Jeremy Boreing Warns About Anti-Israel Social Contagion and How Influencers Manipulate Your Perception of Reality

This past weekend, as he often does, James Lindseay provoked the internet with a post saying, quote, "If you have suddenly become skeptical about or hostile to Israel and/or Jews in the last year or two, you have been taken by yet another leftist anti-American scop like COVID and Trump derangement syndrome. You're not immune to them, but you can break free." Ideas are powerful things. Many a man has destroyed his life over an idea. Many a war has been fought over them too. In the first world war, the Germans smuggled Vladimir Linen into Russia as a sort of weapon of mass destruction. He had an idea and the idea that he carried with him would infect the minds not only of the Russian boleviks but would burn across the entire continent and the world and kill over a 100 million people in the 20th century. Ideas are viral. Ideas are contagious. In the early 2000s, I watched a documentary called Loose Change. Maybe you've seen it. It was free at the time, slickly made, and absolutely certain that the September 11th attacks were an inside job, a controlled demolition, a false flag, an act carried out not by 19 hijackers, but by the United States government against its own people. I remember one moment from the film in particular. Footage of the towers collapsing was playing on my screen. Footage I'd seen live in real time on that September morning back in 2001. Footage I'd watched in horror like everyone else. Only in loose change over that footage was played audio recordings of various people suggesting we were watching a controlled demolition. The claims repeated in an almost hypnotic style. Almost looks like one of those planned implosions as if the demolition team set it off. When you see the demolitions on these old buildings, it just folds down on itself. Anyone who's watched a building being demolished knows the idea that the collapse of the Twin Towers was a controlled demolition had been subtly planted or not so subtly planted. And for one fleeting moment, I believed it. Something shifted in my chest. It felt like waking up. It felt like scales falling from my eyes. It felt like I was finally seeing the truth that had been hidden from me. And the feeling was, I'll be honest with you, exhilarating. And then a small voice, maybe my conscience, maybe common sense, maybe the Holy Spirit, told me to hit mute. And so I did. And the moment I did, I saw what I'd always seen. What I'd watched live on September 11th, 2001. Not a controlled demolition, but buildings that had been struck by passenger jets. Buildings that had been burning for hours. Buildings finally giving way, collapsing in under their own weight. the same footage, the same event, the same truth I'd always known. The narrator hadn't shown me anything new. They hadn't revealed the hidden truth. They'd simply reframe the narrative so that I believed something different about the exact same footage. There's a name for it. It's called persuasion. Telling you what something means before you see it. So that when you see it, you don't evaluate it. You accept it. You recognize it. By the way, this is exactly why Tucker Carlson does monologues in front of interviews that don't quite go the way that he wants them to, but not in front of interviews that do. He's setting the condition for your eyes to see and your ears to hear before seeing or hearing even have a chance to occur. It's a powerful technique, but it's a manipulation. That sensation, that exhilarating, clarifying scales falling from your eyes, feeling of finally seeing the truth. That feeling isn't the feeling of truth itself. No, it's the feeling of something called the illusion of insight. The sudden emotional certainty that you've understood something profound, whether you've actually understood something profound or not, it's a feeling of conviction. And conviction can be manufactured. As James Lindsay said, "You're not immune and neither am I." Obviously, everyone knows. The whole world is turning. Everyone's saying. From Tucker to Candace to Donald Trump himself, modern influencers and politicians engage in these rhetorical techniques that are designed not so much to persuade you as to convince you that you already agree with them. Social proof is one of the most powerful forces for motivating human behavior. Studies have even shown that people are sometimes more likely to act based on social norms or perceived social norms than on their own deeply held beliefs. This is why Barack Obama always gave speeches with a crowd of people standing behind him. A technique effectively emulated by Donald Trump because it works. Just seeing all those faces behind the candidate communicates to the audience that everyone supports the candidate. For many social media and political influencers, particularly the black pillars promoting conspiracy and despair, these techniques have become a way of rapidly moving public opinion on major issues. Nathan Livingston of Milkbar TV put together a striking compilation of Tucker Carlson commenting on the attack on Pearl Harbor. Tucker has stated multiple times as fact that FDR had fornowledge of Pearl Harbor and allowed it to happen to justify getting America into a war that the people didn't want. Quote, it's clear there was foreign knowledge of Pearl Harbor. It's just absolutely clear. It's like not in dispute. Quote, the Senate actually had an inquiry into it during the war and kind of concluded that yeah, we sort of knew. quote, "In 1941, when Roosevelt allowed Pearl Harbor to happen, which he did, that's been proved, I think, and he did it in order to get us into a war that the people didn't want. It was anti-democratic." Now, I want to slow that down because there's a lot happening in those sentences. Quote, "It's clear." Notice Tucker doesn't say, "I believe or some historians argue," or there's some evidence suggesting. He says it's clear, as in this is not a matter of debate. As in anyone paying attention already knows this, as in obviously that's a classic false consensus signal, language that implies everyone already agrees. So disagreement feels like stupidity. Then he says, quote, "When Roosevelt allowed Pearl Harbor to happen," which he did, notice what he does there. He states the claim and then inside the same sentence treats it as already established fact. That move is called presupposition. Tucker doesn't argue it. He doesn't source it. He assumes it into existence in a subordinate clause as though reasonable people already agree and he's simply recapping. In sales, that's called an assumptive close. It's when the salesman speaks as though you've already made your decision. Then Tucker adds, quote, "That's been proved. I think now that combination is a form of plausible deniability. Certainty delivered up front with a hedge tucked in at the back so that the speaker can retreat later, but only after the certainty's already landed. That's been proved declarative, authoritative, the voice of a man who simply knows, I think. Well, that's just legal fine print tacked on at the end. Has it been proven that Roosevelt had fornowledge of Pearl Harbor and deliberately allowed it to happen? No, it hasn't been. It's been investigated certainly. From the Roberts Commission in 1941 to independent research by historians, every miscommunication, every failure of judgment, every lapse of readiness has been turned over and examined by serious historians for the last 80 years. The consensus is catastrophic intelligence failure, not a president sacrificing his own sailors. Now, of course, there are some historians who do raise doubts, but Tucker didn't say some historians. He said, "It's clear." He said, "It's been proved." And millions of people heard him say it. And when they did, they felt that feeling, that waking up feeling, that scales falling from your eyes feeling. The complex, messy reality of the world felt a little simpler. Life isn't the chaos of imperfect people making imperfect decisions based on imperfect knowledge. No, the world and its going on are controlled by nefarious and near omnipotent powers far beyond our control. I say near omnipotent because as with almost all conspiracy theories, this one only works if it works perfectly. If Japan had committed to a third wave of air strikes as they had planned, well then Pearl Harbor itself might have been out of commission for a year or even destroyed completely. In that case, America may not have achieved victory in the war at all. If the alleged demolitions conspiracy theorists say brought down the Twin Towers had failed, perhaps because of the thousands of pounds of burning jet fuel melting the wires on the charges, well then the investigators who came into the building after the fact would have discovered the bombs and the entire plot and the entire American government might have fallen. If the American public had been so outraged by the attack on the USS Liberty that they insisted on retaliation against the state of Israel, well, a global superpower going to war against a country who at the time had a population of fewer than 3 million people, it may have ended in the destruction of the state of Israel itself. Those are pretty big risks. But of course, conspiracy peddlers rarely have to answer for such possibilities because their very framework itself implies that the powerful are nearly all powerful. Tucker employs these same rhetorical techniques all the time. Here he is opening his monologue on the war in Iran. Quote, "It's universally recognized at this point pretty much that continuing this war with Iran is not in the identifiable interests of the United States." And here he is later in the same broadcast on the killing of children in Gaza. Quote, "It was done on purpose. Obviously, universally recognized. Done on purpose. Obviously, this is what's known as epistemic closure. Language that signals that the question has already been settled. So, asking for evidence feels like you're the one who's out of bounds. One claim dressed in consensus, one dressed in self-evidence, no source, no evidence. No, I believe, no, it seems to me, just the layered assertion of a man who simply knows things, telling you that now you know them, too. universally recognized and obviously aren't actually making any arguments. They're skipping the arguments entirely. They're telling you the verdict is already in, that reasonable people have already agreed, and that to ask for evidence is to embarrass yourself. My team analyzed 23 episodes of Tucker's show. We found hundreds of examples of this kind of language. Obviously, clearly, of course, everyone knows it's a pattern. It's delivering a verdict with no detectives or lawyers or jury. Who needs proof? Everyone knows. There's a wellocumented effect behind this. It's called the elucory truth effect. The more often you hear something, especially something stated with extreme confidence, the more likely you are to believe it, whether it's true or not. Now, of course, not every use of the phrase of course is illegitimate. I just used it right there. But that's what makes it so tricky. See, Tucker takes these phrases and he tacks them often enough onto legitimately obvious and self-evident claims, but then he deafly weaves them in with wild, unsubstantiated claims with a thought-terminating phrase like, "Of course," tacked on at the end, as if he's merely commenting that the sky is blue. Here he is, for example, commenting on the Russia Ukraine war and America's role in it. Quote, "The Ukrainian government has tried to assassinate Vladimir Putin multiple times. Has the CIA assisted with the targeting of those drones? Yes, obviously. Tell me how you didn't. No source, no document, no former official on the record, no whistleblower, nothing. Just obviously. And then immediately the inversion. The burden of proof shifts. It no longer belongs to the person making the claim. It belongs to the CIA and to you for doubting it. Tell me how you didn't. the accusation becomes its own evidence and your skepticism becomes the thing that needs explaining. That's classic burden shifting. The claim is treated as self-evident and now your skepticism is what has to be explained. Or how about this example of Tucker claiming that the Russia Ukraine war is part of a conspiracy to wipe out white Christians. Quote, "The fact that Ukraine was white and Christian, one of the last big concentrations of white Christians on the planet, maybe that had something to do with it." Of course it did. Obviously, that's not a far-right conspiracy theory. It's the truth. Notice the sequence. It begins with maybe a gesture toward tentiveness. And then within the very same breath, of course, it did. See, the hesitation's fake. That's where the stacking starts. Of course, to assert the claim, obviously to preempt the objection. It's the truth. To give it a sense of authoritative finality. three certainty moves in two sentences and not a single piece of evidence between them. What you're watching there is assertion stacking, layering multiple signals of certainty so quickly that your brain stops tracking whether any actual evidence was ever presented or not. It wasn't. This is how the technique reaches its full power. You don't need to argue that a covert intelligence operation exists if obviously it does. You don't need to explain why a war was fought if, of course, it was about eliminating white Christians. The words do the loadbearing work that facts would otherwise have to do. And they do it faster, more fluently, and with a tone of such weary self-evidence that questioning them starts to feel like the eccentric position. You've seen the pieces of it now. The framing, the presupposition, the quiet hedges, the repetition, the stacking of certainty on top of certainty until your brain stops tracking whether anything was ever proven. All of it working together to move you somewhere you didn't realize you were being taken. What's being presented as analysis is in reality persuasion. And more specifically, it's a form of narrative-driven sales where the product being sold isn't a thing. The product being sold is a way of seeing the world. It's not new. In fact, it's as old as the first lie ever told. In the Garden of Eden, the serpent didn't come to Adam and Eve with force. He came with a promise of revelation. You will not surely die. He said, "Your eyes will be opened." And that was the promise. That they would finally see. That they would know what had been hidden from them. That they would become wise. And in a sense, it worked. Their eyes were open, but not in the way that they imagined. They weren't made wise. They were made ashamed. They were made afraid. They were made fools. The first deception in human history didn't feel like deception. It felt like enlightenment. But in reality, it was slavery. And that same pattern has been repeating itself ever since. One of the most famous examples, of course, is Candace Owens, who has literally made an entire brand complete with merch out of the phrase, "We don't know." Know, but we know. You know, here's a classic example from one of many times that she's employed the phrase. Quote, I do think it's very weird that he was miked after he sat down. I'll tell you that. That's never happened to me at a Turning Point event. They mike you backstage always. Um, so yeah, I thought that was strange. Something's not right. I know it's not right. We don't know. No, but we know. You know, that's a form of motivated reasoning. Starting with the conclusion you want, admitting the evidence isn't there, and then inviting the audience to adopt the conclusion anyway. Her entire evidentiary basis, her complete foundation for the claim that something's not right is just this. She's never been miked on stage at a turning point event. She's always been miked backstage. That's it. That's the evidence. from that singular data point, her personal experience at her own personal appearances, she concludes that this is how it always works for everyone all the time, that anything different is therefore suspicious and that something's not right. And then having constructed this extraordinary logical leap, she covers it with, "We don't know, but we know." You know, she's telling you out loud that she doesn't actually know. She's admitting it. And then in the same breath, she's converting that admitted non-nowledge into collective certainty. We know, not I suspect, not it seems odd to me. We all of us, we know. Now, this is about the most honest thing Candace Owens has ever said, and it's still not very honest because we don't know know, but we know is not a thing. It's the sound of someone gesturing at a conclusion they just can't reach and then hoping you'll make the jump with them. And most of the time we do because it feels like belonging because we is a very warm word when you're the one being invited into it. Here's a clip of Candace on the question of foreign funding for pro Palestinian activism. Quote, "They cannot produce a shred of proof that anyone is funded by Qatar." then and yet all the proof is here that everyone is funded by Israel in America. No one can prove we all know. This is called asymmetric skepticism. It's demanding proof for one claim while treating the opposite claim as common knowledge with no proof required. She tells you the evidentiary standard she refuses to apply to one side and then she immediately applies the inverse standard to the other side. not as evidence, but as a sort of collective knowledge. We all know. It doesn't need to be proven because we all already know it. The narrator has already told you what you're seeing. The conclusion was loaded before the evidence had a chance to speak. Preersu back at work again. And of course, we fall for it. Not every time, but from time to time. We all buy things we can't afford or say yes to obligations we should have avoided or believe a thing we shouldn't believe. I actually went so far as to hire Candace Owens once upon a time. There's no shame in the fact that highly effective tactics sometimes are highly effective on us. That's their job. But there is shame in not having eyes to see or ears to hear. To allowing ourselves like sheep to be led to the slaughter. to not working hard to immunize ourselves against these manipulation techniques once they've been exposed. Now again, none of this is new. It's not a product of social media or the modern attention economy, although those things have made it a lot faster and more contagious. No, this is as old as human civilization itself, and history has kept some receipts. At the turn of the 20th century, Charles Darwin's Descent of Man had been in circulation for a few decades, and out of it had grown a movement that captured the imagination of most of the entire Western world. Eugenics, the science of human betterment through selective breeding. The idea was seductive in exactly the way all powerful manipulations are. It felt inevitable. It felt scientific. It felt, to use the word, obvious. And nearly everyone seemed to agree. Not just fringe radicals, but everyone. The scientific community, educators, policymakers, progressives, and conservatives alike. Under Teddy Roosevelt, pygmies were kidnapped from Africa and exhibited in American zoos as the supposed missing link in human evolution. Madison Grant wrote the passing of the Great Race, a book Adolf Hitler reportedly called his Bible. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, warned publicly about quote, "human weeds that needed to be removed from the gene pool." Genetic data was even collected on public school children for use in future legislation. This was consensus. This was mainstream. This was the direction of human progress. And the people who believed it, the doctors, the professors, the concerned, well-educated citizens, they weren't monsters. They were just people. People exactly like you and me. People who'd been told by authoritative voices that the evidence meant something that it just didn't mean. People who felt that exhilarating feeling of finally seeing clearly. Who believed they were following the science wherever it led. The eugenics contagion died an embarrassing death when Adolf Hitler put a gun to his head in a bunker in Berlin and the world was forced to see where the science is clear had led him. In 1968, Paul Erlick published the population bomb. Imminent catastrophe, wars, famine, collapse driven by human overpopulation. It was a sensation. Millions of copies, another social contagion. Nearly everyone agreed. It became an international scare. Thousands in the developing world were forcibly sterilized. China enacted its one child policy, leading to the abortion of over 300 million babies. That's more than the entire population of the United States at the time. And of course, it led to the demographic disaster that China is still living through today. The population panic even became one of the cultural forces driving abortion legislation in America. Erlick's predictions were almost entirely wrong. The famine didn't come. The wars didn't come. The population grew, but with it grew something else. Prosperity, life expectancy, human flourishing of a kind history had never seen. But not before millions of real people suffered real consequences for the real panic built on one narrator's certainty. In the early 2000s, it was climate change. Years, not decades, to act or face catastrophe. Of course, the deadlines came and the deadlines went. New deadlines were issued. The US spent billions on wind infrastructure that didn't work. Climate anxiety became a clinical diagnosis. Young women decided not to have children. We got Greta Thunberg, a teenager placed on a world stage to embody a panic that she was far too young to evaluate with any objectivity. And through all of it, the mechanism that kept people inside the contagion and prevented them from stepping out was always the same. The science is settled. A phrase that should probably always make you nervous because science is never settled. That's rather the point of science. The conclusions of the climate movement weren't argued for. They were just sold like snake oil. In the 2020s, we got three at once. A pandemic that was certainly absolutely without a doubt not originated from a lab in Wuhan until it was. Of course, experts who raised the lab leak hypothesis early were dismissed or deplatformed because the consensus had formed and the consensus must always protect itself. We got a racial reckoning that declared America so thoroughly and foundationally racist that disagreement itself was evidence of the racism. A framing that made rational descent structurally impossible. You were either anti-racist or you were racist. The narrator had already told you what you were seeing before you saw it. To question the interpretation was to prove the narrator right in what they said about you. And then there was transgenderism. Seemingly out of the blue, millions of Gen Z kids adopted some sort of agrieved sexual identity. Suburban moms in Wisconsin attempted to change the genders of their three-year-olds. Every mom in Hollywood suddenly seemed to have a trans kid and we allowed men in women's restrooms and men and women's sports. It was madness. In fact, in 20 years, it'll be hard to explain how people went so insane. It'll be even harder to explain it to the people affected by the COVID deception, the families shattered by BLM's reign of terror, or the children who were sexually mutilated by gender surgeons based on our bad ideas. Today, we face a new social contagion. Over the last two years, a lot of people have started noticing things. Noticing things about Jewish people, noticing things about Israel, noticing things about who really runs the world and where all the money really goes. Most people undoubtedly think they came to this newfound skepticism themselves organically. They just started asking questions and followed those questions to where they led. I say it every day in my own comment section. One commenter told me recently, quote, "Up until October 7th, I supported Israel unconditionally and uncritically. I no longer support them at all. The government of Israel seems to be a bunch of genocidal maniacs who would nuke any country to get their way." Another said, quote, "So many Israel first Zionist grifters are becoming worried that everyone can see that Israel controls politicians." And another, in response to my episode demonstrating that Israel doesn't in fact control America or our politicians, said, "Quote, We have eyes, ears, and a mind of our own. Do not tell us what to believe." But of course, someone already told them what to believe. I'm sorry. You didn't just notice. You were shown powerful voices online and in the podcast world sold you a worldview of victimhood and despair. They pointed you toward what they wanted you to see and they told you what you were seeing before you saw it. That entire process is what you might call epistemic manipulation. Not just influencing what you think, but controlling how you decide what's true in the first place. When someone promises you secret knowledge, what they're actually offering almost always is slavery. Interested parties, some malicious, some well-meaning but fully captured, all operating through the exact mechanisms we've been describing here, put specific images in front of you. They told you what those images meant. They told you that obviously everyone could see it, that the whole world was turning, that the only ones who couldn't see it were the ones being paid not to. and they rewarded you with community and attention, dopamine, that exhilarating waking up feeling every time you agreed with them. The current wave of anti-Israel sentiment and the anti-semitism bleeding out from its edges is a social contagion. It has the same shape as every social contagion we've described. It has the same fingerprints, the same feeling of urgent and arguable obvious truth, the same mechanism that makes questioning it feel like proof that you're one of the compromised ones. Real debates don't work that way. And of course, there are real debates to be had about Israeli policy. They're worth having. There are real debates to be had about American foreign policy. Those are worth having. I'm not telling you that any of those conversations are off limits. And of course, conspiracies exist. Of course they do. Governments lie. Even the government of America, even the government of Israel, corporations lie. People lie. Influencers lie. But there's a difference between having a theory about a conspiracy and believing a conspiracy theory. Between legitimate questioning and accepting an answer that cannot be questioned. Having a theory invites testing. It invites critical analysis. It invites falsifiability. But believing a conspiracy theory is more of a form of identity. When the conspiracy itself lives within a framework that seems to answer every question, a sort of universal field theory that explains everything. When it becomes unfalsifiable, when new evidence that contradicts the conspiracy theory is treated as just more evidence that you're over the target, well, that's when you can be sure that your rational skepticism has been weaponized into irrational religious conviction. You've been infected by the social contagion. Of course, there's actually a condition known as gender dysphoria, but every family in Hollywood didn't suddenly and coincidentally have at least one child with gender dysphoria at the exact same time by natural processes. And of course, there's actually a condition known as autism, but every family in Manhattan didn't suddenly and coincidentally have at least one child with autism at the exact same time by natural processes. And similarly, every young conservative didn't suddenly and independently arrive at the exact same conclusions about the Jews through their own organic research and just coincidentally end up using the exact same language and citing the exact same influencers and experiencing that exact same feeling of waking up. When every free thinker arrives at the same conclusion at the same time in the same words, well then their thinking isn't as free as they believe it is. The millions of Americans who embraced eugenics believed they were following the evidence. The population bomb believers thought they were bravely facing what others just couldn't handle. And that's how Tucker works. That's how Candice works. Each of them at some point told you a forbidden truth, something the establishment was lying about, something you're not allowed to say out loud. And that earned them your trust. And now they're spending that trust. That's called authority transfer. One true or compelling claim becomes a credential. And that credential is then used to smuggle in a dozen other claims you never independently verify. And by the time Tucker's telling you that Roosevelt let Pearl Harbor happen or Candace is saying that Jews engage in child sacrifice because they worship Baal, well, by the time that happens, you're no longer checking the work. You've transferred your trust. Psychologically, it follows a foot in the door pattern. You accept a small claim, then a slightly larger one, then a slightly larger one, and before long, you're agreeing to something you would have rejected outright if they'd just led with it 5 minutes earlier. In 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon, most Americans believed it, not because they'd audited NASA's engineering or become well acquainted with rocket science and technical manuals. No, they believed it because they believed America could do it. Think about what America had actually accomplished in the decades before 1969. In 1900, human flight was a fantasy. By 1903, the Wright brothers had flown at Kittyhawk. By 1947, Chuck Joerger had broken the sound barrier. In a single human lifetime, America split the atom, won two world wars, and turned an agricultural nation into the engine of the modern world. The moon landing was extraordinary, but it wasn't surprising. It was the next step in American progress. The default posture was America can. Today, a significant and growing number of Americans, skewing young, believe the moon landing was faked. 12% of the population at large believes we never landed on the moon. Among millennials, that number grows to 20%. And among Gen Z, well, among Gen Z, it's been found that 50% of you either think the moon landing was faked or aren't sure. But guys, the evidence hasn't changed. The photographs are the exact same. The lunar rock samples all over the Earth are the exact same. The retro reflectors sitting on the surface of the moon right now, which anyone with the right equipment can bounce a laser off of, they're all the same. What changed is the default. Today, the default posture, which used to be solely of the left, but sadly is now spreading among the right, is America can't, America shouldn't, America lies. The institutions of America are corrupt. Everything you were taught about America is designed to keep you down. Where do you think that posture came from? You didn't come by it naturally. It came from voices that found it useful to have you believe it. From people who profit in attention and in influence and in money from your despair and cynicism. From Tucker who implies that America was the bad guy in World War II. He's building an empire on that. from Candace who says, "America is an occupied nation occupied by Israel." Of course, she's built a brand and is trying to become a billionaire off of your despair and cynicism. The anti-semmites and the conspiracy merchants have built communities on it. They've all told you in their different ways that the people who still believe in America, the people who still believe in our institutions, the people who still believe in our accomplishments, the people who still believe in their neighbor, that we're the people who are sheep, who are rubes, who are still asleep. But there's a crucial difference between healthy skepticism and reflexive cynicism. Healthy skepticism says, "Show me the evidence and I'll follow it wherever it leads." But reflexive cynicism says whatever they're telling me the opposite is probably true. One is a tool for finding truth. The other well the other is just another spell cast by a different set of hands with a different narrator. Now I believe that most Americans are not stupid are not sheep and are not irredeemable. I believe that most Gen Z Americans are not stupid and are not sheep and are not irredeemable. I believe that most people given honest information reason pretty well. The antidote to manipulation isn't better manipulation from a more trustworthy narrator. No, it's clarity. It's evidence. It's the humility to sit with uncertainty rather than reaching for the intoxicating snap of false certainty. The voices that profit from your cynicism want you to believe that trust is weakness. They want you to believe that doubt is strength. But there's another kind of strength. The strength to say, "I don't know yet." The strength to say, "Show me the evidence." the strength to say, "I fell for the spell, but now I'm going to check my work." That strength doesn't trend. It doesn't go viral. It won't get you into the community of people who finally see, but it's real and it's yours. So, keep a sharp mind and a critical ear. Ask yourself if the claims that are being called obvious facts are actually obvious or even actually facts. Demand evidence for assertions. Demand citations for evidence. Be aware when people use hypnotic repetition and rhetorical sales tricks to get you to turn off your critical thinking and buy by buy whatever they're selling. Don't let grifters draw you into their vortex of anti-thought where the only solution to your problems is for you to click on the next episode. They need you to be the victim. They need you to give up on ever making any difference to improve the current system. That demoralization and despair, that rage can be cathartic. But America only remains free so long as we resist the snake oil salesman. It only remains free if we remain free thinkers. So immunize yourself against social contagions with the vaccine of truth, which of course was created by a Jew.