It Could Happen Here - The Mass Formation Psychosis That Never Was

Episode Date: January 12, 2022

We dive into the increasingly popular intersection of disinformation combining Covid conspiracy theories and Holocaust revisionism. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast all right uh robert do you want to open us up with a something i don't know nope you're opening the opening is is that is what you just did. Okay, welcome. We're already opened. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast about how things do be crumbling sometimes. Including our ability to introduce the podcast that pays our salaries. It's actually a very meta art piece about the, yeah, we started off very polished and slowly.

This is a commentary on, I don't know, something. It's called- Figure it out. Figure out what it's a commentary on it it's called metamodernism it's the post post-modern anyway um we're gonna be talking about disinformation and various bullshit uh today so among the many disinformation vectors online joe rogan's podcast is obviously one of like the largest single single vectors um yeah i mean i've said this before but i'll say it again i don't think there's a cable news station as influential as joe rogan you know and you could you could make commentary on like oh maybe they have a larger viewership but in terms of like their actual ability to influence uh large numbers of people um there's certainly no single cable news host that comes close to joe um and i would argue

probably no network that does he's extremely influential by virtue of the fact that he's um uh a meathead people seem to find friendly and engaging and he is very charismatic he's good at what he does he's good at talking. So, multiple times during the past three weeks, Rogan has brought on two separate quote-unquote doctors, whom have started to peddle something called

mass formation psychosis, which is kind of a new vector in the anti-vax argument and headspace. So, as for the it-could-happen-here headspace so for like as for like the uh it could happen here portion of the episode this one's pretty simple uh could mass formation psychosis happen here no way not this time we created it not this time no not this time it's totally made up pure fiction it's fiction it's fiction we made it We made this one up. It's a made-up tale.

It's a total fabrication. Nope. Not really. It's fiction. Has it ever happened anywhere? I might also argue no. Nope. Fiction.

We've done it. We've solved the podcast. Total fabrication. This is not a thing. Total fabrication. Made-up tale. So, yeah. But whenever these, like, kook doctors bring up mass formation psychosis

you can actually kind of watch them get close to understanding something real and but then they veer off into reactionary nonsense like most powerful nonsense there is an element of truth that it is uh spinning off of you know yeah so let's start off with some of the more kind of deranged examples and well then eventually providing at least some background onto the whole mass formation psychosis idea and then we'll kind of discuss some of the more slightly interesting aspects of this argument that rogan seems fond of pushing right now so the first thing i want to talk about is dr uh peter mccall which is not the not the guy that was trending on twitter last week or whatever this was this is someone else that rogan brought on a few weeks previously

who actually started talking about this first yeah um so background on mccall by most accounts he was like a top cardiologist for many years i know he he shares a similar story to other doctors who've become kind of covid conspiracy celebrities former friends and co-workers say he shares a similar story to other doctors who've become kind of COVID conspiracy celebrities. Former friends and co-workers say he was a pretty reasonable guy and a good doctor. And then he realized he could be worth millions of dollars. Yeah, COVID hit and he started to kind of go off the rails. And he initially began developing conspiracy theories in particular around hydroxychloroquine. And McCullough was also in the news earlier this year,

or I guess in 2021, due to a legal dispute with his former employer, Baylor University Health. So, according to a lawsuit, for nearly six months after McCull's employment had ended, he continued to use his professional titles, such as the Vice Chief of Internal Medicine at Baylor University, and misrepresented himself as a Baylor employee dozens, if not hundreds of times in media interviews in which he spread

disinformation about the pandemic. So the type of misinformation that he talks about, you know, pretty basic stuff. Vaccines are neither safe nor effective. He was a very early hydroxychloroquine proponent. He claims that there's no asymptomatic COVID transmission at all, even if you're not vaccinated. And he claims you cannot get COVID twice. Once you have it once, the post-infection natural immunity is 100% protective against all future COVID disease, which of course is not. Which nothing works that way. All of the things we just said. No illness works that way.

Yeah, no, everything I just said is not true. All of it can individually be disproved by the existence of jair bolsonaro every single one of these claims as you say that chris i'm looking over at my digital picture frame that is just loaded with like a dozen photos of jair bolsonaro in the hospital dying um yeah so i recommend everyone do that. It improves every morning. As soon as I walk up to my recording studio, I see Jair Bolsonaro getting shit sucked out of his nose

from a tube, and I just feel ready to take on the day. It beats coffee. Wow, that's strong words. The other big thing, and this is how we're going to get into the mess, psychosis bullshit, is that McCull also assert is that he, he, McCall also asserts that 50,000 Americans have died from the vaccine shots.

This is not true. Um, looking at like deaths possibly associated with it, it is like a, maybe a thousand or 2000, which sucks. Um, and,

but like, that's, that's the highest amount. Cause again, it's not even a lot of these things are not necessarily directly causal. So it's hard to figure out what is what. But if there is a number, it's around the 2,000-ish range, not 50,000. And McCullough thinks that or at least promotes the idea that like the vaccine is a conspiracy theory to suppress hydroxychloroquine and therapeutic treatment for COVID. And this

conspiracy is organized at every level, three different regions, corporations, big pharma, Hollywood, and this is the mass formation psychosis, is that we've believed that both COVID is a big problem, and that the vaccine is the solution. So

I'm gonna play a clip, hopefully you guys can hear this, of McColl talking about mass formation psychosis. Dope. We've seen mass psychosis in history before. The horrific group suicides that have happened with religious cults. We knew in Nazi Germany where people, in a sense, offered their children up to eugenics programs in a progressive mass psychosis,

and they themselves walked into gas chambers and went gas to death. They didn't fight, go kicking and screaming. This type of, that's a mass psychosis. So what Desmet says is there must be four conditions met for a mass psychosis. The first is the population must be isolated. People must be isolated for a

long period of time. Number two, we must have things taken away from us that we previously enjoyed. Number three, there must be constant free-floating anxiety. Anxiety of more viruses, more disability, more death, more

anxiety. And then the last one is the capper. Number four is there must be a single solution offered by an entity in authority, the vaccine. The only solution to the pandemic is the vaccine. We're in a mass psychosis. And what Desmond says is with the vaccine, there is no limit to the absurdity that we will see. No limit to the absurdity. So this idea of, here, take a vaccine. Take any vaccine. That's absurd.

Vaccines are different. There must be a winner, there must be a loser, there must be somebody I don't know. Why would it be any vaccine? It's the same with a mask. Wear a mask. Doesn't matter what kind of mask. Just put it over your face. The absurdity of, well, I've already had COVID. The CDC says you can't get COVID again. Nope.

Okay. So listeners at home should know so that you understand what this video is, that the entire time he's talking, there is what appears to be the eviscerated corpse of a black woman lying underneath him. Like it's horrifying horrifying it's like very unsettling like meat on top of yeah i i think it's like one of the dolls that medical students learn how to do autopsies on it's not a real person but it does look like the corpse of an eviscerated woman as he's just like chatting but the face really does look like

a person it took me a flick i thought it was like i couldn't figure out what was going on for like yeah i mean yeah they're a real person the the cadaver dolls that they have for trading are quite good um i kind of want to get one for the next time i'm in texas and want to use an hov lane but that's the story for another day so yeah that's that's pretty dumb especially the notion that people were hypnotized into peacefully walking into gas chambers i i just need to state like that's that not not only is that like that is objectively untrue to the extent that i could provide anyone interested with thousands of pages of reading from people who survived concentration camps about how they worked and why people walked into them and a lot of it just boils down to the fact that it was

they were making a very rational choice which was i have no options here i cannot get out of this but i can at least make sure that my children are not panicking in the last seconds before we're killed and a lot of the people the um the the because a lot of the people, because a lot of the actual grunt work of loading humans into the gas chambers was done by other inmates who were also not going through psychosis. They were given a chance to survive longer by helping to operate the camps.

And those people, you can read, some of them did survive and some of them wrote about their experiences, which is some of the most harrowing shit imaginable for a human being to possibly go through. It is all tremendously well documented. to say that they were going through some sort of psychosis and that's why they walked into the chambers and not this was the best option available to them given what was going on and what like the situation they had been forced into they did not have other options um it was that or get machine gun to death um and maybe you think you would choose a different option um but if you're critiquing them or trying to claim that like only reason they would do that, what they did was that they had lost their minds, I will hit you in the face with a brick. Fuck you. That's my answer to that, actually. If you are someone who is interested

academically in why people did some of the things that they did at the death camps and how that actually functioned psychologically. It's like a short book. It's This Way for the Gas, ladies and gentlemen. And it is a quasi-fictionalized book by a guy named Tadeusz Borowski, who was a survivor of the death camp. So it's based on his experiences at Auschwitz and Dachau. And he describes the way in which the world of the camps worked and the psychology of the camps worked. And he's not a piece of shit grifter asshole. He's a guy who lived through all of this. So if you actually care about any of this, just read that. Everything this guy says is wrong. And if I had a chance to, I would hit him in the face with a brick. Please continue, Garrison. to, I would hit him in the face with a brick. Please continue, Garrison. Yeah, it really sucks because it's not just a combination of medical misinformation, but also just the most shit sociology. And it creates this really disgusting package of really bad sociology,

medical misinformation, and yeah, he's doing this because he can make a profit off of it so he's saying these things so i i know um he mentioned a a name uh desmond desmond's the guy who kind of coined this term we'll talk we'll talk about more about him at the end uh but for now uh let's go on an ad break and we'll be back to talk about uh dr robert malone the other other guy who's been pushing this nonsense so here's someone else i probably will want to hit with a brick even more so honestly yeah good welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal tales from the shadows as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast and we're back talking now about mass formation psychosis and the dumb people who are well or smart people who are using yeah i don't think they're dumb i think they're evil yeah they're

they're evil not tough um so yeah so after after mccall went on rogan's show it got that that show got pretty popular um one one big right-wing kind of Trumpist media personality named Melissa Tate was permanently banned from Twitter after posting about the podcast and making the following post to her half a million followers. Global bombshell! Dr. Peter McCall on the Joe Rogan Show says Moderna made the COVID vaccine long before COVID actually hit and that the pandemic was a premeditated and concerted scheme by government and medical entities to then force vaccinations as the solution so that's the type of narrative that they're trying to foster yeah because this the pandemic has been so good for biden's approval ratings it's really working out great for everybody uh u.s u.s senator ron johnson also promoted the interview saying rogan asks asks excellent questions and McCall provides the answers. So yeah.

Apparently, the mass formation psychosis doctor guy was enough of a hit that Rogan's team decided to very soon after bring on another lying conspiracy doctor, Dr. Robert Malone. During the last week of 2021 rogan invited malone onto his show

malone's a of a virologist and an immunization doctor who claims credit for inventing the uh mrna vaccine in a pair of papers from the late 80s spoilers heilers, he did not. There was work on the vaccine before him and work continued after him. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, in 89, he published a paper kind of positing maybe mRNA can be binded with other kind of proteins.

He did not really do any work on it besides just saying, I wonder if this could maybe happen um and then the knowledge fight guys dig into this dude a bit there were people asking similar questions and publishing papers at the same time the question and well and before and like before yeah yeah so malone actually thought this was too hard and abandoned this project very soon and then went to work for like the military to develop other random like uh he thought the rna vaccines were too hard so he went on to develop uh more stuff around dna vaccines and has been working with like the military and various like uh big pharma companies on vaccines for a while more accurately uh dr carico and drew

wiseman are two doctors that are widely agreed and acknowledged to have put the most development work and actual like like actually doing the science to make mRNA vaccines a thing. And of course, development of them was due to, you know, work of hundreds of researchers. So it's not, you know, one person does not invent something like this. It's a group of a lot of people but but it makes it for an easy title for your viral video yes and in fact actually um uh uh logically the uh that's a journalist website uh reached out to malone and uh for an article and malone replied back stating that he did not actually literally invent the uh the the vaccine but instead developed a vaccine technology platform um then he presented logically copies with nine

patents um none of which are the patents for uh functioning mrna vaccines of course um but he he claims to have patented mrna technology i mean he did it's technology that doesn't work uh and never has and never has worked and the patents are expired um anyway i need to patent some shit that just sounds like a real easy way to make a good grift yeah so you know as we've seen with my but because Malone has crafted this narrative that I'm the inventor of this thing just like we've seen with my

COVID grifting doctor's episode of Behind the Bastards just a little shred of medical authority can be morphed and transformed with propaganda into something much greater than what it is whether that be claiming to be the inventor of the mRNA or claiming to be the inventor of the mrna or you know claiming to be the former head scientist at pfizer neither of those have

to actually be true to work because propaganda makes it true via like repetition so yeah it's the kind of thing we're like dunking on these guys like it's important here to correct the record it doesn't do anything no the fact that they're lying and nothing that they say is true does not matter when it comes to them having an influence in the community they have. If you get on Rogan, you've already done the thing that you need to do to be able to

profit from this. It doesn't matter that you're lying. A few months ago, Malone went on to Steve Bannon's show to talk about how the vaccines make COVID worse, actually. And this is a quote from Steve Bannonannon you're hearing it from the individual who invented the mrna vaccine great and has dedicated his life to vaccines he's the opposite of an anti-vaxxer right so it's that narrative that gets made so yeah starting around june of 2021 malone began to make the rounds you know bannon tucker, Tucker, Glenn Beck, and now Joe Rogan.

So, you know, starting in June, he had like less than 5,000 Twitter followers. And just before his suspension at the end of December for spreading misinformation, he had like over half a million. So, yeah. So, yeah. So, right after his Twitter suspension for lying about COVID and causing misinformation to run rampant around a health issue, that's when Rogan invited him on. It was right after he got suspended from Twitter. And there's been one particular clip from the interview that has really caught the far- right's attention um you know the the tweet that's it's uh connected to is captioned on joe rogan dr robert malone suggests we are living through a mass formation psychosis

he explains how and why this could happen and its effects he draws analogy to the 1920s and 30s germany they had a highly educated population and they went barking mad um they did not they made a series of logical the nazis did not go mad they were not crazy they were not out of their mind they were doing they were a large part of what they were doing was saying things that they knew were were nonsense and lies in order to get elected because it riled people up and then a large chunk of their policy was figuring out well if this is the shit that we've been saying how do we uh how do we translate that into policy? Again, reams have been written on this by credible researchers. The people who ran the happen were letting it happen because it was dangerous and scary to interfere in any way they were all making rational decisions there was no

insanity responsible for the holocaust which is worse like much worse yeah yeah yeah what they're like they're what they're doing is like they're they're they're trying to give people a way out right like you know this is this is sort of like oh it's like well the nazis went insane all the people who follow them went insane it's like no no they don't you don't get that way out, right? Like, you know, this is sort of like, oh, it's like, well, the Nazis went insane. All the people who followed them went insane. It's like, no, no, they don't, you don't get that way out. Like you, they chose to do this. Yeah. The scariest and most meaningful lesson to take from the Holocaust is that you yourself could be a part of a Holocaust, even if you didn't support the killing, because it's extremely easy to not get involved and stop something like that once it reaches a certain level. And it's easy for the kind of political organizations that can make things like that possible to reach a point where they can carry that sort of shit out because again it's scary

to fucking fight them uh let's watch the clip's like a minute long and i think it's worth watching to see both in the context of when rogan decides to interject and when he decides not to basically european intellectual inquiry into what the heck happened i hate this guy already in the 20s and 30s you know very intelligent highly educated population and they went barking mad um and how did that happen um the answer is mass formation psychosis. When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don't make sense, we can't understand it. And then their attention gets focused by a leader or a series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis. just like hypnosis, they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere. And one of the aspects of that phenomena is the people that they identify as their leaders, the ones typically that come in and say, you have this pain and I can solve it for you. I and I alone can fix this problem for you. Then they will lead, they will follow that person through,

it doesn't matter whether they lie to them or whatever. The data are irrelevant. And furthermore, anybody who questions that narrative is to be immediately attacked. They are the other. we had all those conditions if you remember back before 2019 everybody was complaining the world doesn't make sense blah blah blah um and we're all isolated from each other we're all on our little tools we're not connected socially anymore except through social media um and then this thing happened and everybody focused on it that is how mass formation psychosis happens and that is what's happened here. Horrible. Completely wrong in every single way. The Germans were not confused because

nothing made sense. They were angry because of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. They were also angry because of what they saw as, and what, like, because of a myth that had grown up about why they had lost the First World War, which was spread by people who were the equivalent in that time of Joe Rogan. They were scared of the left, of communism, of disorder, of riots in the streets.

And when Hitler took power, most Germans did not like him. They did not blindly follow him. He gradually gained the support of the vast majority of Germany through a number of different very logical things. One thing that he did that got him a lot of support was he took businesses and homes and money from Jewish people and from members of other groups that the Nazis were targeting, and he gave it to Aryans. There was a direct financial interest for a lot of people who got in line behind the

Nazis, and he established a series of programs like the Strength Through Joy program that really did benefit in a way that they had not known before the German working class. And a lot of this was, again, subsidized through the appropriations of things that had been owned by people that the Nazis were targeting. People fell in line behind Hitler for logical reasons. He did not reach the highest point of his support from the German populace until the taking of Paris, which obviously that was something that a lot of Germans supported. They had spent four years failing to take the city in World War I. Anyway, sorry. It's all nonsense. It's all lies. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.

Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get your podcast. I think a reason why this is latching on so much to people on the right,

like people on the right who don't consider themselves fascists, who would say Nazis are bad, right? They still are latching on to this because it provides a way for them to not understand how fascism actually works right it provides an alternative explanation that makes them not have to actually think about what fascism is um and that's why they're latching on to it and it also is already it's already a part of the conspiracies they have around vaccines and power structures so So because it's the conspiratorial basis instead of thinking about power structures from an anarchist or hierarchy lens,

it reinforces the worldviews they have and makes them not have to interrogate the ones that they don't want to. It sucks. Malone's substack goes into more of this and it's pretty bad. There's a few quotes that I think really kind of tie this together,

and then he has some horrible statistics. He says, As many of you know, I've spent time researching and speaking about mass psychosis theory. Most of what I've learned has come from Dr. Desmond. Dr. Desmond is like the guy who coined this term, and Malone writes, Desmond realized that this form of mass hypnosis, the madness of crowds, can account for the strange phenomenon of about 20 to 30 percent of the population in the Western world becoming entrenched with the noble lies and dominant narrative concerning the safety and effectiveness of the genetic vaccines.

And both propagated and enforced by politicians, science bureaucrats, pharmaceutical companies, and legacy media. Of course, the obvious examples of mass formation is Germany in the 30s and 40s. How could the German people, who are highly educated, very liberal in the classic sense, Western-thinking people, how could they go crazy and do what they did to the Jews? How could this happen? To a civilized people, a leader of a mass formation movement will use the platform to continue to pump the group of new information to focus on. In the case of COVID-19, I like to use the term

fear porn. Leaders through mainstream media and government channels continuously feed the beast with more messaging that further hypnotize their adherents. Studies suggest that mass formation follows a general distribution. 30% of people are brainwashed and

hypnotized, fully indoctrinated in the group narrative. 40% in the middle are persuaded and may follow if no worthy alternatives perceived, and 30% will fight the narrative. Those who rebel and fight against the narrative become the enemy of the brainwashed and the primary target of aggression. So that's the way he thinks.

That is how, which is is really it's really something like in terms of how he's building a narrative in his head and specifically building a narrative for other people's heads to to view why do i feel distrustful of certain pieces of power but to love other pieces of power yeah and it's again like this idea that like well germany was liberals like there germany had an enormous right-wing movement like it was a hugely conservative country in a lot of ways it would also had a lot of leftist organizing and a lot of leftists in it especially after world war one but like the fricor and shit there were these massive million strong right-wing armed street movements that existed for the entirety of the weimar republic like it's

again everything he says is wrong yeah and again it's like the notion that like 30 are fully brainwashed 40 are in the middle and persuadable and 30 fight the narrative it's like these people who are upset these like these specifically conservatives who are obsessed about thinking like i would have fought the nazis and because they don't understand how fascism works in power dynamics they don't understand how how they're actually getting pulled into the same thing but they still view themselves as the rebel right they they're so everybody wants to be the rebel in america right yeah like they're so focused on being too yeah absolutely so they're so focused on being the rebel and like we're rebelling against the vaccine that that is just like rebelling against the nazis and you're like what um also i just want to say about those numbers if if

they're completely made up yeah yeah when people start throwing even number statistics at you like that it's because they're lying yeah yeah it's because they're full of shit yeah yeah 30 40 30 absolutely not you're not yeah that's that doesn't happen! Yeah, that's complete nonsense. For one, yeah, it's... So, again, because, now, the other thing that happened around this interview, because it did gain a lot of traction among the right,

is that whenever these things gain traction, they also develop conspiracy theories that people are trying to suppress it. Like, look at the Google algorithm when you type in certain keywords. Like, I know the day this was trending, it was like, if you Google Dr. Malone, the interview is only like the sixth result. The first one is this YouTube video debunking it.

And like, I did this and like, no, the first result was the obviously viral video of him saying the thing. Like, they just, they can take one screenshot that maybe someone made, or maybe because of one person's computer algorithm that's what gave them and use this as like evidence that this is the entire system of the internet suppressing the thing i'm like no the internet wants things to go viral now there's certain

things where they like try to shut down the spread of dangerous stuff but this got very viral this was not contained in any way but because of this notion like they're trying to hide it you know it plays into their them thinking they're like they're them thinking that they are the rebels or something no and there's also a very practical reason why the people who particularly know that they're lying do this and it's because all of their success is based on a foundation of the way in which youtube and facebook and twitter algorithmically amplified them and their predecessors. And they know that creating controversy over the fact that they're being suppressed leads to more content that basically algorithmically spreads their stuff more. Because more people are talking about it because other people's channels start debating it.

Because idiots on the left are like, well, we should at least have them on and platform them because we're anti-censorship too so let's debate them and like all of this stupid shit feeds into spreading their stuff it's a very intelligent strategy um i hate it but just just in terms of how ridiculous it is i know a few days ago a congressman troy nels uh said that i submitted the transcript from the Joe Rogan Experience podcast episode with Dr. Malone to the congressional record. Big Tech wants to restrict your access to information, but they cannot censor the congressional record. Nonsense.

Big Tech is the entire reason why you know about these people. Yeah. Yeah. Entirely. If it were not for Big Tech, Joe Rogan would be narrating videos of robots fighting. So Jack Sobiek got real into this because he loves anything that goes viral, of course. If it weren't for big tech, Jack Sobiek would have died in a ditch of an OxyContin overdose.

So he got real into it. He changed his Twitter name to Jack Mass formation psychosis psychosa beck or some bullshit like that yeah some yeah uh-huh stupid and it was it was tweeting about it non-stop for a week and like like a kid learning about a new topic because of synchronicity he's he's gonna like project it onto everything he sees now he's like this this new all-encompassing topic that makes you avoid what fascism actually is and then point out at the things you don't like so of course he's gonna apply to everything he made a tweet right before january 6th um as the anniversary of the capital uh attempted coup thing regime media has

launched a propaganda push against ashley babbitt today to psychologically prep their flock for the upcoming mass formation event planned for January 6th this week. This is called priming and it's a textbook mass formation theory tactic. Wait till you see what comes next. And it is the 6th today. Has anything happened? You know what happened?

Not a goddamn thing? They got fucking Lin-Manuel Miranda to sing a song. That's what they did. They got Lin manuel miranda to sing a song that's what they did lynn manuel miranda wait wait wait did you see that that wasn't he he might have said something in the beginning that was due but the performance has been played before on other things well and i i am you know what if we're trying to reach across the aisle i am willing to to admit that the popularity of Lin-Manuel Miranda might be a mass formation psychosis. Absolutely. The popularity of Hamilton is a mass formation psychosis.

Absolutely. We're just being assholes. But like, like seriously, like it again, but it doesn't, it doesn't. What the fuck is what we're saying?

When it comes to, again, like the fact that he said there's gonna be this whatever uh psych mass formation psychosis event on the anniversary of january 6th and it's gonna be huge watch for it nothing happens doesn't matter never matters will never matter um because again like it's i think one of the issues that we have here is the degree to which brainwashing and hypnosis and stuff are talked about within kind of discussions of a cultic milieu when they're not really a factor. Not a factor in cults. Not a factor.

Not nearly as much as you think. Yeah. Not in the way that you think. There's things that, like, you could call brainwashing, and you could even maybe call hypnosis, although that's a lot murkier. And that is a very technical thing, yeah. because of what they're primed to believe first, and because of what is happening socially, because of the degree to which they isolate themselves from people who are outside of that bubble. That's why it's so hard to get them out. It's not that magically their brains have been taken over. It's that they have pretty methodically been put into a position where rejecting what is being told to them within this context is immensely more painful than just continuing to believe things that are not true.

And there are more consequences for it. You lose a support network. You lose a great deal of your own opinion of yourself and your self-worth if you start to reject this stuff. your self-worth if you start to reject this stuff um and once you can trap people in that it's the same way that like scientology works once you can trap people in that um it the evidence of their eyes and the fact that like they're obviously being lied to and the things that they're being told about don't come to pass it's this it's the reason why you have a bunch of apocalyptic cults who say the days the world's going to end on this day and time. That day and time comes, the world doesn't end, and the cult goes on. Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous. This whole thing was started by this professor of clinical

psychology at a university in Belgium, Matthias Desmet. He seems to have a pretty bad understanding of history and actual power structures and does not know the least bit about fascism um and has tried to craft this thing to fill in the gaps in his own knowledge and applies it to everything and i've read some of his stuff it's it's nonsense um again just like the doctors who talked about it they're like yeah he's using this also as a way to explain how covid's not real and how the vaccine is a is a ploy to do x bad thing it's it's all ridiculous it's irresponsible um and they're using it as a tactic and hopefully it's just gonna blow over but i'm sure it'll pop up every once in a while again just like like it popped up a few weeks ago.

But that's really all I want to get into it. I could say more, but I think we have said enough. I think we've said enough. All right. Well, fuck it. That's it. That's all I've got. Read This Way for the Gas, ladies and and gentlemen by thaddeus uh borowski um it will it it will have a major impact on the way you see the entire world if you

if you actually read it um there's some incredible pieces in there one of one of the things that that thaddeus points out is that people only ever have one kind of language for talking about the things that they feel, whether it's something they kind of vaguely care about or something they care about enough to murder over. And so when people engage in acts of horrific violence on a mass scale. They often do it looking and acting like they would if they were irritated at somebody in traffic. And it's the most unsettling thing about being the victim of a genocide that you don't see the kind of hate and the kind of rage and the kind of like what you would expect someone

would need to be amped up to. It's more of like you see more like kind of boredom and irritation and all that stuff. Like it's not – anyway, read Thaddeus Borowski. I desperately wish Joe Rogan would just sit and narrate this book on his show because it would do actually a service to the world. Anyway, that's the episode. Anyway, that's the episode. And sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of rife.

An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.