15. Why Do Politicians Want Us to be Scared?

During the Coronavirus pandemic, we saw lots of lawmakers and people in power use the crisis to to champion policies and pass laws. But the pandemic was not the first time this has happened. Politicians often use crises, like war and economic problems, to pass harmful laws.

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Here’s a transcript of our conversation: 

Brittany: Hi Connor.

Connor: Hey Brittany.

Brittany: How’s it going?

Connor: I’m doing great. I’m excited to chat with you today.

Brittany: Same. So I’ve been thinking a lot. We just got out of this pandemic. We had coronavirus. It was, it was interesting. A lot of us were in our houses for a very long time, but I noticed a lot of people were very scared. Did you notice that?

Connor: I noticed, see a lot scared. Yeah, spades. Totally.

Brittany: But I noticed that a lot of the, politicians or the government, people in power were kind of benefiting from this. It was almost as if keeping us scared was helping them pass some things or make some laws that maybe shouldn’t have been made. But we were all a little bit too scared to, kind of see what was going on. What do you think about that?

Connor: You, don’t say that’s never, happen in the history of the world now. I’m being silly because that’s a really good point to bring up. Often times the government wants us to be afraid. Now, I think the question for us to discuss is why is that? Why, what what’s in it for the government what’s in it for the, politicians, the elected officials, the people in charge of the government. Why in the world, if their job is to protect us, if that’s why the government exists, why do they want us to be afraid? What do you think?

Brittany: You know, I think a lot of times it is because they kind of benefit from our fear. They kind of get to get their way a little bit more than maybe they would, if I’m scared. And I really don’t know what’s going to happen, I am more likely to say, please make laws that are going to protect me. And I’m also less likely to question whether or not those laws are actually good for us. And we saw that during the pandemic, we saw our economy completely closed down, right? And we did it because we thought if we go outside, if we go to these businesses, we were going to get sick. We could possibly die. We could possibly spread the virus to others. But what happened is we saw our economy struggle. Our economy is still struggling because now all these laws were made were, governors were shutting down states and then businesses were closing down and people were losing money. So I think it’s very, very, very scary to have politicians legislate by, fear. But that happens.

Connor: I think part of the problem is, you know, I, think of a child, right. I remember in particular when I was growing up maybe some of our listeners can relate. Maybe you can, Brittany. I remember periodically, or sometimes that I would wake up in the middle of the night as a kid and I would look across the room and it’s dark. Maybe there’s a little Moonlight coming in. And I would swear that there was like a bad guy, some kind of boogeyman over in the other side of the room. It looked like someone was standing in my room and I would be terrified. I would kind of curl up in my covers and just try and go back to sleep and hope he wouldn’t hurt me. And, then I would wake up in the morning and I would look over and it was the vacuum cleaner that my mom had thrown my jacket on, that I had left on the floor. Right. And it kind of just looked like this person. And so why do I say that? Well, I was afraid. Right. But why was I afraid? I was afraid cuz I did not know the truth. I did not have information. If I had the information that my mom had, if she had told me right before I went to bed or as she turned off the lights, oh, Hey, I left the vacuum cleaner in there. Or I threw your jacket on there. With that information. I would no longer have been afraid of something that I did not know about something. I didn’t understand something where I didn’t quite have the big picture and fully understand. Does that make sense?

Brittany: That makes sense. And it also seems very applicable because that’s what we saw with coronavirus. Right? We didn’t have a lot of answers.

Connor: Right.

Brittany: It, happened really quickly. It came, you know, spread across the globe really quickly. And instead of sitting there and saying, we don’t know what’s gonna happen, let’s look into the facts, let’s see what this is. Let’s get to know this virus. Let’s figure out what’s going on. People just acted. They They just closed things down. They shut everything down. They closed schools down. And then we got into a situation where everyone was too scared to even go back to real life. So that’s, it’s a very dangerous situation.

Connor: Yeah. And, the hard thing for each of us is how do you really get the information? How do you learn the truth? I, think most of our listeners will probably agree that the, so-called mainstream media is not often or not always truthful. They have you know, bias where they have like a, desire to kind of make us believe something that might not be true. Sometimes they’re paid to kind of push a certain message and so forth or, they might not always push a message. Maybe they leave something out. They don’t tell us the full picture. They leave out some information. Brittany you were very active as was I in the presidential campaign for Ron Paul when he was trying to be the president and you and I together would get so frustrated. I remember cuz we’d post about it on Facebook.

Brittany: Yeah.

Connor: When the news channels would completely leave him out, they, would say things like they’d have a debate. And then they did a poll and they’re like, okay, number one was, I don’t remember, you know, Mitt Romney or Newt Gringrich or whoever it was. Right. And then number three was, you know, Rudy Giuliani and number four was, you know, this person. And, and so they have this list on the TV showing like the order that everyone came in and they would leave out number two, like it literally like skip number two, which was Ron Paul.

Brittany: Yep.

Connor: And, why was that? They didn’t want us to know, they didn’t want people to kind of catch on that. There was this guy with this different message of freedom and, man, do you remember how frustrating that was?

Brittany: It was frustrating. And it really made me realize how much people are scared of freedom. There’s a lot of like people and it’s happened during coronavirus as well because they don’t trust what you are gonna do. They think that if they had full freedom, they’re gonna do what’s right. But maybe you Connor, you are not gonna do what’s. Right. And that means that we need to make all these rules. And so I think that happens a lot. And again, we saw that happen with coronavirus, but we also saw a lot of flip flopping on information. So masks, you remember this?

Connor: Yeah.

Brittany: At first we were told not to wear masks. In fact, was it CDC, somebody important came out and said, masks will make you sick. Don’t do it. Don’t wear them three weeks later, what happened?

Connor: Right. Everyone has to wear Masks.

Brittany: Everyone has to wear a mask. And then it was stores. Costco was one of the first to say, we won’t even let you in without a mask. Right. And now it’s coming back where we’re thinking, oh, okay. I don’t know if this is, you know, maybe mask actually contained the germs and you’re actually breathing in the germs and now it’s kind of up for debate again. But then we also had, what was the new thing? Wiping down surfaces. We were told that we could get coronavirus from a tabletop or from a cell phone today. Or a couple days ago, a couple weeks ago we found out, Nope, that’s not true. We do it that wrong.

Connor: Right.

Brittany: But we acted too quickly before we had this information. Right. And it made everybody scared

Connor: And that’s tough for us, right? Because if you and I want to access the truth, we don’t wanna be afraid. I don’t think people want to be afraid. They don’t wanna be controlled. They don’t want the government to, control them. But the problem is if we don’t have the ability to gain access to information, all we can do is trust that those who are talking to us, the people in a position of power or influence like in the government or in the media, that clearly they must, you know, the, truth and understand. Here’s something that’s kind of interesting to consider with this. There are polls, right? Polls are, when people will call you and ask your opinion and you get to share with them what you believe. And then they call a ton of other people. And then that leads them to be able to say, oh, we think that, you know, or we, the poll shows that 50% of Americans think, you know, this or 42% of people in Texas believe that, you know, public school, blah, blah, blah. And so that’s how they can try and determine what people think about things. They call enough people where they get this, picture, that’s a poll. And so what’s interesting is before coronavirus hit, there were polls asking people what they felt aboutthe CDC, which is the part of government talking about and the FDA, the parts of the government talking about health. And we

Brittany: Talked about the FDA before, I think on an earlier episode.

Connor: That’s right. That’s right. And there were polls talking about, for example, the governors, like the governor in California and some of these other governors, Hey, do you support the governor? And, for example, before coronavirus hit only about 40% of people in California said that they supported the governor. And then after coronavirus hit and here comes the governor and I’m gonna shut everything down and we’re gonna do all these things and spend all this money, his, poll numbers. In other words, the number of the percentage of people who supported him, went from the forties to the eighties.

Brittany: So it got higher. People got led to more,

Connor: It got way higher. It, happened that way with the CDC, the FDA, all parts of government in general, people will often be like, eh, I don’t trust you. Or I don’t like you. A lot of people will kind of feel that way. And then something scary happens. And because we’re scared and we don’t have information, we turn to people who we think have the best information. And so we naturally trust them. We put our confidence in them that clearly they’re gonna steer us in the right direction. So all of a sudden, right. And so think about it, that the question for us in this episode that we’re talking about is why, do these politicians, why does the government want us to be afraid? Well, if you’re the governor of California and a bunch of people, don’t like you, and you know that if something bad were to happen, that scares everyone, that all of a sudden they’ll like, you suddenly, you have an incentive, you have a reason to want to find scary things to want to have problems happen so that you can be the one with the solution. Right?

Brittany: Yeah. In fact, there was a, I believe he was a governor at the time of where was it? It was Rham Emmnuel. I can’t, was he mayor, was he governor mayor?

Connor: It was the mayor of Chicago.

Brittany: Mayor of Chicago. That’s right. Yeah. He once said, and this was he, got in trouble for this one. He said, never let a crisis go to waste.

Connor: Yeah.

Brittany: And that always kind of gave me chills. Right. Because there you have a politician who’s being actually very honest, more honest than most politicians telling us that that is a political max or max, like kind of a rule that, politicians sometimes abide by. And that is that crises are really good for getting whatever you want past or, getting elected. And so that’s a little bit scary to me because you think, all right, how many things are we blindly believing that are making us scared? Because a politician has something they want to get through or wants to get reelected, but maybe we shouldn’t have been very scared about it from the get go.

Connor: So I’m gonna share something that I don’t often talk about. And frankly, I, had kind of forgotten about it till we’re talking right now. But a lot of our listeners, the kids are haven’t been alive since 9/11, but I think we all know what happened on 9 /11. It’s still recent enough that everyone knows that, you know, these people flew into some buildings in New York city. What was really interesting and what a lot of people don’t know. And you anyone’s welcome to go Google this again. You know, just like we shouldn’t put our trust in the media. You don’t always need to trust, you know, Brittany or Connor. So go, look this up on your own, if you’re curious about it. But before 9 11 there was a group called the project for a new American century. And it was this group of, they weren’t so much politicians. They, sort of were, some of them worked in government

Brittany: World Leaders. Right. But necessarily politicians.

Connor: Yeah. I mean, some of them had worked in government. Some of them were more academics. In other words, they kind of worked in colleges or they were like thinkers. They thought about a lot of stuff, but these are, yeah. These are people who try to influence what governments do. And so they put together this document, they sat down, they said, you know, we, think that these changes need to happen in government. We think the government needs to have certain additional powers. And we think these things ought to change. Well, what they recommendedwas they called it. What we need is a new Pearl Harbor, right? Pearl Harbor is during world war II. Japanese came in and, attacked Pearl Harbor, which was a military base in or near Hawaii. Right. And off the Pacific coast and killed a whole bunch of people. Well, what did it do in America? It really it rallied the troops. A lot of people were like, oh my gosh, we’ve been attacked. We need to fight back.

Brittany: And We were not in war yet. We were not in world war II yet.

Connor: Right. And so, you know, for example, when nine 11 happened, there were, you know, before 9/11 on, nine, 10, right. September 10th, it was standard. You know, life, people were disagreeing and different political parties were fighting and all this kind of stuff, but then 9/11 happened. And all of a sudden it led to, do you remember, like, I remember Glenn Beck in particular would always talk about 9, 12, 9, 12.

Brittany: Yup

Connor: He called it the 9, 12 project. Why? Because he looked back and he is like the day after 9/11, we were United. We weren’t left. And right. We weren’t Republican Democrat. We were Americans. We rallied around a single cause. Well, that’s what these, this group in the project for a new American century wanted to happen. They called for a new Pearl Harbor before nine 11 even happened. And they basically said, we need an attack like this on Americans so that people in government can push through all of these changes we’re talking about. They can have more powers, they can have more surveillance, this, that, and the other. We can go to war and, you know, we can go fight in the middle east and, things like that. So what’s amazing to me is here are people who are trying, supposedly trying to look out for our best interest, keep us safe and whatever. And yet they’re saying that we need to be attacked. We, need Americans to be Scared.

Brittany: Now I was gonna say, they need us to be scared, don’t they?

Connor: Yeah. So that we’ll surrender more of our freedoms. Now here’s a question I want to talk about before we wrap up Brittany, when we give up our freedoms in exchange for safety in the, midst of a crisis, do we ever get them back?

Brittany: No, And if we do it’s because something big happens where like revolutionary war, I mean, we’ll talk about this in another episode where the American colonists got mad enough to stand up and say enough is enough.

Connor: Right.

Brittany: But we don’t really do that anymore. Do we?

Connor: I Mean probably none of the kids listening, remember what the airports were like before the TSA,

Brittany: They were wonderful.

Connor: Oh my gosh. You know, he walked,

Brittany: It was kind of a fun place to be you didn’t being at the airport

Connor: And now, you know, you’re like sheep waiting to go to get sheared. And, you know, you get patted down. I always get patted down. And, then the underwear bomber happened years ago. Right. Where he kind of had the, a bomb within like his pants. And so now they will sometimes put their fingers like inside your, waist belt, you know, your pants

Brittany: And it makes you feel so uncomfortable,

Connor: So uncomfortable. And, what kind of freedoms do we have? And, then why, because people were scared. And so they put up with losing their freedoms, but I’m sorry, we haven’t had an underwear bomber other than that one time. Right. Do, we stop driving? Just because there was that one car accident that happened exactly. Right. And so that’s the frustration Brittany, that you and I seem to agree with here is that is what there’s a term for it, which is the ratchet effect. Right. If you ever use like a ratchet tool here I am. Right. I think it was the previous,

Brittany: You were the tool guy. You’re not a tool guy,

Connor: Not the tool guy. Right. But I know what a ratchet is. And the ratchet effect is like, you can tighten it one way. And then when you go in the other direction, you know, it freely moves and then you can tighten it more and more and more. And that’s what happens with our, our freedoms. Right. They get less and less and less, but we don’t really ever get ’em back. And so that’s why the lesson for me, Brittany, and all this is in times of crisis or when we’re scared, when we’re fearful. That is when I think we need to be especially young guard. Right? Yeah. Because that’s when these people in government are maybe trying to take our, freedoms away from us. Any parting thoughts that you wanna share.

Brittany: Yeah. If you haven’t listened to our previous episode, and I think it was called Liberty, should you give up Liberty for security or something along those lines? I think that would be a good episode to listen to after this one, because that we talk about a lot of similar themes, but again, don’t let fear, let you give up your, rights. Those are very sacred.

Connor: Maybe before we end, just for the parents listening, I would point you to a book that I wrote several years ago called “Feardom” which you can find on Amazon. And it’s all about this. So if you want even more examples, if you wanna understand why the government wants us to be afraid and the media as well, grab the book, “Feardom”, you’ll be able to better understand the stuff. And then you and your family can talk about it as kids. So guys, thanks for listening. This is a super relevant topic that isn’t just about coronavirus. This is why we laughed at the beginning of the episode is this is just happening since the history, right?

Brittany: Yep.

Connor: And so it’s super important that we figure out how to stop it. So grab “Feardom” for the parents listening andmake sure you’re subscribed for the next episode. Thanks for sticking around Brittany. I’ll see you later.

Brittany: See you Next time