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Feb. 27, 2023 - Jim Fetzer

01:00:35

Informed Dissent with Mark McDonald, M.D.

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	Transcription by CastingWords
	- Good morning, CHD.
	I'm so excited to be here with you.
	Today is Thursday, February 23rd.
	It happens to be my husband's birthday, so shout out.
	Happy birthday, Mr. Justin.
	I am thrilled with our guest today.
	I've had him on before, and every conversation I have, every time I listen to his podcast, I feel like I learned something new.
	I just You know, the warrior inside of me and I am motivated by what he has to say.
	So, Children's Health Defense, I hope that you are equally as excited to welcome Dr. Mark McDonald with me here this morning.
	Good morning.
	Thank you for being here, Dr. Mark.
	I'm so happy to have you here.
	It's great to be back.
	I love the energy and the ideas on this group show.
	Thank you.
	So speaking of the group show, Dr. Mark has given a hint away.
	Because Dr. Mark is a psychiatrist out in California, he's dealing with a lot of the crazy that's happening in the world right now.
	And I thought it might be a great idea if us, as the Children's Health Defense audience, were to engage in a group therapy session today.
	Of course, these are not necessarily the views of Children's Health Defense, but they definitely are mine.
	And whatever Dr. Mark has to say, that's going to be a whole lot of truth.
	But I've heard him say many times when we engage in therapy, and I hope everybody's here with me, that we promise to stay in reality with him.
	I promise.
	I think everybody else out there will promise.
	So, Dr. Mark, there is so much going on right now, and it just feels like it's flying at us from everywhere.
	And truly, it is reality.
	But it is a reality that's a lot scary.
	I was going to say a little, but it's not a little.
	It's a lot scary.
	There are people all over the world.
	It's not just a Civil issue.
	I know that there have been, there's a civil war in America, civil war in Croatia, civil war, you know, everything that happened in World War II.
	Those were somewhat isolated.
	They turned into world events because people were helping, but those things were happening in a country, a singular country.
	And now we're dealing with this worldwide attack on us.
	I don't know.
	Can you give us your opening thoughts with all of this?
	I think that In my view, and I always look at things from a really top-down approach, I try not to get caught up in details, you know, the micro, published research statistics, R-squared analyses.
	I leave that up to other people who are really data guys.
	I look at things from the top because my work involves individuals, you know, human beings, so I have to look at the totality of the person when I do my work clinically.
	And so I apply that to the way I look at society and the world at large.
	I kind of see it as a As a living body, as an entity.
	And what I see, more than anything, that interconnects all the issues you brought up and the others that we're facing right now, they seem to be growing by the day, by the way, all link back to one specific illness.
	And in my view, it is an illness that I define as an attack on reality.
	I don't believe that people today are living in reality at all.
	I think that they are living a sort of pseudo-reality for a whole variety of reasons that I write about and talk about and we can discuss today.
	But bottom line, there is not an acceptance of what is in our world.
	And that can be men versus women, meaning biology.
	We all know the attacks on biology are coming from the transgender activist community.
	The failings of the so-called vaccine, which are no longer really debatable, they're simply obvious.
	Masks, the school closures, the collapse of our economic system through horrible government policies and open border and inflation and increased monetary supply.
	I'm talking about a lot of disparate things because you brought some of them up just now.
	And when you put them all together, In my view, they all stem from a denial of reality.
	Yeah, and I hate to, you know, Oprah coined this, my reality, your reality.
	I get that people can live with different experiences, but that's still under the umbrella of reality.
	We have, I mean, there is true and not true.
	Do you find that a lot of people are trying to tell their own version of this story?
	And how do you talk to them about that?
	They are.
	And you know why they're doing this, Sarah?
	It's because they have been lied to.
	They have been conned by people like Oprah.
	And I think Oprah is part of this.
	She's not the greatest, most evil actor in all of it.
	But I think she's part of the talk, I would say, that you hear the buzz in media, as well as government and education, which I think is a lot more intentional.
	to mess with our understanding of what the word reality means.
	Reality is not your emotional experience.
	And I, as a psychiatrist, respect more than anyone emotional experience.
	That's what I do every day.
	But I tell my patients, as you just said to your listeners when you opened, the first thing that we have to agree upon, you and I, to do good work is reality.
	I want to hear your emotional experience, which is completely different than mine, but we have to discuss that emotional experience under the rubric of a shared reality, because the moment that we no longer have a shared reality, we can't talk about anything.
	It's like a shared language.
	Sara, if you started to speak to me in Tajik, which I don't know any Tajik.
	I was going to say, you have to think of a language.
	I had to think of a language I don't know a single word in.
	There aren't many.
	I'm learning Polish right now.
	Dzień dobry.
	That's actually good morning.
	That's awesome.
	I would have no idea what you're saying.
	We wouldn't be able to carry on a conversation because we don't have a shared language.
	And a shared reality is very similar.
	You can express different feelings and thoughts within the same shared language, but the language is shared.
	We can express different feelings, different thoughts, based within a shared reality, but we still have to start from reality.
	Because if we don't, it's like having a conversation with a schizophrenic living underneath the freeway overpass.
	He's seeing things that aren't there.
	You can't converse with someone like that.
	That's why when we take in insane psychotic people in a hospital setting, we don't have a real conversation with them.
	We simply elicit their actual experience, which is psychotic, and then we give them medication.
	We let them sleep for a while, and then when they wake up, we try to figure out if we can help them therapeutically.
	That's what we need to do with people today in our country.
	We can't have conversations with the insane.
	We can't have conversations with the people like the readers of the New York Times who wrote 4,000 comments on the Bret Stephens article two days ago that reviewed the Cochran Library report, which included 78 studies and 600,000 participants that proved conclusively that masks do not work and they don't help people.
	Those readers, 4,000 of them, wrote comments and likes in defense of someone who wrote that, well, the reason why mass didn't work is because people just didn't comply enough.
	If you were to say to someone, you know, socialism doesn't work and it never has since Lenin 150 years ago, do you know what a socialist, communist, leftist would say?
	They always say the same thing.
	They always say the following.
	It didn't work and it hasn't worked because it hasn't been fully and properly implemented.
	That is exactly what the mask people say.
	What the Vax people say.
	That's what all of them say.
	And it comes from the same core problem.
	Socialists deny reality.
	So do all the people that are pushing all the medical policies that are obviously harming people.
	I think it stems from the same element.
	Denial of reality.
	If we don't have a shared reality, if we can't use the same language to talk about what is real, what we can touch, see, feel, and hear, then we're done.
	We can't proceed.
	Totally agree with that.
	And there are people who attempt to make the case.
	I know that ignorance is not always bliss, but ignorance exists.
	There are people who don't know things, but it gets really hard when those are the ones that are doubling down, telling me what is true.
	Because that is, I guess, essentially propaganda.
	You're trying to make me believe something.
	That is not true, but they have a responsibility.
	I mean, people who are in these positions as scientists or doctors or whomever that are trying to tell me what is true, they don't really know.
	I mean, especially when the vaccine, you know, argument comes around is, you know, this is good and healthy and safe and effective.
	And this is, going to prevent you from suffering.
	How much is that motivation?
	Is it narcissism?
	Is it pride?
	Is it, I don't know, what is it you think that prevents them from seeking and understanding and accepting truth?
	Part of it is that there's actually an active, concerted effort to lie to Americans by people who should know better and are positions of power, like Rochelle Walensky, who recently announced CDC director.
	We're going to continue to push the under six months vaccination policy for children, and we're going to maintain mask policies for children throughout the country, because I think this is our actual own words on national television, because I think this is our actual own words on national television, because our masking policies don't change That's exactly what she said.
	This is after the Cochrane Report came out.
	So what she's saying, if you want to sort of sift through all of it, is we deny reality up here, we deny science, even though we call ourselves the pro-science people and all of you the anti-science people, but we're going to issue a diktat Which is now not even an arguably scientifically based one.
	There isn't any room for argument anymore because the evidence is so overwhelming that what they're saying is wrong.
	But she continues to lie.
	It's not an error.
	It's not a confusion.
	It's not a misspeak.
	It is a lie.
	It is, by definition, the telling of an untruth Knowingly, with an intent to deceive.
	That's the definition of a lie.
	And that's what she's doing.
	And so when people like her, who represent our government, represent our people as Americans, say things like this and continue to do it, that leaks out to the population, which is perhaps ignorant, which is perhaps not necessarily leftist or destructive, but they simply don't know.
	And so they become informed Through a reality which is not real, it's a lie.
	And then this spreads and it becomes kind of a defensive shield against real arguments by people who do actually know.
	And I'm very concerned, Sarah, that this is going to only get worse.
	Because with the advent of AI, like ChatGPT and other programs that create algorithms that respond almost before you can, when you're looking up, say, news on your phone or reaching something through Google, You will not even have access to the lie and then to the reality, and then have the opportunity to distinguish between the two.
	You're only going to be fed the lie.
	Can you imagine what will happen when real deep fakes start to come on board through our media?
	Not just censoring this, upping that, downing that on an algorithm, but actually creating fake news, meaning video of people saying and doing things that didn't really happen, that appears to be completely true.
	We're already seeing teenagers Pushing people, pushing other children and adolescents through bullying into suicide because of lies that they write and type up on social media.
	What happens when they create videos and images of girls and boys doing things sexually, for example, with one another that never happened?
	And then that spreads throughout the entire school.
	And then it goes on Facebook and Twitter and TikTok.
	Those children are going to kill themselves.
	They're already doing it just with texting.
	So I'm really concerned that the ability of Americans to distinguish between the reality and the lie is going to get harder and harder as we co-mingle corrupt government politicians, bureaucrats, educators, and media with advanced technology that helps to support that lie and actually physically blocks Americans from being able to access the truth.
	Oh, that's so hard to hear, but we gotta be able to do something about it.
	One of the topics that I wanted to discuss today talks a lot about this AI and this advanced technology that's gonna happen because these leaders, and there's all these world organizations, right?
	So right now we're dealing with the World Government Summit, then we have the World Economic Forum, and then we have the World Health Organization, all these people coming to tell us what is right, what is true, and what is good.
	They don't necessarily have our best interests in mind.
	And I know that Elon Musk sent out a tweet that said, yeah, AI is great and all, but it can be used for bad.
	I mean, that was a paraphrase, obviously.
	But we have to understand.
	But it's really hard to understand because we don't get to have the filter of truth in these realities.
	So this is something they want for us.
	This is something they want for themselves.
	How would you recommend that we distinguish?
	How do we stay on top of it?
	I'm at a loss for words at the moment because it feels too big.
	I saw the same article in CHD Defense just yesterday regarding the AI.
	There it is on the screen and I read it.
	I completely agree with him.
	There isn't anything inherently wrong meaning entirely wrong with technology you know it's like guns you know i don't i'm i'm not against guns i own many of them myself they can be certainly used in crimes and to hurt people just like technology can or ai artificial intelligence but the way that is being misused right now is very concerning i think that
	On a psychological level, on an individual level, I do believe that this artificial intelligence and its misuse is being driven to a great extent by narcissism in our culture.
	The example I just gave of children is one that I think is really dear to me because I see so many children in my practice who are suffering right now.
	They are being taught by their parents to be entitled and narcissistic.
	I wrote about this just a week ago in my Substack Informed Dissent called Spoiled Brat Syndrome and then Comfortism, which was the one just recently.
	I do believe that both the Spoiled Brat Syndrome and the Comfortism are being taught by parents to their children through this corrupt values paradigm that is being foisted on them through, unfortunately, the same actors that are pushing the AI.
	It's kind of a vicious circle.
	But what's going on is the parents are telling their children that their feelings and how they see the world is the most important thing ever.
	It's not about truth.
	It's not about values.
	It's not about Deferred gratification.
	It's not about doing what is right.
	It is about doing what you can and doing what you feel.
	And when that becomes promoted heavily in our culture, particularly by adults down to the younger generation, I think that makes them even more prone to these TikTok and Facebook and AI, essentially, intrusions into their life.
	So I think one thing that's very important to look at, and I wrote about it in my most recent book, Freedom From Fear, there's a chapter on this called Narcissism, and get over yourself, really, is that We need to really all look in the mirror and face the narcissism that has been taking us over because it's not about us.
	Express narcissism, express maybe grandiosity and some excess pride, but it was also backed by accomplishment.
	We're not accomplishing much in the United States anymore.
	We are riding on the fumes of the past.
	And so are the children, riding on the fumes of their parents' endeavors and work and accomplishments.
	We need to get back to a reality that is based not on narcissism, but is based actually on responsibility.
	What we owe others, not what others owe us.
	And if we could do that, Then I believe that we would have some psychological, on an individual level, as well as societal, defense against the intrusion of artificial intelligence.
	Add that to just basically switching your stupid phone off, which I tell parents to do all the time with their children, and then we might have a shot.
	We've got to actually work on ourselves, and we've got to work on what we're carrying in our pocket.
	Basic, basic stuff.
	Don't walk past the bar if you're an alcoholic.
	Right.
	Don't keep the phone in your pocket turned on with notifications if you can't handle that narcissistic candy that keeps popping into your phone every day through these alerts.
	That's my thought about what we do with this problem.
	It's a big one.
	Okay, so here's a problem in my mind.
	These kids are being taught by their parents.
	I don't remember being taught that.
	I mean, I'm a 40-year-old woman.
	My mom is not that much older.
	You know, there were things that I was taught.
	Family first and, you know, selflessness happens.
	You're gonna have to miss out on, you know, a party once in a while if that means that grandma's having a birthday.
	You have to go be with your family.
	There are things You can do that bring you joy, but at the same time, there are things that are more important than you.
	Where did we lose that?
	And my other, my, as you were talking, my brain goes, where were you taught?
	Because you don't sound like a doctor from California.
	You sound like someone who knows what's going on.
	I guess my brain just goes, it has to start with education.
	We, whether it be from a family or school or wherever, and we're missing a step.
	Where did we go wrong?
	What happened?
	It is education, Sarah.
	That's exactly where it comes from.
	I had an excellent education.
	I went to a Catholic, conservative, all-boys school in Los Angeles called Loyola High School, which unfortunately has now gone a bit woke because they actually have a diversity, equity, and inclusion director there.
	I know.
	But at one time, it was an amazing school.
	And we were taught that it was responsibility that was much more important than rights.
	And you should fulfill your responsibilities first before exploring your rights.
	And you certainly were not asked to, if not explore your feelings, at least wear them on your chest for all the world to look at and to praise and to bow down to.
	That was never allowed, accepted or tolerated.
	I went to Berkeley later for university and I was so rebellious against what I had been taught I wanted to go full woke and full socialist.
	Woke word wasn't a word at the time.
	It was basically socialism.
	So I moved into a co-op house called Casa Zimbabwe.
	Which was a co-op living environment where you paid a small amount of money and then you did some work in order to defray the cost of living.
	Well, that was the experiment in vivo that told me, taught me, proved to me that socialism-communism is an utter failure.
	The place was filthy.
	It was dangerous.
	The kitchen was shut down due to a rat infestation because nobody cleaned it.
	There were homeless people that were invited in during parties, one of whom set fire to a couch during a rave.
	The hot tub was full of mold and people were contracting diseases from it.
	I mean, it was horrible.
	And of course, here I am thinking, wow, I thought that it was all going to be great.
	You know, save money, work together.
	It didn't work out.
	Everything dropped to the lowest common denominator.
	And that's exactly what happens in a socialistic environment.
	So I got an education in real life at university that helped not Destroy what I learned in high school, but reinforce it.
	And I've carried that with me to this day.
	What are children learning now in school?
	They're learning America is racist.
	They're learning there are no men and women.
	There's only how you feel.
	You can change your name and your pronouns on the fly, and if anyone tells you that you can't, you can have that person fired, or expelled from school, or if it's a parent, banned from the campus.
	This is what they're being taught in school, and they're being taught this by, as I had written about a few weeks earlier in another Substack, they're being taught by people who are mentally ill, who are considered to be teachers, who are living out wish fulfillment.
	This is what was written about, I think it was in 1956, I wrote in my Substack column.
	By a famous psychoanalyst named Jung, and he wrote at the time that we have a huge problem in our society.
	This is back in the 50s, starting with education, where we have people who don't know who they are and who want to be someone else, i.e.
	a man who wants to be a woman.
	And when we allow these people to express their wishes, their fantasies, on an altar And we deify them as instructors over our children, and we give them a platform.
	We have just started to erode the foundation of our society, and that's why our educational system is failing.
	We are putting into place educators, so-called educators, who are actually very sick, and they're mentally ill.
	And then we are enshrining their speech with law and protection.
	From parental uproar and upheaval, putting books in the library that support their ideology, all of this is our educational system, our government school system right now.
	If that can be addressed, and it is being addressed at the local level in school board meetings and parents homeschooling their kids, Then I think we have a chance at moving forward.
	But I completely agree with the premise that you made, the assertion that everything has to start with the reform of our educational system, even more than the media.
	Because if we don't do that, the next generation is going to be in charge, and it's going to be worse than the current one.
	We can't handle that.
	That's not... Oh, I can't let it happen.
	I have to declare that cannot happen.
	And that's what we're doing here, right, peeps?
	We're trying to educate, at least... We are preaching to the choir right now, right?
	We can all understand that.
	I think everybody who's tuning in to us right now is the choir.
	But what we have to do as the choir is become educated, because I think that builds confidence.
	And when we're confident, I know for me personally, listening to you and reading the opening to your book and the way that you can just say to a mom who put a mask on her child that that is an awful thing to do, that gives me confidence because someone who's smarter than me has the confidence to say that to someone, that means I can do it too.
	That means that there is some sort of foundation that I can stand on to say that is right and that is true and we have to be willing to do that.
	So I know that boosting confidence is so very important.
	But I also know educating is important.
	I did pull my kids out of school recently, and I love that you're saying that because my focus has been a lot of homeschool.
	But bringing this conversation into that realm, I just want to say, homeschool your kids.
	Please homeschool your kids.
	It's so much better.
	Besides that, we're going to go back into we know what is.
	We know who they kind of are.
	We know Agenda 2030 and World Government 2071.
	We know their goal.
	So now, our job, living in reality, is to dissent.
	Agree or disagree, and how do we do it?
	We must dissent.
	I mean, this is my website, Informed Dissent.
	This is the name of my podcast, Informed Dissent, because offering a contrary view and a contrary opinion makes you a dissident.
	And Informed Dissent, which is our podcast, Dr. Jeff Barkey and I, we podcast just about every week with wonderful guests, Dr. Jeff Barkey is a family practice physician down in Orange County and works with many really well-known people in our movement.
	We've interviewed just recently Sebastian Gorka and Peter McCullough and Robert Malone and Gosh, the list goes on, all the number of doctors and scientists, I can't even keep them in my head.
	And these people that we talk to, and the people that I write about in my books, like DissidentMD, my website, and my podcast, DissidentMD, I'm sorry, my substack, DissidentMD, I'm getting my words mixed up.
	They all focus on dissent, on offering a contrary opinion.
	And this is not a small thing, Sarah, because today, when you disagree, you actually put yourself at risk.
	When you disagree, you can be cancelled.
	You can be banned from a school if you're a parent.
	Your child can be sent home from a sports team and told not to come back.
	Blocked from graduation, you can lose your job, and in some cases, as we know now, and have for over probably a year and a half, two years, you can be arrested and put in jail.
	We still have, we have political dissidents right now, for the first time in U.S.
	history, languishing underground in Washington, D.C.
	for doing nothing, for the most part, other than expressing a difference of opinion through activism.
	This is really dangerous, but it's also really important, because the more that people express their voice and their differences non-violently, the more that we can encourage those who are in the middle, who see things and are uncomfortable with them, but they're not yet courageous enough to actually lead the charge.
	Courage, I believe, as Dennis Prager often says, is contagious.
	The people who are managing our lives, and I say managing in a nasty way, pulling the strings, all the people you mentioned, these different international forums and people in our federal government and corporations, they are in the minority.
	They are not nearly as numerous as we, the people, are.
	But their voices are very powerful, largely because they have a small contingent of very active, nasty, aggressive activists who control the middle ground.
	And then the people who are speaking the truth, they're so small in number right now that they don't have enough power to overwhelm that entire other block.
	But we can overwhelm that block with reality if we can encourage everyone in the middle to step up and start to, like in The Emperor's New Clothes, to actually point out what the child is saying, that the emperor is naked.
	There are only, what, three seamstresses in that story compared to the hundreds of people on the parade.
	We're arguing that the Emperor actually had clothes on, and all the people just followed it until the child spoke up.
	We need more of those children to speak up, because that child wasn't afraid.
	The adults were.
	Isn't that the ironing here?
	So, we need adults.
	Whether they're afraid or not, I don't care.
	One of my points that I make in my book, Freedom From Fear, is that the only way to overcome fear is to act despite it.
	You can't wait until you stop feeling afraid.
	We're told so often that we have to act on our feelings.
	Well, if we acted on our feelings and we're all sitting around, I don't say we, but a lot of Americans are sitting around scared, we would never get anything done.
	We need to act in spite of our feelings.
	We need to act based on what's real and true, not based on how we're going to feel later.
	This is really important.
	Being a dissident, dissent, is critical right now, not just for us that are leading the charge, but for all people in America, everybody in the middle.
	Yeah, and I know that you are leading one of those charges right now, because in the state of California, they passed a AB 2098, which was legislation essentially silencing any dissenting views specifically, but not only on the COVID-19 narrative.
	Are you allowed to update us on that?
	I do have some updates on the AB 28 battle.
	This is a big battle in California.
	This is the medical misinformation bill that was voted in by the Democrat supermajority in California and then signed into law by Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom on January 1st of 2023.
	But before it went into effect, Dr. Jeff Barkey and I filed a lawsuit through the Liberty Justice Center, a non-profit organization out of Chicago that defends the constitutional rights of Americans.
	To challenge this law as being unconstitutional.
	And as soon as we did that, other lawsuits were also filed.
	One by AFLDS, Dr. Simone Gold, as well as Dr. Aaron Cariotti and company, former psychiatrist and bioethics director of the psychiatry department down at UC Irvine.
	And there was two others, I believe, as well that were filed.
	They weren't all, and have not all, been successful.
	Ours is still pushing forward.
	We're on, I think, our second appeal to try to get it blocked.
	But, interestingly, on January 26th, Dr. Aaron Cariotti's lawsuit against AB 2098, which really would ban freedom of speech for all physicians to actually tell their patients what they believe to be true based on medical science, basically hamstringing doctor-patient relationship, total disaster,
	His lawsuit was successful in reaching an injunction against the law, meaning the law has been sort of blocked from being put into effect, at least until the next appeal goes through.
	And what I found so interesting about this was that the same day that that injunction went into effect, January 26, a letter was typed up and mailed to me, which I received about a week later from the California Medical Board.
	And the California Medical Board had been investigating me for over nine months.
	For a social media post I put up in 2020, and this is two and a half years ago, on Twitter, that said, we should all start considering using ivermectin to help protect us against the Chinese Wuhan virus, which of course now is completely non-controversial because even the government has admitted that ivermectin is effective.
	But I was basically investigated for misinformation, for posting that in 2020, for nine months.
	Potentially at the risk of losing my license.
	On January 26th, they mailed me a letter.
	Very perfunctorily.
	No explanation.
	All it said was, the investigation has been closed.
	Interesting, it's the exact same date that the injunction against AB 2098 went into effect.
	My belief, and this is another great example of why it's so important to dissent and to speak up, Sarah, is that even though legally we haven't won, so to speak, I mean, we've won a battle, we've got a pause button on this AB 2098, but we haven't won, it hasn't been thrown out yet.
	Even though we haven't had a massive legal win, we've had a huge political win.
	Because law and politics are now so intertwined, and I believe that the California Medical Board felt politically intimidated by Dr. Cariotti's injunction win, and therefore pulled back.
	They retreated in their ongoing offensive against me, and perhaps against other doctors who were also under investigation.
	I'm not the only one.
	And this silencing effect that they were hoping to put in place, this sort of censorship under the table, you know, you might want to just stop talking, speaking the truth, Dr. McDonald, and then maybe we'll drop the investigation.
	That's kind of like the unspoken agreement.
	I think they dropped that because they realized, we're going to lose, and we're going to be so embarrassed, it's going to blow back on us.
	We're just not going to go after these doctors anymore.
	We're going to release them to speak freely.
	Not that I was being constrained myself anyway.
	They were trying to constrain me.
	So if we can win, whether it's a small, pointed win, In the legal system that then has profound political ramifications that then affect the practice of medicine in the state, we can have really major repercussions throughout the country.
	This one law, had it been ignored, had it just been like, well, what can we do?
	We'll just let it go through.
	We'll just go to speakeasies and talk about medicine under the table, under the ground.
	Or all the doctors just leave to go to Arizona or something.
	If that had happened, you know what would have happened the following year?
	The other states would have adopted the same law.
	They would have been emboldened as opposed to intimidated, which is exactly what really happened.
	They got intimidated, not us.
	So there is not a A martyrdom, necessarily, in moving offensively and speaking out.
	Yes, it's risky.
	Yes, you can actually take a hit.
	But you can also achieve great wins, not just for you, but for other people, like Dr. Aaron Cariotti did.
	And I'm very grateful that he did this.
	I completely support everything that he's done.
	And even though we haven't been successful, I have no envy whatsoever over his win.
	I am grateful, because we're all fighting the same battle.
	We really are, and I am so appreciative of you for fighting that battle because it would be easy to just tuck and run.
	It would be easy to run to what seems to be a free state at the moment, but some of us are called to go and some of us are called to stay.
	So thank you for being one who was willing to stay and fight at great personal risk, I'm certain.
	I also find it a little ironic and humorous that you're not a general practitioner, you're not a pediatrician, you're a psychiatrist.
	I know you have the ability to prescribe medications, but you wouldn't be the first person someone called if they got sick with COVID.
	And here you are just saying, hey, maybe ivermectin could work.
	There they come.
	I don't, I just, I find it humorous.
	I really do.
	I did.
	I was one of the first people to be attacked in California for doing that who wasn't a private General Physician, General Practitioner.
	And you know why it happened?
	It happened because in the summer, about two years ago, I was invited onto a panel with Governor Ron DeSantis and Jay Bhattacharya to speak about the mask mandate for children, which Governor DeSantis was trying to ban throughout the state.
	God bless him.
	And on that panel were A whole group of general physicians who were promoting ivermectin.
	And the next day, in all the papers in Florida, I was smeared with a screenshot of myself talking on the panel.
	This is about masks, of course.
	With a quote saying, Doctor advising Governor DeSantis pushing horse deworming medication.
	This was when the CDC posted that absurd tweet that showed a picture of a vet standing next to a horse, and it said, Stop treating people like horses and giving them horse medication.
	End it, y'all.
	Y-apostrophe-A-L-L.
	That was like an infamous tweet from the CDC that came out.
	Pure propaganda.
	So they used my ivermectin social media tweets, conflated them with my anti-mask stance because they're, you know, they're against the blocking of mandates of masking children.
	But they couldn't come out and say that.
	They couldn't say, damn it, This doctor is pushing children to be breathing.
	It was just an untenable position.
	So they attacked me sideways, and they said, this doctor's pushing horse dewormer, just like the FDA and the CDC had warned us about.
	And then I started to get phone calls from media in Florida.
	I got my first series of email death threats, which I didn't take very seriously, because you're going to kill someone, you're going to actually say it a little more directly than putting it into a, you know, A fake Yahoo email account.
	And I received an email every hour for 24 hours with an expletive in the subject from the same person.
	Never happened to me before.
	And I thought, wow, this is amazing.
	This is what happens when you activate the activist ideological left to go after you.
	And it all came back to, you know, Apparently, my position on ivermectin, even though I'm not an active prescriber of that and I'm not really someone who treats this infection.
	I just advise people based on the evidence.
	I wish I didn't have to laugh.
	I just don't know what the other answer was.
	It is amusing now.
	It's so silly and I do laugh about it because I think it is amusing.
	It's just so extreme.
	So speaking of extreme, and we talked about possibly moving, and I've heard you say several times that if AB 2098 was to go into effect, or if a lot of these other proposed changes take effect, that you might take off to one of the Slavic countries, possibly Croatia.
	When you go there, I know you've said many times that they were recently, they ended their civil war, I believe it was from 1991 to 1995-ish, that the area fought that war.
	So it wasn't so far in the past that people have forgotten, but it's enough in the future where they have been able to rebuild.
	What have they taught you?
	Or have they been a contributor to your courage and to your willingness to stand up and dissent?
	Or, I guess I'm just wondering, how do we get there?
	What have they learned that we haven't learned yet?
	One of the first experiences I had, this is early on in this whole pandemic insanity, was at a coffee shop in Tuzla, which is a town in the south, central south of Bosnia.
	And the coffee shop, I still have the little sugar packet actually from when I went there and got a coffee with the name of it on it, was called Sloboda.
	And Sloboda is the Bosnian word for freedom.
	And they named their coffee shop Freedom, and I think it's the oldest coffee shop in Tuzla, probably 15 or 20 years old, which is the same word and the same name as their national soccer team, or sorry, the city soccer team in Tuzla, Sloboda, Freedom.
	So I thought, wow, that must be a really important term if they're naming their oldest coffee shop and their soccer team after it in Bosnia.
	And I began to ask people, wrote a substack actually about Sloboda with a picture of that sugar packet on it over a year ago.
	And what I learned is that their understanding of freedom is very similar to what our Americans' understanding of freedom was at the founding of our country.
	It was freedom from oppression.
	It was independence.
	It was opposition to autocracy.
	Because we had a very angry, and from personal experience obviously at the time, very angry and anti-royalist sentiment that founded our colonies.
	We wanted our freedom from the British.
	Who were corrupt and who were taking money and not providing representation through taxes.
	And I think the Bosnians have a similar view today.
	They are living and have been living under a relatively corrupt government.
	And as you pointed out, there was a civil war for years there.
	And there was a lot of infighting and a lot of theft and a lot of destruction.
	And they've come to the conclusion that they can't trust government.
	And with good cause.
	And so today, even though things are relatively stable there, there's no conflicts militarily, a lot of the region is booming, they're economically quite successful, considering their past.
	There still is this taint, this worry that the people who are in charge really don't have their best interests at heart, and we shouldn't necessarily swallow whole what they're telling us to do without really serious reflection and pause.
	And so a lot of the people in Bosnia, when they heard close the schools, wear a mask, they just went, eh, screw you.
	They had curfews in Tuzla and I know from talking to people there, children, 16, 18 year old kids, they would walk past the police without their masks on after curfew and just stare at the police like, come on, come after me.
	And then sometimes the police would give them a ticket.
	They would rip the ticket up in front of them and they just keep walking.
	And the police couldn't do anything about it.
	They were disempowered because everybody was opposed.
	They weren't being attacked, but they were being actively protested against by the people.
	We didn't see much of this in the United States.
	So what I learned from that experience in Bosnia is that it is actually healthy to have a somewhat cynical view of your government, a distrusting view, because the moment that you give that up, the moment that you begin to accept that your government has your best interests at heart, like a parent, and that government Then becomes larger and larger and more and more powerful, as our government has been at the federal level, certainly, and also state and local.
	You start to breed corruption, you start to breed an abusive relationship.
	And when the abusive relationship starts, and I've written about this in many of my books, I treat abused children frequently, and when they have an abusive parent, they are unable to
	Disattach themselves from the parent and find freedom from the abuser because they're so infantilized and they're so paternalized and they're so scared that they're going to be left abandoned and be left because they become so dependent on that abusive parent.
	And I don't think the Bosnians are dependent at all on their government.
	They are very independent.
	We as Americans now are so dependent on our government, especially in urban areas, for our fuel, for our transportation, for our food, for our housing, for our medical care, for our education.
	There's so many single parents, there's so many poor people, or people even middle class, who are reliant on government for everything in their lives, in the cities in particular, that this breeds a kind of Cognitive dissonance that can't be rectified between the, I don't think I like how I'm being treated, I'm being hit, I'm being beaten, I'm being starved every day, but this is the only parent that I have and I can't turn against him.
	That's kind of the relationship we have now with our government.
	The Bosnians don't have that.
	Those in all of former Croatia don't have that.
	We need to get back to that distrust of government and the independent spirit so that we can shield ourselves from the abuse and call it out when it happens and rely on our family, our community, our church, our homeschooling network, our friends for our support and not up there at our government.
	That's right.
	And right now, our government doesn't really have a lot of question marks.
	They have been very upfront, in my opinion, about what their plans are.
	Reading, if you were to read Klaus Schwab's book, I know I wrote it down, it's escaping me, the name of it, The Great Reset.
	Or, I mean, that just takes me back to World War II.
	Hitler did the exact same thing.
	He wrote a book called Mein Kampf.
	It means My Struggle.
	He was explaining to the world what happened to him, why he's doing what he's doing, how he's going to do what he's doing, and exactly what his goals were.
	Speaking of cognitive dissidence, they're laying the groundwork.
	I mean, they're telling us exactly what they're going to do.
	I've heard Jeremy with the Babylon Bee say a lot of what they're using is media.
	We don't have a lot of question marks anymore.
	I guess the only question mark is what are we going to do about it?
	Are we choosing to go forward in our cognitive dissidence?
	Or are we choosing to learn from our enemy?
	I hate to call it enemy, but the people who are out to get us, I guess, and take away our freedoms and take away our autonomy, take away our right to go to church or go to school or be a homeschooling family.
	They're telling us what their goals are.
	How do we wake up, do something?
	It's kind of like that example I gave earlier of the abused child.
	Think about it as the abused wife, for example, or abused spouse.
	It's generally wives.
	It's usually the husbands that are doing the beating, not the wives in most cases.
	Not all, but in most.
	It starts out with a very charming, kind of narcissistic fantasy on the part of the abuser.
	Oh, I love you.
	You're so great.
	You're beautiful and lovely.
	Oh my gosh, he's amazing.
	I want to get married.
	He has money and a car and he's so kind.
	And then you start to see these little, like, snaps, these little irritability outbursts, these diminishing comments, and these demeaning words that seem to come out of nowhere.
	And you feel a little weird, but oh well, he's just having a bad day.
	And eventually you become so locked in, you quit your job, you move into the house, you cut off all your friends because this guy is just amazing.
	He's going to save us from everything.
	He's giving us and allowing us to fulfill the fantasy that we've always wanted and always dreamed about.
	And then at that moment, that's when he starts beating you.
	That's when he starts pushing you down the stairs.
	That's when he gives you the black eye.
	And at that point, It's not the first day.
	You would have walked out.
	You would have called the police then.
	Now you don't know what to do.
	You're confused.
	But he loved me.
	And he's beating me.
	He loved me.
	He's beating me.
	And I don't know what to do about it.
	I don't know.
	Can I go to the police?
	But what if he follows me?
	Oh, I have a child with this man.
	I'll lose my children.
	And then you become locked in.
	You become frozen.
	And you just say to yourself, no, he just gets upset sometimes.
	I'm sure that he'll change.
	And he said he was sorry.
	I mean, you hear about it.
	It's like a trite story.
	It's been going on for decades in this country.
	I think that's kind of what's going on right now between us, the American people, and our government.
	So I think that The only way really to fight back against this, because as you said, just like the man who starts out really kind and smiling and happy becomes smug and abusive and nasty, our government has shown its hand.
	Our government is now in the position of saying, you know what?
	We've got you.
	You're like the wife that we have by the hair, chained to the bed.
	So we don't even have to pretend anymore that we're telling you the truth.
	We're gonna come right out and tell you, we are gonna do whatever we want to you, we have you, we're gonna abuse you, we're gonna harm you, we're gonna murder you in some cases, and there's nothing you can do about it.
	That is basically the position that our government has taken.
	I mean, it's astonishing that I'm saying this today.
	Three years ago, four years ago, I would have said, oh, are you crazy?
	There's no way that...
	Maybe there's some soup to refuse.
	There's some individuals in our government that are corrupt, but the system and the people that run it in the international community, the Klaus Schwab's, they would never come out and say, we're trying to decimate the population.
	We're trying to call the herd.
	We're trying to.
	Lead a sort of, as you said, like a Mein Kampf, almost a Nazi-like extermination of people that are not necessary, and put everybody into a position of subservience and dependence on our fuel sources, and our housing, and our transportation, and our education, and our medical care.
	That would never have happened.
	Of course not!
	And they're actually saying it and doing it right now.
	So we are now in the position of having to cut and run.
	We're having to completely detach ourselves from our school system, from our medical care system, from our dependence on what the government says is our energy resource, and build up an independent grouping of different communities, just like people are right now trying to grow their own food and Their own chickens?
	Because centralized food supplies are failing?
	I mean, I could go on and on.
	There's so many examples of this.
	The only way to combat this kind of abuser-abusey relationship is for the one who is abused to develop internal resources, meaning courage and strength, and external resources, meaning external support, friends, family, community, so that that individual person can then Have the courage and external resources to stand up to the abuser, to cut the ties, and to leave.
	And to reject that abuser wholeheartedly and say, we're not negotiating anymore.
	We're not compromising here to get that.
	We're not giving up our liberty in order to have the promise of security so that we get neither, in the famous quote.
	I don't see any other way of doing it.
	We cannot negotiate with these people.
	We cannot come to an agreement.
	We cannot make a compromise.
	This is not about diplomacy.
	I truly believe today that, as you said earlier, these people, they are our enemy.
	Not our fellow Americans.
	I mean the people that are running this show.
	They are pushing something that is evil.
	And if we accept As I do, and a lot of people certainly in the liberal and left community don't accept this, which is one of their problems, the existence of evil, that there are individuals and institutions that are not just misguided, that are truly evil, Then we can perhaps marshal the resources to fight them.
	The man who's beating his wife is not having a bad day.
	He's not just, you know, a little angry.
	He's a criminal.
	So you don't negotiate with people like that.
	You leave them, you call them out, you put them in jail.
	That's my view.
	And I would never have said this three years ago, but I really do feel that this is the only path forward today.
	Yeah, and I've heard you talk a lot about people trying to avoid suffering.
	And what popped into my head as you're speaking is we are already suffering.
	That is what is happening.
	So regardless of how much we don't want to hurt, regardless how much we don't want to experience the pain of Having money taken from us from, you know, a welfare system who refuses to give, like in Brazil, the UBI is conditional on receiving a vaccine.
	If we want freedom, then we have to endure the suffering.
	And I guess kind of the good news is we are already suffering.
	You are already experiencing it.
	So might as well suffer for the sake of freedom rather than suffer for the sake of bondage.
	That's very well put, Sarah.
	And I think that, and it's just sad that I have to say this, that it may take real suffering for all regular Americans, the people in the middle that have been just going along to get along, real suffering.
	And it's already starting, $7 for eggs, you know, fuel costs are going through the roof.
	Natural gas in California has gone up 300% in the last 60 days.
	A woman in Chinatown that I wrote about last week in my substack just got a bill for $13,000 for her natural gas costs for her restaurant.
	She had been running the business for 30 years.
	Her husband is now deceased.
	And she said, my last bill was $4,000 to $5,000.
	That was in December.
	January's bill was $13,000.
	She said, I'm going to have to close my restaurant.
	I can't pay that month after month after month.
	This is the sort of suffering, and this is just economic suffering, you know, not to mention physical health problems, suicides, deaths, cancers, heart attacks, mental illness, drug addiction.
	The invasion of our country by illegal aliens and terrorists and child rapists and fentanyl pushers, four, five, six million of them right now, who are now going to start voting in our elections.
	A collapse of our military and our international prowess.
	The absolute abdication of all accountability for teaching good values in our school system, which is happening to our children, who are now completely and utterly confused about their identities.
	This suffering is happening right now to every American, every single one.
	And the worse it gets, and again, I say this not because I wish for it, but it may be the reality, the worse it gets, the more people who are suffering from cognitive dissonance blocking and lack of courage will be forced to stand up and to say, you know what, I'd rather risk
	More of what I've already been suffering from by stepping up and fighting back than just sitting here and let it be taken away from me piece by piece by piece and have my whole life dismantled as I just lie here, this sort of passive, foolish, lackey of international world order.
	And I hate to put things like this because I don't want to see people suffer, but sometimes there really is no other route because education and information has not been successful in pushing and turning back this tide.
	It's only been battles, like the legal battle with AB 2098, that have been partially successful.
	But it hasn't necessarily changed the hearts and minds of the American people.
	It's only allowed those people to, in this case, for example, have a little bit more of a reprieve in establishing and maintaining their doctor-patient relationship.
	But it's not the patients that went for the fight.
	And most doctors didn't either.
	It's just Aaron Cariotti and I and a few others.
	We need to engage all of the doctors and all of the patients in these battles.
	And so far, it hasn't happened because they just haven't suffered enough.
	That's hard, and I know we don't want to, but that might be necessary.
	So, group, how do we usually end therapy, Dr. Mark?
	We have to end on a positive note, right?
	How do we do this?
	I know, for me, having people like you who Listen and fight and you're doing things and when you put yourself out there, you put your personality out there, you put your thoughts, you put your research.
	People, I highly encourage you guys to follow Dr. Mark McDonald wherever, whatever suits you.
	If you like podcasts, Listen to Informed Dissent.
	If you like reading, follow his sub stack.
	He also participates in a slew of interviews if there is any kind of different platform.
	I know he's participated with IPAC with James Lyons Wilder.
	There are a myriad of things that you can do.
	I personally am energized by knowing that I'm not alone.
	But what would be a good and Oh, and also read his books.
	I'm so sorry.
	Yes, Freedom From Fear and The United States of Fear.
	Those are also amazing.
	I've read them both.
	But how do we end?
	How do we wrap it up and put a bow on it and send people out into the world ready to engage another day?
	Well, I like to let people know that, as Dennis Prager often says, there's no point in being an optimist or a pessimist, because if you're an optimist, things are going to turn out fine.
	So why bother?
	If you're a pessimist, things are going to suck and they're going to turn out horribly, so why bother?
	So, I think a better position to take is the following.
	Regardless of how things are today and how things turn out tomorrow, I am going to continue to fight.
	I'm going to continue to battle, because despair is not an option.
	Despair is actually immoral.
	We are obligated, morally, as Citizens and as human beings to continue to speak the truth and continue to push for what is right, and that requires some courage.
	How do you get that?
	Well, as I said in my first book and my second book, and I say this repeatedly, one of the first things that you need to do is to acknowledge, if you are in this camp, That you may be a bit intimidated, you may be a bit scared, you're not really sure what to do, and you feel a bit isolated.
	There's a lot of people in this camp, and I often speak to them.
	You know, I can preach to the choir all day, but I want to preach to the people that are maybe in the audience.
	They're not in the choir.
	They're not in Satan's lounge.
	They're in the church, but they're just kind of hanging out in the back, wondering where to go from here.
	For those people, I think the first thing that you need to do is you need to seek out and surround yourself with like-minded people.
	And you can do that electronically, surreptitiously if you wish, without giving yourself away by listening to podcasts, by especially these live interactions and finding out who's saying what that makes sense to you and that encourages you.
	And then find others, citizens, who are also following those people and then interact with them online.
	Go to their local meetings.
	There's almost always in every city some local meeting, some group.
	CHD does a great job in LA and Orange County.
	There's many groups here locally and they're all over the country.
	Go meet up with people, even if they're people you've never met before, even if your whole family is against you.
	Go and meet up with other people who share the same views and values.
	Get yourself informed.
	Get yourself weaponized and equipped to fight back.
	That's the first step, because if you don't have a support group, you're going to be alone, you're going to be cowering, you're going to be scared.
	I think that's the most important thing to do.
	And the next is to really start working on yourself.
	Work on the narcissism.
	Work on the fear.
	Work on the addiction to media that misinforms you and puts you in a state of incapacitation.
	These are steps that every person can take.
	Forget about fixing Washington.
	Forget about the federal level.
	That's not going to be changed anytime soon.
	Work on yourself first, and then your local community, because that's where the benefits accrue.
	Look what happened with the election two years ago in Virginia, Loudoun County, and the new governor there, the overwhelm of the school board system, and putting in parents in place.
	These are local changes that make a difference.
	And when you see the changes locally, That is when we can start to see these, like, as the Bushes said years ago, thousand points of light growing up from below and rising up vertically.
	And then I think we can actually have an effect and a change.
	And it's not going to happen from top down.
	It's going to happen from the bottom up.
	And I strongly believe we can do it.
	We can do it, especially when we have good leaders, good organizations, good people who continue to do the good work.
	So thank you, Dr. Mark, for being one of those people who's willing to put yourself out there and do that for us all.
	I hope that everybody can appreciate and send you love and support you however they can.
	But I really do appreciate your time this morning.
	Thank you so much for being willing to be here with me.
	Thanks for having me on, Sarah.
	I enjoyed the conversation.
	Thank you so much.
	All right, for our CHD audience, we have a couple of announcements.
	We hope that you stay tuned because live on CHD TV right now, Dr. Meryl Nass is live blogging CHD's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
	The ACIP meeting is today and tomorrow and they will be discussing the adult polio vaccination.
	Pfizer is talking about a pentavalent meningococcal vaccine and RSV vaccine development.
	Her live blog is amazing and we want to give a special thank you to her for spending time adding her perspective and humor I know I've heard Mary Holland chuckle a couple times thinking about the things that she says out there.
	So I know what will at least keep you entertained to these long and they can be disheartening meetings, especially when we all know what we know.
	But thank you all so much for tuning in today.
	We really do appreciate all of our viewers on CHD.
	I'm Sarah Knoyer, and I will see you soon next month on Good Morning CHD.
	And thank you so much for your time and attention.

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