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I’m Not Crazy. YOU’RE Crazy: The Power of Gaslighting (Ep. 273)

January 13, 2022 52m 24s Full transcript available
I’m Not Crazy. YOU’RE Crazy: The Power of Gaslighting (Ep. 273)
0:00 / 52m 24s
In this episode, we tackle the insidious nature of gaslighting and how it manipulates our perceptions of reality. From personal relationships to political narratives, it's crucial for men to recognize and expose these deceptive tactics to reclaim truth and integrity in our lives.
Transcript
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0:36 This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast. I'm your host Kyle Thompson. Let's get into it.
0:52 Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. That is Ephesians 511.
0:58 Guys, we have used that scripture a lot lately and for a good reason, and it's going to be very
1:02 pertinent to what we're discussing today. But I did want to remind you just from the jump here,
1:05 because this is a new year. A lot of you guys are doing different things. So if you've not
1:08 become a donor to Undaunted Life, again, that is the only way that we're able to kind of keep
1:12 our operations going. As of right now, we give away hundreds and hundreds of hours worth of content
1:17 for free through the podcast or the devotional. So guys, if you'd like to hop in and join us and
1:21 help us to equip other men around the globe to push back darkness, just go to www.undaunted.life/donate.
1:29 All right, before we get into today's content too far, a couple of quick things here from the very
1:34 jump. There were some podcasts that we did at the end of last year, and there needs to be some
1:38 corrections and some announcements. I did a review episode and a best books episode, and I said some
1:42 stuff that didn't end up being completely accurate or some things that like turned out really weird,
1:46 really quick. So I went to kind of correct the record. So part of the reason for that is because
1:50 I did most of the research for some of these episodes in kind of the beginning or middle part
1:53 of December, and then I recorded them early and released them. But anyway, the first thing is,
1:57 I said in the review episode, the year in review episode, episode 269, that Olivia Rodrigo,
2:05 that her album this year was the best selling album of the year. But by year's end, what actually
2:10 ended up being the best selling album of the year was an album called Dangerous, the double album by
2:14 country singer Morgan Wallen. And that's according to Billboard. So I guess Billboard, where I was
2:18 looking wasn't really taking these stats into account. But Billboard actually takes the digital
2:22 sales plus the sales of actual physical copies, and then also adds the streams that are being
2:30 played. And so he sold the equivalent of three million plus albums, so triple platinum in 2021.
2:36 Now, this is the country singer that you may have heard about earlier this year. I believe it was
2:40 earlier or I would have been 2021 early in 2021. He was drunk coming home in the middle of the night.
2:44 And as a joke, he called one of his white friends, the inward, right? So his neighbor was recording
2:50 it. You know, I guess in it to TMZ. So this goes around. He's, you know, dropped from his label
2:54 temporarily. He's a disinvited from all these different things. He had to cancels, you know,
2:58 to worry it to do all these different things. But his album continued to sell really, really,
3:02 really well. Now, some people would say that they would lead you to believe that the reason
3:06 that is is because there's all these secret racists that are so glad that this horribly racist,
3:11 basically the grand wizard of the KKK said the inward and now they can support this guy who's so
3:16 racist by buying his album. Or he's just an incredibly talented musician that writes good
3:21 songs that are like fun to listen to. That could be the other reason for it. But you know, the thing
3:25 about it is he kind of didn't do himself any favors this year because he had a very, very big year,
3:29 but he just kept stumbling over himself trying to continue apologizing. And the thing about it was
3:34 is the public doesn't deserve an apology for that. And this isn't an entire, you know,
3:38 episode about Morgan Wallen or any of this stuff that happened. He did not refer to a black person
3:42 and call them the inward, which is where that word becomes offensive, right? He used that word
3:47 towards another white person. It was, it was tasteless. It was something he shouldn't have said. It was
3:51 sinful. What he did. But this idea that he shouldn't be able to have a career anymore. I think the
3:55 guys in his twenties, like let him learn from his mistake. Don't get drunk and say stupid things.
3:59 Don't have really stupid words in your vocabulary. Now, I would be singing off a very, very different
4:04 sheet of music. If he had referred to a black person using that word, I don't care if he's
4:08 drunk or not or higher, whatever, that would have been absolutely unacceptable. Is it
4:12 except unacceptable enough for him to not have a career anymore? You know, that's, I guess,
4:15 worth your debate. But you know, good for him. I did want to correct the record that he did have
4:20 the best selling album of 2021. I'm glad that at least the majority of the public has forgiven
4:24 him for being such a bonehead. But also in our best books of 2021 episode, that was episode 268.
4:30 I said the worst book that I read last year in 2021 was your brain is always listening by Dr.
4:35 Daniel Ayman. Now, actually, there was a book that was significantly worse than your brain is
4:42 always listening that I completely forgot about. It completely slipped my mind that I had engaged
4:48 with this content. I don't know if I put a mental block in or something, but it's the book called
4:52 Jesus and John Wayne, how white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation by
4:58 Kristen Cobes de May, or I think it's de May. But this is actually a woman who I was supposed to
5:04 be debating on the unbelievable podcast over in the UK. And you know, she was going to be
5:09 representing, you know, the feminist side, I was going to be representing, you know,
5:12 kind of the complimentary and masculinity side. And she basically chickened out. She she wanted
5:17 nothing to do with the debate with me. She ended up doing an interview. So she didn't have to
5:21 engage with me and really have her ideas challenged, right? So that was a book that as I was reading
5:27 it, one thing I had to do with this book is I couldn't read it at nighttime before bed,
5:31 which is where I do a lot of my reading, because I would be so fired up at how stupid her arguments
5:36 were because she's clearly an intellectual woman. She's clear clearly a smart person. She's clearly
5:40 a good writer. But as I said on that debate, whenever I was talking about the fact that she
5:44 basically chickened out a debate, I mean, when I had to debate somebody else, I basically said,
5:48 she's a good example of a really, really smart person that gets all of the applications wrong.
5:53 It's kind of like whenever I talked about, you know, on the ways to avoid being a crappy man,
5:56 she has a lot of knowledge, but no wisdom. You know, it's I said seek wisdom, not knowledge.
6:01 So she's got knowledge coming out of her ears, but she has no idea how to coalesce it into something
6:05 that is cogent or even resembles the truth. So that is actually the worst book that I read in 2021
6:10 from 2021. And that was Jesus and John Wayne. And then the last one here before we get into
6:14 today's content. And this is in an absolute worst turn of events or turn of news. In the Year
6:21 in podcast on Episode 269, I said that we could all come together and look forward to celebrating
6:28 the 100th and over 100th birthday, rather, of the unmatchable Betty White. Her 100th birthday
6:34 would be on January the 17th of 2022. Okay. That episode was released on Thursday, December the 30th
6:41 of 2021. And you guys already know where I'm going with this. Betty White died the next day.
6:47 The next day on Friday, December the 31st of 2021, she took her last breath, right?
6:53 About a month shy of her 100th birthday. And as soon as I got the news, like I had people
6:59 texting me out of the woodwork like Kyle, did you just jinx this woman? Did you take Betty White
7:04 from us? Which is obviously there was kind of being in Jess, which is a little bit of dark humor.
7:08 But yeah, the timing of that was was not very good. I couldn't believe that she passed away.
7:12 I was sad whenever that happened because she is one of those people in culture that
7:16 basically everybody had nothing but good things to say about her. But I will say,
7:20 I was going to, I think I even said on the podcast that I was going to do something a little bit
7:24 special for Betty White's 100th birthday. And here's the deal on the 17th of this month. That is her
7:29 100th birthday. Okay. She will not be here with us to celebrate it. She's moved on to wherever she's
7:33 moved on to, but we are going to do something a little bit special. So be on the lookout for that.
7:37 But today in terms of our content for today, we're going to be talking about gaslighting.
7:42 Okay. So if you are unfamiliar with that term, gaslighting is where a person intentionally
7:48 creates a false narrative and pushes that on to somebody. Okay. So basically what gaslighting is,
7:54 it's a form of manipulation that causes the other person or persons to question their own
7:59 perceptions of the world. And this could literally even lead them to questioning their own sanity.
8:04 Okay. So gaslighting, I'm sure a lot of you have kind of heard this. Maybe you just didn't know
8:07 where it came from or how it was used mainly or something like that. But it takes many forms.
8:11 You know, you can be gaslit by somebody with distractions to where you really need to focus
8:16 on this issue that's right here in front of you, but they want you to focus on something over here.
8:19 Hey, look at the shiny thing over here. We'll certainly give some more examples of that here
8:22 in a second. Another way that they do that is through denial. No, no, no, I didn't do that.
8:27 No, no, I never said that. Like that that that certainly didn't happen. Right. So they'll gaslight
8:32 you in that way. There's also changing history, which is, you know, with denial, but it's like,
8:35 no, that that battle didn't in that way. No, that person didn't actually think that back in the day.
8:40 No, no, Jesus wouldn't have said it and mint it that way. Right. They, they kind of change history,
8:44 a little bit of a 1984ish Orwellian say, oh, side of doing things. There's also the shifting
8:49 of blame. Right. Someone's clearly done something wrong, but they're pointing out the person opposite
8:53 them saying, no, no, no, it wasn't me that did this. You did this, right? They're gaslighting them.
8:57 And then I guess the last thing I'll kind of bring up is that it's just straight up lies.
9:00 You know, people will just lie right to your face. You say, Hey, this is something that happened.
9:04 They're like, no, I didn't. You're crazy. You have no idea what you're talking about. Okay.
9:08 And I think to a degree, we've all kind of dabbled in gaslighting, maybe without knowing what it is.
9:12 It's usually something that you try to do. Like, you know, you see kids do this where it's like,
9:16 you know, you know, they've done something that they broke something, but then they'll blame it
9:19 on their little brother. They'll blame it on the dog. They'll blame it on you. Somehow and be like,
9:22 no, I don't remember any of those things happening. Those are kind of little, you know, almost innocent
9:26 examples of how gaslighting is. But the thing about gaslighting, it's been around for a very,
9:31 very long time. Okay. In terms of where it comes from, it's a colloquial term that's actually been
9:34 around since the 1940s, if you can believe it. So there was a film that actually came out in 1944
9:39 called Gaslight. And in it, there's a husband that tricks his wife or is trying to trick his wife
9:44 into thinking that she's gone insane. So the plot of the movie, there's a whole lot of stuff
9:49 that goes along with the plot that plots kind of convoluted. And there's like a murder. And
9:52 there's like jewels that this person's trying to find and all this kind of stuff. But essentially,
9:55 the husband tries to convince his wife that she's going insane by hiding things from her and then
10:00 accusing her of losing them or hiding them herself. He also keeps dimming and brightening the gaslight
10:05 in the attic of their home. And when she mentions this, he essentially, you know, looks at her like
10:09 she's crazy and tells her, you know, it's all in her imagination. And this woman ends up kind of
10:12 going crazy. And you know, I think it kind of ends up going okay for the woman. But that's
10:16 essentially where we get the term gaslight. It wasn't used, you know, in common vernacular for
10:21 a very long time. But it is something that has kind of made it into popular culture. But the
10:24 thing about gaslighting is it's a very powerful tool. Okay. And you know this, if you've done this
10:30 before, I talked about some innocent examples, somewhat innocent examples just a second ago,
10:34 it can be used to manipulate family members, it can be used to manipulate and change friends,
10:39 co workers, employees, if you're in a position of power in any way, shape or form, you can use gas
10:44 lighting or if you're not in a position of power, you can use gaslighting to try and gain power.
10:48 Okay. But it can also be powerfully used, very, very powerfully used. And maybe the most powerful
10:54 use by politicians and government officials to manipulate the public to serve their own interests.
11:00 And that's really going to be the main focus of today's episode. And the way we've seen this the
11:05 most, I'll go into some minor examples here in a second. It's got to be about COVID-19. Okay. So
11:09 just the fact that I immediately said that in this podcast, this is probably going to get
11:13 shadow banned a little bit. I probably that's why I didn't put it in the title of the podcast,
11:16 because but this gets transcribed and put out on the internet. So hopefully you guys are actually
11:19 hearing this and get shared around. But I made a post on Instagram on Monday, January the third.
11:25 Okay. So in it, this is just on my notes on my phone. I pointed out the tremendous,
11:30 absolutely incredible narrative shifts coming from the United States government officials,
11:35 elected leaders and prominent liberals on COVID-19. And they were changes to the narratives that
11:42 it occurred within a week of each other, right? There were literally so many of these shocking
11:50 twists of narrative that happened almost all at once. Okay. And again, as I seemingly say all the
11:56 time now, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I'm not. If you're watching me on YouTube,
12:01 it's just my headphones. There's no, you know, tin foil hat anywhere. But the timing of this thing
12:06 was pretty damn convenient for all these narrative shifts. All these narrative shifts on COVID-19
12:12 occurred essentially in the dead week between Christmas and New Year's or right around Christmas,
12:17 right into New Year's writing, you know, the seven to 10 day period. Why would they want to
12:22 change the narrative? It's like, if you want a news story to be buried, you talk about it
12:25 on Friday afternoon. That's kind of a common, you know, news trick. It's like, Hey, you know,
12:28 public relations wise, we need to kind of get rid of this thing and kind of shove it, you know,
12:32 behind the couch or something like that. So for those of you that are keeping score at home,
12:36 cause I definitely did, but I want to kind of bring you up to speed. Here are some of the massive
12:41 narrative shifts that we saw out of all in about a week in terms of COVID. It's not going to be an
12:45 exhaustive list, but here are the main ones. So here's the first one. We went from the federal
12:50 government will shut down the virus and states that don't want to get in line need to get out of the
12:55 way to the federal government is not capable of shutting down the virus. And it's up to the states
13:01 to figure it out. So the source of this narrative shift is president, or sorry, excuse me, co-president
13:07 Joe Biden. So the thing about it is, since he was running as a candidate for president, right,
13:13 co-president Joe Biden basically said he was the one that was going to shut down the virus.
13:18 Okay, that all you had to do was elect him. And guess what? Lickety split. He's going to follow this
13:23 five point plan. And then COVID will be behind us. He constantly talked about how anyone that
13:28 could allow hundreds of thousands of Americans to die on their watch because of a virus that
13:33 is essentially controllable according to them. Those people shouldn't be in office. He was obviously,
13:37 you know, referring to president Trump. But now that he's in office and COVID's out of control,
13:42 he's shifting his tune. It's very, very interesting. And this shift came really in late December.
13:48 So Biden said this while he was dressing, addressing a meeting of some of the nation's
13:52 government governors. He said this and this is a direct quote. Look, there is no federal solution.
13:57 This gets solved at a state level. Unquote.
14:00 Now Joe Biden has hopped all over governor to Santas all over. He's his name is up in my
14:09 mine right now, but the governor of Texas, he the all these red state governors for not doing
14:14 things the federal way, not doing things his way, right? Saying that, you know, all these,
14:19 all these people are, you know, they're, they're engaging in propaganda and they're scaring and
14:24 killing their own citizenry, those types of things. That's been the narrative this entire time.
14:28 But right before he goes on Christmas vacation, co president Biden decides to say, hey,
14:32 it's not a federal solution. We can't take care of it. Best of luck to your states.
14:36 As he's also controlling the supply of monoclonal antibodies and not just sending them to states
14:41 outright. He's, he's privileged, privileging them to blue states over red states. There's been a lot
14:46 of evidence of that. They're, they're keeping these lifesaving treatments out the hands of
14:50 governors so that they can't distribute them within their states. But why the sudden narrative
14:54 shift the entire time it's been about, we can shut down COVID. We're going to be able to shut
14:59 down. COVID just elect me. We can take care of it. And it might lead to, and I, you know,
15:04 I'm just spitballing here because I think I said this in the wrap up episode. Again,
15:07 before we get into the midterms of 2022, the narrative is either going to be COVID is so out
15:12 of control. You have to keep us in power because we're going to continue to fight it.
15:15 Or look at us. We've shut it down. And it'll be magic. You know, August, September of this year,
15:20 it'll be like magic be like COVID never happened. So perhaps this is a way of them getting set up
15:24 for that. The second main shift was this from we should be focusing on case counts to we should
15:32 just be focusing on hospitalizations and deaths. And the source of this narrative shift is also
15:38 co-president Joe Biden. Okay. Because for the last two plus years, people like me have been
15:44 screaming about the fact that case counts do not matter. You've heard me say this. Have you been
15:49 listening to my show for any length of time? When you hear the media focusing in on case counts
15:54 and not even mentioning hospitalizations and deaths, that is a good sign that things aren't
15:59 nearly as bad as they want you to believe. Because cases sound scary. I get updates on my phone
16:04 from news nine, which is here in Oklahoma City. And we are constantly getting updates about the
16:09 number of cases that are happening in our area. And they're like, but they'll give you the exact
16:13 number of cases and then they'll just mention and hospitalizations and deaths are going up.
16:17 Or they're they're framing it as COVID related deaths or COVID related hospitalizations, right?
16:23 Even though we know the numbers get skewed, you could come in, you know, from a car accident from
16:27 which the injuries that you die from the injuries that you sustained, you die because of that. But
16:31 if you test positive for COVID, you become counted as COVID death so that it can be coded in a certain
16:36 way. So the hospital gets paid in a certain way, right? But we've been screaming this whole time
16:41 about case counts. But now Joe Biden is saying, Hey, we really don't need to worry as much about
16:47 cases. We need to worry about hospitalizations and deaths. Why? Because case counts right now
16:52 are going through the roof. But hospitalizations and deaths are only up taking a little bit. So
16:57 the narrative right now, if you're focusing on cases, it looks really, really, really bad for him
17:02 and looks bad for the entire administration. So that's the distraction gaslighting. It's like,
17:06 no, no, no, no, no. Look over here. Don't don't look right directly at the problem. Look over here.
17:10 So that's one of the other big narrative shifts that we've seen.
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17:39 Post a free job today at linkedin.com/quality. The third one that I wanted to go over is we've
17:44 gone from forget about economic health, we have to protect public health. Two, we need to consider
17:53 public health and the health of the economy when it comes to recommending lockdowns. And the source
17:59 of this narrative shift is obviously St. Anthony Fauci. So he actually told MSNBC on this was an
18:05 interview towards the end of 2021 that renewed lockdowns were not feasible. Okay. And this is a
18:10 reason that he gave. And this is a direct quote, quote, we're trying to have a good balance of
18:15 preserving and protecting the public health. At the same time, we don't have to have the draconian
18:21 decision of shutting down the country. End quote. Really, really, St. Fauci into year three of this
18:31 pandemic, someone called a plannedemic, but I'll just use the normal term pandemic. You're telling
18:37 us that we should now be considering not just the public health, but the economic health of the public.
18:44 Wow. Wow. Because for the last two plus years, anytime someone even hinted at that, you know,
18:52 because he won't go on, you know, any, you know, mainstream kind of conservative sources, he always
18:56 goes to his friends at MSNBC or CNN. But anytime somebody would question that, you basically
19:01 looked at them like they wanted people to die. Like, are you really more concerned about money
19:07 than you are about people's lives? That that was the uppity answer that you kept giving us
19:12 for years for literal years. But now all of a sudden, we need to focus on the healthy economy.
19:18 Could it have anything to do with the fact that there's midterms coming up in 2022 and all these
19:23 Democrats are looking to get trounced because the economy is in the toilet and people won't go back
19:27 to work. And our recovery has not been nearly as explosive as it should have been in 2021 going
19:32 into 2022. Could that have anything to do with it? Again, we have to ask, why are these narrative
19:37 shifts coming? Why are they coming so suddenly? So that's the third one. Let's get into the fourth
19:41 one here. We've gone from we have no idea if natural immunity is helpful. So everyone should
19:48 just get vaccinated to natural immunity should be taken into serious consideration when it comes
19:55 to mandates and lockdowns. Okay, so the source of this narrative shift is again,
19:59 St. Anthony Fauci, because here's the thing, when it became apparent that Omicron was, you know,
20:05 more virulent, way more virulent than Alpha or Delta, but much, much, much less severe and less
20:14 deadly than Omicron. Fauci said it was because of the strength of natural immunity for many Americans,
20:21 natural immunity. Again, remember that hashtag? I think it was so I forget to post it a while ago,
20:25 when you use the hashtag natural immunity on Instagram, it would take you this like the CDC's
20:31 website, basically to talk about how you needed to get vaccinated, right? But as soon as we realize
20:37 that Omicron is not this tremendous boogie man that they're trying to make it out to be,
20:41 we all sudden are focused on natural immunity. Now, we still think that you should get vaccinated
20:46 because we're going to ignore the Israel study that said that, you know, somebody that, you know,
20:51 gets COVID and has natural immunity from COVID is way more protected than somebody that, you know,
20:56 would get it later because of the vaccine or something like that. But yeah, yeah, we can't talk about
20:59 that. It was a major, major narrative shift. And you got to wonder why? Why are we all the sudden?
21:05 And I say we, why is Anthony Fauci all of a sudden talking about natural immunity?
21:09 He's been asked about natural immunity over and over and over in the media. And he constantly
21:15 would skate away from the question. And now he wants to talk about he's the one that brings it up.
21:19 It's incredible. The fifth one here, we've gone from, if you get COVID, even if you are not
21:25 symptomatic, it is imperative for public health that you quarantine for at least 10 days. Two,
21:33 if you get COVID, you only need to quarantine for five days. The source of this narrative shift
21:38 is United States Centers for Disease Control, the CDC. Okay. So the 10 day quarantine has always
21:43 been the thing. And that was a very big sacrifice for a lot of people. But they thought they were
21:48 doing it for the sake of the public good, because, you know, I work from home, my wife and I, you
21:52 know, both work from home, we run businesses, you know, and that's just kind of our thing. So
21:56 being, you know, stuck in the house, we both had COVID at the same time, you know, it wasn't so bad.
22:02 Like it wasn't that bad. But there are a lot of people. You missed two weeks of work, right?
22:06 You know, maybe you can see any of your sick family members or something like that.
22:13 The 10 day quarantine was hard on you. You know, you had to figure out a way to get groceries,
22:17 you had to figure out, you know, hey, I probably shouldn't be in the house because I'm the only
22:20 one that's sick. You know, maybe I should get a hotel or maybe I should say somewhere else or
22:23 camp in the backyard or something like that. That was a 10 day quarantine. And for over two years,
22:28 that has been the recommendation from the CDC. But then all of a sudden, the CDC's director,
22:33 Rochelle Walensky, said that she said about the change. This was in an interview with CNN.
22:38 But the change from 10 days to five days didn't really have to do anything with scientific
22:43 discovery or some sort of a new breakthrough. Like, oh, you know, after five days, you're good to go.
22:48 It wasn't that she said this. This is a quote. It really had a lot to do with what we thought
22:54 people would be able to tolerate. End quote. That was a quote in reference to the 10 day quarantine.
23:01 We did a 10 day quarantine because it had a lot to do with what we thought people would be able
23:05 to tolerate. And so now people are able to tolerate five day quarantines, not 10 day quarantines.
23:12 I feel like this didn't get nearly enough coverage. It got, you know, quite a bit of coverage in
23:18 conservative circles. But this is an unbelievable thing for her to admit that the 10 day quarantine
23:25 wasn't based in anything scientific. It wasn't based in anything that was really meant to help
23:32 the public health, to take care of people, to keep people from getting sick, to prevent the
23:37 spread of COVID-19, to prevent, you know, other variants from coming to coming to be, right?
23:42 It was because we thought we could get away with 10 days. We thought when we all got together in
23:48 our lab coats and our glasses and our big brains that we could control the American people for
23:52 10 days. That's what we've determined. And now two years plus down the road, the American people
23:58 aren't nearly as fond of that idea. And all of a sudden it goes from 10 to five cuts in half,
24:03 like a miracle, like Rochelle Walinsky just farted out a miracle. Wow, incredible. So that's the
24:10 fifth one. We got a couple more left. Number six, we went from masks will prevent us from spreading
24:17 COVID and will save countless lives to most masks are essentially worthless at stopping the spread
24:23 of COVID. That's what we've gotten to now. The source of this narrative shift is Dr. Liana
24:28 Nguyen. So she's seeing she she's seeing ends medical expert. She's actually the former head of
24:33 Planned Parenthood. That's where you may have seen her before. But she said this to CNN's John
24:37 Burnman on Christmas Eve. She said this and this is a quote cloth masks are not appropriate for
24:42 this pandemic. It's not appropriate for Amacron. It was not appropriate for Delta Alpha or any of
24:47 the previous variant variants either because we're dealing with something that's airborne.
24:52 We're dealing with a virus that's extremely contagious. Unquote.
24:56 So Dr. Liana Nguyen who for all intents and purposes have been one of the most public
25:02 defenders of masking. All of a sudden comes out and shifts on Christmas Eve and says,
25:07 yeah, the masks essentially don't work. It's essentially just a facial decoration, right?
25:12 Because she doesn't even mention the the N95s or the K and 95s. But the thing about those masks
25:18 is do you guys have one of those? That's either yes, no. And it's like, do you have one? Because
25:23 I have one. It's been in my truck. You know, it's been sitting there for years. If you are
25:28 appropriately using those, you can't have facial hair. It's got to be stuck to your skin, right?
25:32 You need to get rid of it after, you know, each use when you see these doctors in the hospital,
25:36 they're replacing their masks literally all the time, these surgeons and things like that.
25:40 So people are using them appropriately. But these cloth masks that if you needed to go to target
25:46 or go to Walgreens or go to Lowe's or go to any of these places and walk in and do your business,
25:50 you had to put on these cloth masks because, well, we don't know why.
25:53 Because you have to do this because we said that's why. But now all of a sudden it's like,
26:00 yeah, these masks essentially don't work. And so now people that are on the masking side of things,
26:04 they're trying to figure out, Oh crap, do we still do the masking thing? That was one of our ways that
26:08 we could signal virtue is the fact that, Hey, we're in stores that don't require it now,
26:11 but I'm going to continue to wear it because this makes me a good person. Hey, I'm going to
26:14 even get one that says Black Lives Matter. Hey, I'm even going to get one that's a rainbow because
26:18 then I can communicate that I'm super understanding as well as virtuous for masking, right? Which is
26:23 a dead giveaway that you're also triple vax going on your fourth vax like those types of things.
26:27 But that was just such a sudden shift for two plus years. We were told we had to wear these things
26:32 in order to save grandma in order to save ourselves in order to save our kids. And that really goes
26:36 in the last one that I want to talk about here. And this one's just absolutely, absolutely egregious.
26:40 This is number seven, we went from, we must protect our children from this virus at all costs.
26:45 Two, we should really consider the mental health of our children as well as their physical health.
26:51 So the source of this narrative shift is from many people. There's been a lot of people that
26:57 have kind of made this shift. And it's, it's kind of thankful that they're kind of coming to the
27:00 party now, even though I think they're doing it for their own reasons, not really for altruistic
27:03 reasons. But we're going to look at two people individually, we're going to look at CNN's Brian
27:07 Stelter. And then we're going to look at the New York Times as David Leonhardt. Okay, so let's
27:10 look at Brian Stelter first. So he said this on his show at the end of 2021 quote, we collectively
27:16 took action to protect the elderly from COVID. Now shouldn't we be doing more to protect children
27:22 by letting them live normal lives? Are we really going to let kids suffer even more? And are the
27:28 facts about COVID getting through to the people who need to hear them? Isn't that just such a stunning
27:35 admission, guys? I forgot to say end quote. But yeah, you got you got the idea in quote. Brian
27:39 Stelter for two plus years has been one of the people beating the drum that we should keep our
27:44 schools locked down to protect the kids that kids, if they are in school, should be masked,
27:50 because we need to protect the kids that there's so many kids in hospitals and on ventilators,
27:55 even though they aren't, but we got to do everything we can to protect them. And now we're worried
28:00 about them living normal lives. We're worried about them being able to develop by seeing people's
28:06 facial expressions by communicating language, using the mouth and the cheeks, which is important
28:13 for their development of language. But then there's a section in this article by David
28:18 Lanehart from the New York Times. And I'm going to read a big chunk of it because it just was
28:23 absolutely, absolutely stunning. I mean, you guys can't even imagine like my skin was boiling as I
28:30 was reading this. But here's the quote. American children are starting to 2022 in crisis. I have
28:36 long been aware that the pandemic was up ending children's lives. But until I spent time pulling
28:40 together data and reading reports, I did not understand just how alarming the situation had
28:45 become. Children fell far behind in school during the first year of the pandemic and have not caught
28:51 up. Among third through eighth graders, math and reading levels were all lower than normal this
28:57 fall, according to the NWEA, a research group. The shortfalls were largest for black and Hispanic
29:02 students as well students in schools with high poverty rates. Many children and teenagers are
29:07 experiencing mental health problems aggravated by the isolation and disruption of the pandemic.
29:14 Three medical groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, recently declared a national
29:18 state of emergency in children's mental health. Suicide attempts have risen slightly among adolescent
29:25 boys and sharply among adolescent girls. Many schools have still not returned to normal,
29:31 worsening learning loss and social isolation. The Omicron variant is now scrambling kids or
29:36 children's lives again. Most schools have stayed open this week, but many have canceled sports,
29:41 plays and other activities. Some districts have closed schools for a day or more,
29:45 despite evidence that most children struggle to learn remotely, as my colleague Dana Goldstein
29:51 reports. Closings are taking place in Atlanta, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Newark and several New York
29:55 City suburbs, among other places. For the past two years, large parts of American society have
30:01 decided harming children has an unavoidable side effect of COVID-19. And that was probably true
30:07 in the spring of 2020, when nearly all of society shut down to slow the spread of a deadly and
30:11 mysterious virus. But the approach has been less defensible for the past year and a half,
30:15 as we have learned more about both COVID and the extent of children suffering from pandemic
30:20 restrictions. Data now suggests that many changes to school routines are of questionable value
30:27 in controlling the virus's spread. Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce COVID
30:34 cases in most instances. Other interventions like forcing students to sit apart from their
30:39 friends at lunch may have also been of little benefit. One reason, severe versions of COVID,
30:44 including long COVID, are extremely rare in children. For them, the virus resembles the typical flu.
30:52 Children face more risks from car rides than COVID. Unquote.
30:57 Guys, if you've been screaming at your car, at your phone that you're listening to, believe me,
31:05 I want to scream super loud right now, because this entire time they've been talking about
31:09 close down schools. And I didn't have a kid that was school age, or else I would have probably
31:13 lost my mind by this point. We have to keep schools closed. We have to partition kids with
31:18 plexiglass. We can't let them sit with their friends. We can't let them wrestle. We can't let
31:22 them play basketball. We can't let them play outside even because it's just way too dangerous.
31:26 Because as of right now, I believe this is, I forgot the person's name, but it's a doctor from
31:30 Johns Hopkins. Less than 20 in the entirety of this pandemic, less than 20 children
31:36 have died from COVID alone. And even in those cases, they're not 100% sure that there wasn't
31:42 another comorbidity. We're talking about less than a couple of dozen kids, which is not
31:47 diminished the lives of those children and the suffering that their families are feeling,
31:51 obviously. But this was never a pandemic that was going to affect our children. And a lot of
31:56 people will point this out. But in case you haven't heard me say it before, if this had a death rate
32:01 as high with children as it did with elderly people, society would have chosen to shut
32:06 everything down. We would have ruined the world economy. No big deal. Because there's no way in
32:11 hell, we were going to let this affect our kids in the way that it's affecting elderly people.
32:15 But thank the Lord that kids basically get this and shake it off for the most part.
32:20 It's not a big issue. There are more kids, especially teenage boys that are being negatively
32:25 affected by injuries from the vaccine than they are from actually getting COVID. They're not getting
32:30 hospitalized with COVID, right? But why the narrative shift? All of a sudden, these people
32:37 who for two years were somewhere between ignoring the problems with kids or diminishing them outright
32:44 are now all of a sudden super, super, you know, concerned about our children. Where did that come
32:49 from? And guys, there are literally a lot more of these, but those are the main ones. And it all
32:55 just changed in a very, very short period of time. Okay. Now, the thing about this is if you had
33:01 uttered any of those previous statements, right? So the from statements I made as opposed to the
33:05 two statements, if you had uttered any of those statements in the last two years, in public or
33:12 social media or something like that, even a month ago, a month ago, it would have led to you being
33:17 publicly mocked and derided, especially by the mainstream media. And it was likely enough to
33:22 get you kicked off of all major social media platforms, including Twitter, including YouTube,
33:26 which is technically like social media now. And you would have been branded as a conspiracy theorist.
33:31 If you would have said any of those things, even when you had the data to back yourself up the
33:36 entire time, it was, oh, you just don't care about people. You just don't care about old people.
33:40 You want grandma to die? Oh, what if it was your kid that died? Remember, it was all those things,
33:46 right? So the main gaslighting that we've seen really for the past two years has been with COVID,
33:51 but there have been other things and we're not going to be able to dive too deep into this because
33:54 I wanted to mainly make it about COVID because this is pertinent to the time we're living in.
33:58 But, you know, we've been gassed a little lot about, you know, racist cops killing black people in the
34:02 United States. Every black person supposedly unarmed that's killed by police, it's because of a
34:08 systemically racist system because, you know, somehow cops, you know, they were originally people
34:12 that went and, you know, found runaway slaves and now they're basically doing the same thing in 2021
34:17 or 2022. That's basically been the narrative, right? We've been gassed a little about those
34:21 things. Every time something happens, we're basically focusing on it until it becomes apparent that,
34:25 oh, this person probably should have been shot. And then all of a sudden, we forget the story,
34:29 or we just move forward with a narrative and say that, oh, yeah, the cop was clearly racist,
34:32 right? Go back to the George Floyd thing. There's still not a single person on planet Earth that
34:37 has come forward with even a shred of evidence to suggest that Derek Chauvin is a racist.
34:41 And yet that is a racial killing according to tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions or
34:46 billions of people around the planet. Derek Chauvin is a white supremacist racist that just wanted to
34:50 kill a black man that day. We've been gassed a little on that issue. But also even here recently,
34:55 we've been majorly gassed a little on January 6th. You know, we're, you know, democracy almost
35:00 died on January 6th. Did it? Did it almost die? Because what it seemed like is a March turned into
35:08 a riot where a couple of hundred people broke the law, trespassed, tried to do violence to people,
35:13 you know, were motivated by some sort of random, you know, excitement, they go in there. And then
35:18 once they got into the Capitol building, they forgot what they were supposed to do, right?
35:22 This, this wasn't an insurrection as evidenced by the fact that none of these people that are
35:26 currently languishing in jail that were arrested for trespassing on January the 6th, none of them
35:30 have been charged with an insurrection. So you're being ghastly because every chance a prominent
35:35 Democrat has to use the word insurrection. They're doing it. Oh, it was an insurrection.
35:40 Really? Why didn't they have any guns? If I'm going to take over and try to overthrow, you know,
35:46 you know, the greatest election in the history of elections, I would probably at least bring a
35:50 potato gun, something. Why were there no firearms anywhere to be found? None of these people that
35:56 are currently in jail have been charged with a weapons crime. Why not? They had a weapon, a weapon
36:01 on federal property without the proper licensing, right? Without the, you know, the proper permission.
36:06 Why have they not been charged for that? Maybe it's because they didn't have any weapons on them that
36:10 day. We're not even hearing about these people having knives or pipes or, you know, mag, you know,
36:16 mag lights or, you know, locks that are on the ends of bandanas or anything like that.
36:20 Anything that big can be used as a weapon. None of those things have been found.
36:23 And yet democracy almost died on January 6th. Again, I don't, I don't dismiss that as a no,
36:29 there's nothing burger as a big nothing because it was something egregious. It was gross. It was
36:33 horrible. But say that democracy almost died within hours. All the chambers were completely
36:38 done in a Republican, you know, led Congress, you know, was signed off by the vice president,
36:43 Mike Pence, you know, certified the election. But we've been gaslit into believing that this was,
36:48 you know, up there with Pearl Harbor and up there with 9/11. And I even had one of my idiot friends
36:54 here in Oklahoma compare what happened on January 6th to the Oklahoma City bombing.
36:58 He said it was the same motivation that connected those two things. So a lone wolf guy or basically
37:04 a guy that had a little bit of help kills 171 souls. There were 168 people that died in three
37:09 women were pregnant. So that's 171 people, 171 souls were blown up that day. And you're
37:15 saying it's the same as January 6th. We're the only person that died was one of the rioters,
37:19 Ashley Babbitt, give me a break. But we've been gaslit. And again, it's the power narrative
37:24 because we're going to be hearing about January 6th all the way up until the next presidential
37:28 election, not just 2022 midterms. We're going to be hearing it through 2024 because they got to
37:33 make sure orange man doesn't get back into the White House. Okay. But now we need to transition
37:38 into why we should even care if we're being gaslit. Because I know I can kind of hear
37:43 from a lot of you guys. It's like, okay, Kyle, it's like, look, I got to run my business and I
37:46 got to take care of my family and I got to do all these other things. I can't really worry about
37:50 whether or not I'm being lied to or being gaslit. Is that really something we should be focused on
37:54 right now? And the reality is that you should be okay. So the first reason we should care about
37:59 that is that honesty is a really big deal. Honesty, integrity, those are big things.
38:06 And I was thinking about this in a proverb six came to mind. This is verses 16 through 19.
38:11 There are six things that the Lord hates seven that are an abomination to him.
38:14 Hotty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans,
38:22 feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breezes out lies, and one who sows
38:27 discord among brothers. I mean, a lying tongue, a heart that devises wicked plans,
38:32 you know, a false witness that breeze out lies and one who sows discord among brothers.
38:36 That's gaslighting. So if you're a serious person, if you're serious about the Bible,
38:41 if you're serious about sin, you should care about honesty. You should care about integrity
38:46 like clearly. But another reason why we should care about this is there's no such thing as
38:51 quote, unquote, your truth or quote, unquote, my truth. There's no such thing. There's only
38:58 truth. That's capital T truth, right? We live in this postmodern era where for a lot of people,
39:06 and this is even in Christian circles, we're so afraid of offending somebody that we're going to
39:10 allow them to change reality into their form of truth. We're not going to call someone out for
39:17 propagating a narrative that is not true, that is a lie that is made up or fabricated,
39:22 because we don't want to be offending towards them. We don't want to offend them and their
39:26 sensibilities. And so we've allowed this postmodern notion that truth is relative to creep into our
39:32 livelihoods, to creep in to our culture, to creep in to our churches. But the reality is,
39:38 is things are either true or they're not. So I said earlier, you know, that, you know,
39:42 COVID is not affecting kids in the way that it's affecting elderly people as an example.
39:46 That's either true or it's not. That's not a bumper sticker. That's not a narrative.
39:51 There's data to prove that either children are dying in droves or they're not.
39:58 Either old people are dying in droves or they're not. And between the two, when you compare them,
40:02 one of them is going to have a higher percentage of death. And don't you know, it's not children.
40:07 So that's truth. And that's why we should be so, you know, concerned about the fact that
40:15 people are trying to gaslight us about the truth. And for a lot of us, we just accept it so easily.
40:20 And another reason why this is really important and should be important to us
40:23 is it should always concern us when our elected officials or, you know,
40:27 unelected government, government bureaucrats lie to us to manipulate how we act.
40:32 You know, lie to us to control our lives, to control our businesses, to control our families,
40:39 to control our congregations. Because here's the whole thing. And I've started saying this
40:44 recently and I've said it in some interviews and, you know, I've said it a little bit on this
40:47 podcast, I believe I'm not as concerned about the push that has been going on in the last two years
40:54 from our government overlords. It's definitely concerning, obviously, especially what's going on,
41:00 you know, like in Australia with basically internment camps in Europe whenever, you know,
41:04 I think Emmanuel Macron basically was talking about unvaccinated people like they were insects,
41:08 you know, it's kind of a rough thing when you consider what happened early in the 20th century
41:12 in that same part of the world. But I'm not worried about this push. I'm worried about the next
41:18 couple of pushes. Because people have talked about this, like anytime you give the government
41:23 more power, they're not going to give it back to the people. Well, we've just laid down and
41:27 allowed the government to take over a lot of things, right? We didn't even question them.
41:31 We just basically said, yeah, they, they probably have our best interests at heart,
41:33 right? What could possibly go wrong, right? But they've pushed and they've reset the boundary.
41:41 So what about the next push? Let's say two years from now, there's something completely
41:46 different than COVID, but it's similar. Well, they've already got the new standards.
41:50 What are they going to do to push beyond that, right? Again, go back to the CDC director,
41:56 Rachelle Walensky, when she said this, you know, about changing from 10 days of quarantine to
42:00 five days, that the change didn't have anything to do with science, right? But it really had a lot
42:03 to do with what we thought people would be able to tolerate. Well, we tolerated 10 days.
42:09 Well, are we going to tolerate 15 or 30 or a month, you know, or a month or longer, I meant to say,
42:16 right? 45 days, 90 days. How much are they going to be able to continue to push us?
42:21 Again, we're supposed to be, you know, liberty-filled Americans, right? You know, we got our guns
42:26 and we got our liberty and we got our, you know, inalienable rights, like, you know,
42:29 you can't tread on us. Well, they've been treading on us quite a bit.
42:33 And the thing about tyranny, guys, is there's not a big sweeping tyranny that typically happens.
42:39 It's typically a slow creep towards tyranny. If you go back and study the rise of Adolf Hitler,
42:45 which is interesting for anybody that really cares about the millions and millions of people
42:50 that died during World War II, not just the Jews that were eradicated systematically, but for the
42:54 people that went and fought and died over there, he didn't just come to power overnight. He wasn't
43:00 an overnight phenomenon. You know, like even a guy like Barack Obama, he was kind of like an
43:05 overnight phenomenon, right? He wasn't even a senator for two years before he announced that he was
43:09 going to be running for president. It's a miracle that a guy who literally never even,
43:12 you know, wrote a piece of legislation for Congress was able to get elected to two terms,
43:16 again, power of narrative, hope, change, and forward. I mean, three words basically got the
43:20 man in office for eight years. But when you look at what it took for Adolf Hitler to continue to
43:26 change people's minds, it happened over weeks and months and years. And then it led to all the
43:31 horrific things that we saw during World War II that were propagated by the Nazi party, by the
43:35 third Reich, right? But it was a slow creep. You think about the book, Ordinary Men, where these,
43:40 I think it was the, the, these Polish police officers, they went from being these police officers that
43:45 were trying to, you know, maintain the peace to, you know, being part of the systematic eradication
43:50 of Jews to be part of the execution squad. Well, they didn't just go from being normal law enforcement
43:55 officers to being a kill squad. It happened over time. And we are slowly moving towards tyranny,
44:03 one little step at a time. And this will be the last thing I say on it. That slow creep of tyranny
44:08 will eventually break down the walls of your church.
44:11 And as I say that, perhaps that's a good thing. Because if you've been, you know, plugged into
44:18 any Christian circles, the church is thriving in places where you think it shouldn't be.
44:23 Iran, China, North Korea, Cambodia, like some of these places, the church is absolutely exploding.
44:32 It's because these people have nothing else to depend on. They don't have their money to
44:38 depend on. They don't have their culture to depend on. They have to depend on Christ.
44:41 They have to depend on provision from God. They have to, you know, depend on direction from the
44:46 Holy Spirit. And this tyrannical thing is going to affect the West. Now, Western Judeo-Christian,
44:55 you know, institutions, those are things that have kind of withstood a lot of different tests
44:59 over time. But this is one that it might not be able to withstand. Now, this is Christ's church,
45:04 and he's going to build it his own way. But it is very, very cocky of us as Westerners,
45:08 especially as Americans to assume that tyranny will never actually come to our doorstep.
45:12 Do I need to remind you of the pastors that were arrested in Canada and jailed in Canada?
45:17 We had one on this podcast, Pastor James Coats, go and look up the interview we did last year.
45:20 I believe it was sometime during the summer, right? Think about what's happened in Europe.
45:24 Think about what the government has been able to tell congregations, whether or not they could do
45:28 this thing or that thing. Sure, you can have church, or no, you can't have church. Sure,
45:33 sure, you can sing if you want. Nope, nope, can't have singing because droplets, right? You're
45:36 going to be shooting, you know, death droplets into the air, right? Think about that. That that
45:41 was a big deal for a long time. Think about the next several pushes. So as we're thinking about
45:48 gaslighting, I want you to remember Ephesians 5, 11, take no part in the unfruitful works of
45:53 darkness, but instead expose them, okay? A lot of what I've said today, again, a month ago would
45:59 have got me kicked off a lot of the platforms where I exist, right? And we're reevaluating right
46:03 now kind of certain platforms because we're not really active on Twitter. You know, we're waiting
46:08 to see what's going to happen with with Parler and with Gitter and with all these other different
46:11 platforms, you know, Instagram that we haven't really gotten pegged too bad on there quite yet,
46:16 you know, YouTube, it's not quite big enough for people to be paying attention, but we're
46:19 remarking that way. But again, we're doing everything that we can here at Undaunted Life to equip you
46:24 to be able to push back darkness. And you can't push back the darkness that comes from gaslighting
46:30 by pretending that it's not happening, by ignoring the fact that it's happening,
46:35 by playing along with it, you have to actively fight against it. All right, guys, before we let
46:40 you go, we are going to do a quick resilience boost out on Daunted Life. Our mission is equipping
46:44 men to push back darkness with content that for just spiritual, mental and physical resilience.
46:48 So for today, I'm just going to give you that New York Times article that I quoted,
46:51 that was from David Leonhardt. It's the one about kids. If you don't have a subscription,
46:55 I think that you can get a few articles for free through the New York Times, but you can also find
46:58 some people that have kind of clipped it and put it some other places. All right, guys, thanks so
47:01 much for listening to this podcast. We really do appreciate it. Wherever you're listening to this,
47:04 please subscribe, rate and leave us a five star positive review. If you want me to come speak live
47:08 at your event or on your podcast, you shoot me an email to info@undaunted.life. That's i-n-f-o
47:14 @undaunted.life. You can follow us on Instagram and TikTok and like us on Facebook and you can
47:18 check out our website for everything else, including how to donate to keep our content like this coming
47:22 your way. Just go to www.undaunted.life. And we also want to thank the band August Burns Red for
47:28 allowing us to use our music for our content. The music on this podcast is our song "Cutting the Ties,"
47:32 which is off their 10th anniversary re-recording of their album Leveler. The links are in the
47:37 description. I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Remember, keep pushing back darkness, keep forging spiritual,
47:44 mental and physical resilience, keep seeking the Lion of Judah.
48:07 [Music]
Key quotes
2
Kyle Thompson
Gaslighting is a form of manipulation that causes the other person or persons to question their own perceptions of the world.
Kyle Thompson
Honesty, integrity, those are big things.
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