself.
Above all, those who rank themselves among the bearers of intellectual life.
Wow.
And then we're going to have one more, but maybe we talk about that before we share the.
Yeah, that's that's incredible.
I must say, I feel like sending it to Sam Harris.
I think he might appreciate it.
I'd hope he'd appreciate it.
But anyway, yeah, that's extremely powerful.
And I love the point he makes about the responsibility that these people have, the disproportionate responsibility and their disproportionate failure and its implication for, what did he say, holding the stirrups for the new regime?
Holding the stirrups for the new regime.
Yeah.
Yes.
The people who would have us believe that they are the intellectual lifeblood of the country and are to be trusted.
And whatever conclusions they come to, you too can come to those conclusions.
They're holding the stirrups for the masters who do not have your best interests at heart.
And anyone who is telling you You should not try to understand for yourself but simply accept the authoritative conclusions of others.
When you have seen with your own eyes how reliably the authoritative conclusions of others have been wrong, they also do not have your best interest at heart.
Regardless of whether or not they are merely confused or are actually trying to hurt you, it doesn't matter.
Don't listen to them.
Don't listen to them.
One sentence in the middle of this essay which is extraordinary, I recommend it.
The unveiling of the truth is not pleasant to those who have power and misuse this power at the expense of others.
For this reason they fear the intellect and seek either to wipe out its bearers or, what is more important in the long run, to buy them and to place them in their service.
Okay and one more, just the last paragraph of this piece, same piece originally broadcast by Paul Tillich with the help of the U.S.
government from America where he was by then living into Nazi Germany in, just looking for the dates of the of the broadcast, was September 4th, 1942.
Final paragraph.
I have spoken today in the first place to the bearers of the intellect, the scholars and writers, the artists and orators.
But the intellectuals of every nation not only form the nation but are also formed by it.
And for this reason I call out to the German nation.
Do not consent any longer to your philosophers and authors conjuring up a world that is not yours and that leaves you in your misery.
Demand intelligence from them that is in fact intelligence, that does not glorify a wicked reality but unveils and unmasks the roots of this reality.
The intellect that seeks a new, that sees a new reality and builds in partnership with you.
The mind that says what you feel and thinks what you hope.
Allow the old, feeble mind to decay behind the walls, allow the old, feeble mind to decay behind the walls of the Reich Culture Board and make room for the new mind that changes reality.
Extremely powerful.
I know that there are many in America today, both among the class who consider ourselves intellectuals and People who don't consider themselves intellectuals, although frankly the distinction is one that in most cases I think is without a difference.
But to the degree that Tillich was making a distinction, it's important in thinking about this essay.
There are so many people who are not confused and the ways that they got there are variable, but the people that we hear from, and there are a lot of them, who say I had something in my gut.
I thought that there wasn't something right.
I started to see this and then this and then this and I couldn't make sense of why I was supposed to start believing them after it was clear that they had at least been wrong if hadn't if not had been lying to me so far.
Thank you for having the conversations that modeled intelligent conversation again in terms of
Raising awareness of where the inconsistencies were, where the bodies were buried, why the science couldn't possibly have said what they were telling us the science said, and frankly being, if maybe most of all, just staunch in our defense of science, of actual science, not the science in follow the science, not the science that Fauci claims to embody.
That's not science.
What we need, what we need To be a functioning society, to have any chance of moving forward into the middle of this century, much less the next one, is actually have people who understand what science is, are willing to do it, even when the results of it produce something that you look at and go, God, I wish that weren't true.
But if it is, let's go.
Let's figure it out.
Let's figure out what to do next.
Pretending that what is true isn't serves no one in the long run.
Yeah, we have a situation where our governments, or whatever has captured them, is demonizing the very people that we need to listen to, but it is also doing so in an era where we have a new kind of pirate radio, you know, where we have Glenn Greenwald, we have
Snowden, we have Russell Brand, we have Joe Rogan, we have Woody Harrelson, we have Bobby Kennedy Jr.
We have all of these voices who are, you know, each of them taking from their own discipline.
And standing up courageously, John Campbell, all of these people are telling us something that we need to know.
And it's like, it's like a society in exile.
And I think it is time that we lean into it and figure out how the adults are going to, you know, right the ship of state and return us to a place where we can, you know, again, fight over how it is we can achieve the values that we all agree on.
Absolutely.
All right.
All right.
I think we're there for the week.
We will not be doing a Q&A today.
Encourage you to go check out Natural Selections, find us at our Patreons perhaps.
We will be back here same time next week, noon Pacific time on Saturday, and next week we will be following that with a Q&A.
So if you have been holding on to a question for a while, you can ask it then, or you can go into my Patreon and find an opportunity soon to ask a question in advance for that private Q&A, which is a lot of fun.
So, until we see you next, Be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
