Fear and Logic examines how fear dominates logic in manipulation—from Adolf Hitler’s four-year reign to modern grifts like vaccine misinformation and January 6th narratives. Trump commuted a convicted Celebrity Apprentice figure now pushing pro-Trump rhetoric, while his own "Russia Shutta" message and Elon Musk’s anti-Semitic legal threats reveal the tactic’s persistence. Lydia Green’s Venn diagram overlap between anti-vaxxers and Holocaust deniers underscores the pattern, where fear-based control thrives unchecked by accountability, even in systems like science or courts. The episode warns of this tool’s enduring power to distort truth and sway populations. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have theme music if I was any good at making that sort of thing.
Look at you changing things up.
Yeah, a little bit.
I have some thoughts on what to do for some kind of theme noises.
It won't be music because I don't do music, but I don't know.
I'm way behind on so many things that it might still be months or a year yet before I ever get that done.
So till then, you just have us introducing the show like this.
Back again today with David Bloomberg.
How are you doing, David?
Okay.
Okay.
If it weren't for like copyright, I would have some good suggestions of some theme music that including one song we might get into later in this podcast.
Yeah.
I have one of my favorite artists of all time.
I'm working up the courage to send some kind of email to ask them if I can use a clip from a song as part of it.
But I dare not reveal who it is or what song until I get permission.
So yeah.
But, you know, maybe, maybe not.
Who knows?
Yeah.
Hard to say.
Sometimes they just say, yeah, use a clip.
Use it 10 seconds or whatever.
Yeah.
Anyway, enough housekeeping.
We're going straight into the topic today.
We're going to talk about two related things, which are fear and logic.
Most people don't consider these things to be related, but as soon as you start to describe both of them, it seems obvious that they are.
Related or oppositional?
Well, that's related too.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sure.
I mean, I mean, it's hard to describe the life of Winston Churchill without also describing the Nazis.
They clearly weren't on the same side, but they were related.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So logic seeks to answer the question, how do we know what we know?
I mean, humans aren't inherently logical creatures.
So we have to, we can't just rely on intuition to do this.
And this is something I kind of touched on when I did an episode about intuition, was that intuition is there and it's a powerful part of your brain, but it's not always going to lead you to the best conclusion.
It's always going to lead you to a conclusion.
And that conclusion isn't necessarily the best one.
And in some cases, it's the worst one.
So let's start with that.
Where do you think where we sit, where we are humans?
We are creatures that compete with each other.
And in competing with each other, logic will help us in that competition.
And therefore, that might be leading us to become more logical, except that if that were really true, we probably would have been a lot more logical than we are now.
Yeah, I think the last part is the key because, you know, when you're saying people get an advantage for being logical, I'm not sure that's true overall in general, because we've seen plenty of people succeed, not only in spite of their illogical nature, but sometimes because of it.
I mean, just look at Trump.
Okay, don't look at Trump.
Nobody wants that.
But the point is, we've been seeing that the more he's charged with crimes, the more evidence that's piled on, the more support he gets from his base.
And that's definitely not logical.
And that's an unfortunately high percentage of the population.
And the thing is, it's not just him.
Logic would dictate that if you're running as a family values politician, you should exhibit such values.
But then we find more and more that they're having affairs and not just affairs, they're having affairs with each other.
And they're fondling in a public place with kids around and so on.
Let's time stamp this a little bit.
This is September of 2023.
And there's just this last week or so has been the story of Lauren Bobert being recorded in a, I believe it's a theater where they're having a musical.
And she was vaping and was asked to leave.
And then because she complained and said that she wasn't vaping, they looked closer at the video and found something else in there, which was essentially an extramarital affair in progress.
Yeah.
So that explains that reference.
There's no other way to describe that.
You're right, David.
It's they just don't care about their own hypocrisy anymore.
Right.
And because their base doesn't care about logic.
And so therefore they don't care about logic.
And by not caring about logic, they're succeeding.
If you had to get Lauren Bobert into a logic debate, I'm not sure she could even find where the debate was located.
Well, I have, I'm surprisingly less cynical than you on this point.
I think she's much more calculated than merely pressing on the emotion button, though.
Someone has pressed on the emotion button and many politicians are attempting to cash in on the.
It's almost like someone went up to a great big slot machine and they plugged the last coin in.
That got the, got the rain of coins coming out the bottom and there's too much for any one politician to catch.
So many politicians are all holding their little cups under there to try to catch it all.
Yeah, and that's what this reign of of emotion is like, that it.
It bypasses all logic and is solely emotion based.
Most of these decisions yeah, I mean it it I, I don't know it it a lot of the emotion is related to the other topic uh, which you know why.
I said it was uh in opposition to fear, and i'm sure we'll get to that in a little while.
But it's just they.
They throw these things out there and they don't suffer consequences because of it, and some of the logical politicians, more logical politicians, do suffer consequences.
You know, you've got a politician who gets uh caught doing something that uh, maybe wasn't so bad, but his own people say you should resign, and he resigns.
And then you've got the, the other politicians who are like, no, i'm just gonna, you know, pretend it didn't happen and go on my merry way and they succeed.
Yeah, I think that this is um getting swept up into the logic of a democratic debate.
You know, like it's possible for people to vote in the wrong person, it's possible for a large swath of people to have the the wrong way of viewing things.
But I think if we're going to look at logic, we shouldn't try to look at the decisions of a group.
We should look at decisions of individuals.
Like you're right you you're Definitely right that many of the politicians on the right are not displaying logical thinking in many of the things that they say.
Although they will display that logic still has value because they will sometimes say things that are meant to be logical and then attempt to point out how logical they were.
One of the most amazing instances of this, I think, has to be every reference to trickle-down economy because it's meant to be logical that if you let the economy bulk up, it will, you know, money will fly around and spread around to many other cups.
And that's meant to be the, I think that that's meant to be the process there.
It doesn't really work the way they claim.
So that's the problem with it, that it doesn't line up with reality is where it fails logically.
But if you just look at it from the outside, it looks, oh, well, that's great.
It looks looks great.
Rising tide raises every boat, right?
It's fine, except it raises some boats much more than others.
And that means it's not really a tide.
Yeah, the yachts seem to get, you know, get the heaviest boats lift more than the lightest boats.
Yeah.
The people who are sitting there on their dinghies.
Because it's just a poor metaphor.
Yes.
Yeah.
I mentioned that I mentioned quickly when I introduced this topic that we're not really rational creatures.
We're capable of rationality, but we're not really rational.
If we had evolved to be rational, we would be more rational than we are.
Yes.
In preparing for this episode, I did a fair amount of other searches to make sure there was other, to see if there was other takes on logic and fear and rationality, etc.
And there is a fair amount of scientific studies, anthropological, psychological, sociological, that sort of thing, where they try to study this because some people in the past have thought that humans are rational creatures.
And then someone rapidly pointed out eventually, well, actually, it's not really true.
And then they attempted to work out, you know, the way science does, they attempted to solve that question.
Are we rational or are we not rational?
And it seems to be, and I'd like to bring this up because I think it demonstrates something about where we are: is that when you are, especially like, let's say you're Neanderthal.
Well, maybe I shouldn't say that because some people didn't ever have Neanderthal DNA.
Let's say you're 2 million years ago, you're an early human and you are alone and something happens.
Doesn't matter what it is, some noise in the bush.
Reacting out of fear, specifically fear, where you react very quickly and with a strong bias towards self-protection, you are much more likely to live and survive to have children and to have those children survive than you are if you don't react out of fear, which is why we have such strong fear responses.
And of course, the creatures that we evolved from also have all of those.
Every creature that has decision-making developed a fear response very quickly.
They all have it.
Right.
So obviously we evolved from creatures that had a fear response and we've maintained that.
We haven't evolved away from it.
But when we're together, when we're in a group and we can make decisions that are not blocked by fear, not interfered with by the fear mechanism, we can make rational choices.
And those making those rational choices, having more time to do it and more courage to not just drop everything and run, we were able to make choices that were better not only for us, but for the group.
And being better for the group, it was better for a greater timeframe.
Because if you strengthened the group, you also strengthened the ability for not only yourself to protect your children, but the group to also protect your children in a way that it takes a village to raise a child, to quote a poster I saw on a wall once.
And this is part of the rationality that was injected into our DNA, essentially.
The ability to be rational did affect our ability to become dominant over our landscape and eventually become the ultimate apex predator on the planet, et cetera, et cetera.
And so we are, we do have this, but it's not a simple thing like we dropped fear and took rationality.
They're both there and they both compete with each other.
And that, that is not going away anytime soon.
That's, I mean, if we, if there were aliens that came here and grabbed us and culled us like sheep, they could remove the fear response from us.
We could, they could slowly pick the ones that were less fearful and they could do that.
But we're not doing that to ourselves and nothing in our society moves us closer to that, not really.
So we're always going to have fear and logic.
Yeah.
And, you know, I might have to go back on what I said before about them always being oppositional.
Because if you're a caveman and you hear a noise in a bush, it is your fear that is telling you to be wary, but it is also logical to be wary.
Right.
And there are certain situations where it is logical to be fearful.
Yeah.
And it is logical to make certain decisions.
And so I think that's where science really comes in.
Because what do we see with a lot of anti-science movements is we see individual stories.
My child was fine, then they got vaccinated, then they got autism.
Therefore, vaccination causes autism.
This is my logic.
One preceded the other, one caused the other.
Yeah.
And from an individual standpoint, you can understand how someone would reach that conclusion.
You know, the I'm trying to think of, you know, what it would have been even in older cultures.
You know, the moon blotted out the sun.
Therefore, the gods are angry with us.
Therefore, we need to sacrifice a person to appease them.
Right.
This is logic.
You know, this is clear logic based on their belief system.
Cause and effect.
Yeah.
Yeah.
As they saw it, with the limited view they had, no context.
Yeah.
Right.
And so that's really where science has to come in because you can't rely on your on each person's individual view of so-called logic.
And it also goes to, you know, on the more specific scale of science, that is where logic will advance you.
Because, you know, like when we have discussions on Twitter, let's say, we try to pin down the logic with someone.
Someone makes a claim.
I'm going to ask them to back it up.
The thing is, if they can't, well, what do they suffer?
You are just, you know, arguing with a guy who has like 150,000 followers.
And you pointed out, you, you pointed out his illogic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't think he's losing any followers over it.
You know, he called you a bunch of names and, you know, eventually we'll move on.
And that's the end of it.
And so, you know, what's in that situation, there's no detriment to being illogical.
And in fact, it goes back to, you know, like that guy, I suspect, was one of the people who benefits from general illogical thinking.
Just yesterday, I had to block a guy on my TikTok because he kept making comments and accusations about me and other commenters.
And every time one of us would present logic to him, he ignored it.
And I was like, look, I'm done with you.
You're blocked.
And so, you know, that's unfortunately not a rare instance.
The day before, I went round and round with someone who couldn't understand simple logic either.
And, you know, it's a sad state of affairs.
But when you get to science, it was a long path to get there, but when you get to science, that is where you're supposed to have a process, a logical process that puts all those other things aside.
And similarly, in theory, a courtroom or other more restricted situations where you see the importance of logic and you hopefully see it succeed.
Even then, not always, but at least that's where there's hope.
Yeah.
I think that it's important to remember that rationality and logic aren't defined merely by the things that give you advantage.
Some people actually think that's true, though.
It's rational if it gives you advantage.
And therefore, anything that gives you advantage is rational, which is a really shaky way to view this.
And you're right.
Fear can be advantageous.
And you mentioned that fear was, it was logical to be fearful in some situations.
From my personal perspective, I think that logic rules over caution and fear destroys the possibility of rational thinking.
And so it's logical to be cautious.
And you might do the same response as you would when you are afraid.
But if you keep your head about you, you might look and see that it's not a cougar.
It's maybe prey.
Then if you run away from it, you're running away from a meal rather than so there's by not just blindly doing the thing that you would under fear, you would get an additional advantage by being merely cautious and keeping a rational head.
So maybe we should talk about fear a little bit because we've been, it's been obvious that it's there the whole time.
I mean, fear is an extremely powerful emotion.
It's possibly the most powerful.
It's difficult to measure these against each other, of course.
Love, fear, hate, they're pretty much the top three.
Everyone agrees, but it's hard to say which one is most powerful.
You know, we're going to have avatars of these in an upcoming Marvel movie, maybe, and we'll, they'll punch each other and we'll see which one, you know, wins the fight or whatever.
If it's a, if it's a Marvel movie, love will win.
Love will out smart fear.
Yes.
Yes.
Fear will be more powerful.
It will appear to win the day at first.
Yes.
Yes.
That's that's the Marvel movie that I want to see.
Yeah.
But it literally does shut down.
It is, it is very literally an instinctive response to do the things that you do when you're afraid.
And this is usually boiled down to fight, flight, or freeze, which is the three responses when you're really afraid.
You will immediately do one of three things based on the situation.
You know, what little information you have on what the threat is will determine which of these things you do.
And also something of your personality will undoubtedly affect that too.
Because if you think you can fight every enemy, you're going to pick fight every time.
If you think you can't, you're probably going to run every time.
Right.
But some people freeze immediately, just freeze and just wait.
And that's probably the most cogent response because you get to see what's happening.
Unless you're a deer on a highway, yeah.
No, maybe.
Yeah.
True.
That didn't help any of those deer on the nope to freeze.
So it's not, it's not always the right response, but it's probably better than the other two.
But this overrides logical and rational thought.
It's because it's an instinct, it doesn't even engage the conscious part of your mind, actually.
So when we have grifters in our world that are trying to make people feel afraid, those people are not engaging the logical parts of their brains to make the decisions that they need to make in regard to that particular aspect of life.
If someone's trying to make people be afraid of vaccines, they're not going to consider all the options as closely as they should to decide what they should do about vaccines.
If they say, you should be afraid of all the powerful people, all the elites, they're all working against you.
And by the way, they also have the mainstream media on their side.
Well, if you believe that, well, I don't know what level of decision you're going to make, but you might just make the decision that I've seen people tell me they're making, which is I'm going to do whatever the mainstream media tells me not to do.
And I just hold my head in my hands and think, how did you get here?
How did we get here?
Yeah, I mean, fear is the biggest weapon of a con artist.
Yeah.
You know, whether it's fear of something happening or fear of it not happening, fear that you need to send money to fake kidnappers to save your grandchild, or fear that you need to send money to a Nigerian prince or else you won't get a promised windfall.
Fear that cancer will kill you if you don't take this special magic potion that all of science is trying to hide.
Fear that you are being controlled and are a sheep when in fact it's the grifter who is controlling you.
And to go back to the success argument or discussion, the people that we were talking about, I would say, often continue to be successful because they are good at perpetuating that fear.
You know, vote for us or else terrible things will happen to your children.
Like they might meet a gay person.
Ooh, they're going to come for your guns.
Yes, they're going to come for your guns.
But meanwhile, don't ignore the fact that your child could be killed in a school shooting.
Also, not a thing you should be afraid of, apparently, yet people are.
And this also destroys their ability to think logically in a lot of ways.
It's not great.
So don't be afraid of, you know, us, the, you know, this party.
We're, we're the good guys.
And, you know, just, again, ignore all these other bad things that we've done.
And I think this is something we have seen for a long time.
I mean, I think many of us have noticed it a lot more recently, but this has been going on forever.
People always whip up their own enemies or whip up people against their enemies using fear.
And this brings us to the song I was talking about earlier.
Your fellow Canadian, the late great Neil Peart of Rush, wrote a series of songs about fear.
And I think the one that's most appropriate here is called Witch Hunt.
And some of the lyrics are: The Righteous Rise with Burning Eyes of Hatred and Ill Will.
Madmen fed on fear and lies to beat and burn and kill.
And then this is where really gets into it.
They say there are strangers who threaten us in our immigrants and infidels.
They say there is strangeness too dangerous in our theaters and bookstore shelves.
Well, maybe in some theaters that are showing Beetlejuice when Lauren Bobert is there.
Those who know what's best for us must rise and save us from ourselves.
And I mean, that really, I mean, this was written, I don't know how many years ago.
I didn't check the date.
20, 30, 40 years ago.
I'm not even sure.
And you see the same thing.
You know, the right wing still is trying to censor.
You know, oh, it's literally too dangerous in, you know, in libraries or bookstores.
You can't see it.
We won't, you know, we advocate for parents' rights, except when it comes to the rights of parents to let their kids see these things.
And they just use that fear to whip up their base.
And, you know, then, you know, one of the key parts of the song, ignorance and prejudice and fear walk hand in hand.
And, you know, that's the way they want.
That's the way they want to keep their base.
Afraid, ignorant, and prejudiced.
Yeah.
And I, it's so effective to just inject fear and then claim that you are the one that's telling them the truth because you're the one brave enough to tell them about the thing that they should be afraid of.
And in the modern incarnation, surprisingly, also just tell them that the other side is going to try to make them feel fearful.
You know, sentences after they just made them feel fearful.
Like giving the game away while they're doing it.
It's so bold.
It's so bold.
It's like a serial killer that walks among the police and pretends to help them solve crimes when they're the one doing all the murdering anyway.
It's, I believe you just described Dexter.
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
I did watch Dexter.
It was a good show.
There was a couple other instances where that happened.
I couldn't think of the right reference at the time.
But Dexter works fine.
Yeah.
And that boldness is something that I feel like it should be fictional, but I know that it's not.
I can see that it's not.
I can see that we have people who are doing that now.
Oh, yeah.
And why we can't look at the same evidence because they don't care about the evidence.
They want to keep their power.
You mentioned that I got in an argument with a guy that had 150,000 followers yesterday.
So come and clean here.
That person is Nick Searcy.
He is a fairly well-known actor.
You might not recognize his name, but you'd probably recognize his face when you see him.
Look him up.
He's best known for appearing on a TV show called Justified.
And he was at January 6th, and he had a video camera and he wrote, he did his own documentary about the events of January 6th.
And watching his documentary, you would think you're in opposite land.
Like it was well done.
I had to, after I saw his documentary, I had to double check what I was told about January 6th because what he told was such a compelling story.
And I had to double check it.
And then after I double checked and I looked at more things and I found them, I felt angry that I was fooled by him.
But I also thought, you know, here's a guy.
He was there.
He must have known what happened.
And still he does this.
Well, okay, he's a grifter.
Right.
So I happen to have, you know, I didn't seek him out.
He made a comment to another person that I follow and I pointed out to that person who they were talking to.
And I think that person mostly talks about vaccine information.
So they weren't that interested in getting into a dogfight about election stuff.
But I could point out exactly like I showed video footage that completely contradicts the narrative he tells very well, I thought, in his documentary.
And the few people who mentioned it, which of the 145,000 people who followed him, only about five ever made any comments.
So, you know, I'm happy about that, but also kind of weirded out because I've had people who had 300 followers that had more people in that comment on there.
But they didn't want to look at the evidence.
They would slide right past it and say, oh, well, one of them said, oh, well, what you're showing isn't the full context.
And in that respect, we're looking at a video where the clip is two videos side by side, split screen.
And one of them is zoomed right in on about eight people.
And it shows a police officer moving his hands and appearing to wave his hand in a motion to move some people.
And it sort of looks when you're just kind of looking at this, like he's waving his hand and protesters are moving through.
But side by side is the same moment zoomed out from, I don't know, about the perspective of like a drone above the air, watching it for a news camera feed or something.
And you can see that what's actually happening once you zoom out and get more context is that you have a police officer whose barricade, barricaded line has just broke through and the protesters are running past the barricade.
And he is motioning for other officers to move their position because they're either about to get swarmed or and surrounded or they're going to they're needed somewhere else.
Whatever he's indicating to them, he's motioning to other officers.
He's far away from the protesters and you clearly get new context on that same moment and they're side by side.
They're literally side by side.
They're synced up so you can see the same officer doing the same motion side by side with more context.
And the person responds to it saying, there's more here.
You don't have enough context.
And I don't understand how you can overlook this and say, one of these was a person attempting to lie to you blatantly.
And the other is providing context that shows you the lie.
And your response is that there's more context that will do what?
Like, what do they think the context will do?
It will disprove the thing that proves it's a lie.
Like, what other context is going to explain this moment?
And yes, the rest of the day has more context, but that moment already is showing a lie, a blatant lie about the day.
So where are we going with this conversation?
And what are we doing?
What are we even doing?
If a person is so afraid that their government is going to do whatever they think Biden is going to do yet, which by the way, he hasn't done all the things that they claimed he was going to do, he still hasn't done any of those things.
I mean, neither did Obama and he was in there for eight years.
Obama didn't come to get anyone's guns.
Right.
I'm still waiting for that.
You know, he was definitely going to do it and that it didn't happen.
But, you know, I mean, it goes back to what I was saying earlier.
There is no logic in that discussion coming from the other side.
You know, you're using logic and they're ignoring logic and they're not suffering any consequences.
Well, I still have hope, David.
I'm less cynical than you and I'm maintaining that stance.
I have hope that this is not like a bullet that takes down a silver bullet that takes down a werewolf.
It's more like water that slowly erodes a dam or a wall.
It just, you just keep at it, and people don't even like to admit they change their mind, so they never tell you.
But I think there's a reason why very few people responded to the things I was saying, because if you read what I was saying, you run smack into the point that it's what this filmmaker was saying just wasn't true.
And I think some of the people who were responding were just trolls and hadn't even seen his movie, right?
That was clear at some point.
I called a few of them out on it.
Like, you haven't even seen the movie.
Like, we're talking about his documentary and how he's blatantly trying to exploit tragedy.
I mean, in his movie, he has an interview with the husband of Ashley Babbitt.
It's, I don't understand how he can sleep at night.
I mean, that's because you have a conscience and he doesn't.
I mean, if you look at most of these people that we're talking about, I don't think they have a conscience.
How else do you explain going out there and doing all the things they do just to hold on to power if they're politicians or to get money if they're grifters?
I think that their brains are wired differently.
The only logic that they use is the logic of making it better for themselves, getting themselves more power.
I mean, you can look everywhere for that.
Look at, you know, I mean, look at Putin.
Why the hell did Putin need to invade Ukraine?
He had complete control of a superpower nation.
Complete control.
Nobody could ever touch him.
If anyone said a bad word about him, they fell out of a window.
But he just had to invade Ukraine because of reasons, because they were, you know, to quote Khan in Star Trek's second movie, he tasks me.
You know, and I think he was quoting someone else too.
But, you know, he, you know, I think Putin just felt upset that Ukraine would dare not join him, even though he had all the power in the world.
And that's the megalomania principle, right?
It's always about more.
And yeah, but that's it with all these people.
I mean, they, you know, Texas, they just didn't convict one of their high-ranking officials, even though there is so much evidence that this man has committed multiple crimes.
In Pakistan, yeah.
Yeah, but they let him go because, oh, we heard from our base and our base wouldn't like it.
Well, that's not what you're there to do.
Yeah.
You know, the point, I believe, I believe that there is some words written in one of the holy documents that began the holy U.S.
It might have even been related to the concept.
I don't think it's in the Constitution, but it was one of the documents that meant to support the Constitution.
I believe the words are tyranny of the majority, which is meant to mean that you might need to make decisions that the majority doesn't like, but that protect the individual and properly prosecute crimes and that sort of thing.
You don't just make that decision that way just because the majority wants it.
That is the tyranny of the majority.
And if that's the case, someone needs to point that out and say, okay, are we just throwing this not wanting the tyranny of the majority thing away?
Are we doing away with it?
Like, let's just play by the same rulebook here.
Is this just a case of getting 51% of us all to want one thing?
And then that's the way it's going to go.
Because if that's the case, then they should just say that, but they're not.
Boy, I'm worked up today, David.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you know, it's true.
They want power.
They want more power.
And, you know, it's there, believe me, it's not only on the right.
Other politicians do it too.
You know, in my own state, we saw Rod Lagojevich.
He was ostensibly a Democrat.
And, you know, he, but all he wanted was power.
He just kept doing things to get more and more power.
The difference was that the Democratic House and the Democratic Senate in Illinois impeached and convicted him.
Now, you could say that's because he wanted all the power for himself and not to share with them, but at least they convicted him.
Yeah, if it had been Republicans, I feel like they'd have been like, eh, maybe running for president.
Selling a Senate seat.
Yeah, who cares?
You know, and then what happened was he, well, first he was on Celebrity Apprentice with Trump.
And then he went to jail and Trump commuted his sentence.
And so now he's out there on right-wing radio as a pro-Trump voice, which shows he never cared about the values of Democrats.
Again, it was a pathway to power.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, maybe we should try to wrap up fear and logic here.
Well, I was going to say that the best pathway to power is to plan people's fears and get them to drop logic.
I mean, it really is.
The less people think logically and the more they think with fear response, the more certain people, politicians, con artists, grifters, whatever, can get them to do what they want.
My brain is relating two things here, David.
So you may or may not have remembered about a guy named Ben Johnson.
When I was a kid, for a very brief time that I knew about him, Ben Johnson was a hero.
We were, as a nation, were in the Olympics and we weren't winning nearly as many gold medals.
And of course, we had the very, very big United States.
It was Carl Lewis who was winning all the gold medals.
And then we had a guy going to the 1988 Seoul Olympics who was fast and we knew he was fast.
And we were like, oh, this guy, this guy can win a gold medal for us.
This is going to be great.
Every Canadian kid was like, oh, this is so amazing.
And then he won.
And he didn't just win.
He crushed everyone.
Because Ben Johnson used steroids.
He was jacked.
He was ripped.
He was a monster.
And he failed.
But what he did was the greatest advertisement for steroids in history.
Really was.
Like all the doctors who sell steroids were like, oh, this is when we get our payday.
And they did.
They all did and more of them.
So what does this have to do with what we're talking about here?
Well, in history, there was a leader who very famously and very publicly used fear to control his people and also to push everything forward.
His name was Adolf Hitler, and he failed.
But in the same way that Ben Johnson failed and was the greatest advertisement for steroids, Adolf Hitler is the greatest advertisement for using fear to control a population.
Even Stalin isn't as famous for this, although Stalin was much more successful at it because Stalin did it over a 30-year period.
Hitler did it over four years.
I mean, from no one to ruling that nation with an iron fist took four years for Adolf Hitler.
And this is a thing we have to fight too.
It's not, it doesn't seem coincidental to me that many of the people that are ignoring evidence and engaging with this fear response and working to amplify it also often don't really like the question of what really happened to the Jews in World War II.
It's a fun game to play.
A friend of the podcast, Lydia Green, pointed out to me is that the Venn diagram between anti-vaxxers and Holocaust deniers is very, very close.
And I had no idea until she pointed it out.
And then I tried it.
And it's amazing how many of them squirm as soon as you bring this up.
Yeah, most of them don't respond to you.
Most of them I've noticed will say like, well, that has nothing to do with what I'm saying.
And you're like, well, then why won't you answer the question?
Yeah.
And they just doing a simple reality check here.
Let's say something simple.
Yeah, I think, and I could be wrong about the attribution here, but I think it's Dr. David Gorski who has said something to the effect of at the root of every conspiracy theory is anti-Semitism.
It always comes back to the Jews did it.
If that wasn't a thing he came up with, it is a thing that he has said and quoted someone else saying.
Yes.
Yeah.
And you could, I mean, you know, I mean, Trump just issued a Russia Shutta message that was anti-Semitic, you know.
Yeah.
Elon Musk, you know, like, how dare you, Anti-Defamation League, say that I'm anti-Semitic?
I'll show you, I'll sue you and blame you, the Jews, for all of my losses because of my terrible business decisions.
Yeah.
It's like, you know, it just, again, it just went in doubt.
Blame the Jews.
Blame the Jews.
Yeah.
80 years later and we haven't moved past this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But by the way, speaking of years, very quickly, while you were mentioning Witch Hunt, I just want to say that I looked up Witch Hunt and it was released in 81, which makes it 42 years ago.
So you were right about 40 years old.
You were right about 40 years.
I'm old.
I just want to point that out.
Yeah, thanks.
Thanks a lot.
Well, you have to be a Rush fan when it was cool.
It's always cool.
So we should mention that if you want to catch any of the arguments I have on Twitter, you can follow me on Twitter at Spencer G. Watson.
I occasionally snag a big fish and get in a big argument with a celebrity on there.
That's always fun.
But where can they find you, David?
On Twitter for now, until Elon crushes it.
I am at David Bloomberg.
I am also at David Bloomberg on some backups in case Elon does crush Twitter, although not on purpose.
Like on Blue Sky and Mastodon, much less active there, but still there.
I am at David Bloomberg TV on Threads.
And the TV is there because Threads is connected to Instagram.
And that is also my handle for Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.
And if anyone has any comments, concerns, complaints, they want to tell us what we got wrong on this episode, they can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And with that, I think we're going to sign off with a lot of meandering.