How to flip a friend to our side
It won’t be easy, but maybe we can remind our friends that once upon a time they didn’t trust these same ‘experts.’
In a recent dispatch, Alex Berenson describes a luncheon where he tried to convince a relative that he wasn’t a kook.
The subject of the luncheon and article was the mRNA vaccines. These shots comprise the new-fangled vaccine platform the science community is trying to foist on the world.
As I posted in a reply, I might have taken a different approach to convince a relative that my skepticism was not misplaced or unwarranted.
I don't even know that it’s necessary to convince someone that “our side” understands the basics of the "scientific method." As I wrote two years ago, a simple understanding of statistics and probabilities might suffice to make the point that a new type of mandated "vaccine" isn't warranted.
I might have asked my skeptical relative how many people he/she personally knew who had died "from" Covid in the past three years? Also, how many children or healthy young adults did you know who died from this disease?
It’s very possible Alex’s relative could have cited a few acquaintances who did or perhaps died “from” Covid. However, spread out over 38 months, this number wouldn’t be particularly alarming.
And I’m almost 100-percent certain she couldn’t name one person under the age of, say, 30, that she personally knew who died from this disease.
I'd also point out that official statistics can be doctored/manipulated and should not be automatically accepted as gospel.
I might ask her if she’d been to the grocery store recently. Does she really believe that annual inflation is just 5 or 6 percent?
If she agreed with me and said, “No,” I’d then ask her who gives us the “official” CPI numbers. Answer: The same government that produces all the bogus or dubious Covid statistics.
Alex tells readers his relative is a “smart” lady. If she is, she’s intelligent enough to know that the experts and authorities have been wrong on big issues more times than I can cite in one Substack article.
FWIW, the narrative is often wrong …
It’s perhaps risky to mention “political lessons” from history, but “damn the torpedoes.”
For example, Alex could ask his relative is she thinks Saddam Hussein really had weapons of mass destruction. Even if Iraq’s ruler did, was he really planning to use his nation’s Navy (if the country has one) or Air Force (if it featured any long-range bombers) to use the weapons to attack and conquer the United States of America?
I mention the Iraq war even though I know some of my readers might still support this military intervention.
However, I think it’s safe to say that tens of millions of Americans who once supported that war have now changed their assessment. This is important as history teaches us that our trusted leaders (and the press) can be spectacularly and tragically wrong on big issues.
Believe it or not, given enough time, “narratives” can change.
The same leaders - according to today’s consensus opinion - were also wrong about the even more tragic Vietnam War. “Radical” protestors - like John Lennon and Muhammad Ali - were right.
So too were the many millions of college-age protestors who protested that war.
Today, I remain befuddled that many of those same protestors grew up to be the most militant defenders of “The Man” or authority figures when it came to Covid policies.
Today, the majority of Americans citizens say there’s no way our government could be this wrong about an issue that affects virtually every citizen in the country. My question: Why in the world would you think such a thing? If more citizens thought just a little more about history, they wouldn’t think such things.
Plus, the narrative changes by the month or year …
I might also ask a defender of the authorized narrative what’s bad for her health - eggs, coffee, fat, carbohydrates, alar in apple juice?
My point being it’s hard to keep up with the “science” on what’s good for us or bad for us because the “consensus” keeps changing depending on the year and what study just came out.
Maybe if Alex’s relative thought about all the “settled science” that’s no longer settled, she’d be more open to the possibility the experts aren’t always right.
Does she think big pharmaceutical companies have always been right? Have any of these companies ever been successfully sued (and/or fined by the government) for killing or harming large numbers of people?
To pick another “settled” subject that makes many of us roll our eyes, there’s probably no way Alex could convince his relative that Global Warming is not an existential threat to the planet.
I do want to go on the record reminding everyone that “Global Warming” DID morph into “Climate Change” - probably because “global warming” wasn’t happening fast enough.
(As far as I can tell, what we’ve had in the two-plus decades since Al Gore wrote his book is “Global Staying-the-Same”).
The above is an effort at an analogy. Perhaps Alex’s relative would at least acknowledge that the Covid “vaccines,” which were touted as ending the pandemic and stopping infections and transmission, are now touted as maybe reducing your chance of developing a “severe” case.
That is, I would try to point out that the official narratives - be it Climate Change or “safe and effective” vaccines - always seems to change. Things our government and trusted officials hyped endlessly weren’t the truth after all. Or: They became too “iffy” so the narrative quietly had to be changed.
Trust your first instinct …
In the past, many Americans possessed a healthy skepticism of government do-gooders, Big Pharma and the liberal press corp.
But somewhere around March 2020, this all changed. Almost overnight, all three institutions somehow became more trustworthy than the wise counsel of your father.
The answer many of us are looking for might be to get more Americans to go back to their first instincts … which are often right.
In the future, when I engage in one of these debates with a friend or relative, I’m going to say, “You know, Joe Biden thinks the exact same thing as you … and you trust Joe Biden?”
Or …
“You do know that you’re mimicking the talking points of The New York Times, right?”
Or …
“Tell me the truth. Do you really think the CEO and shareholders of Pfizer care about your health? Do you really think they wouldn’t rig some ‘safety trials?’ ”
Just like Alex probably didn’t at his lunch, I probably won’t change one person’s opinion .. but at least I’d make my lunch date realize whose talking points they’ve accepted as gospel.
Maybe I will have planted a seed that they’ve been trusting the wrong experts - something they used to know.
I know Alex lives in the northeast and people in the Northeast might be more likely to trust the teachings of college professors. But in the Southeast, many parents might be more receptive to the proposition that college faculty members are trying to not-so-secretly spread socialism and wokism among their captive students.
Again, just because someone has some impressive-sounding credential doesn’t mean they are right … right?
Thanks for another insightful article.
Over the past three years (or maybe the past twenty-two years, or maybe even longer), I have shared my thoughts with my friends. Oftentimes they thought I was crazy, but sometimes they eventually came to the same conclusions.
The so-called "pandemic" basically blind-sided us, and it was hard to know what to believe. My initial reaction was that on the one hand, this was a deadly disease for which we had to go to extreme measures to "flatten the curve" - or, alternatively, the whole thing was a hoax and a fraud. What I told people early on was that the truth was somewhere in between these two extremes. Of course, the more I learned, the more I leaned toward the "hoax and fraud" perspective.
Going back in history, the "establishment" told us that butter and eggs were "bad" for us, due to "cholesterol and saturated fat." I never bought into that, and have eaten lots of real butter and fresh eggs all my life. Whenever the doctors test my cholesterol levels, they are the best they have ever seen! A few years ago, a dentist from California, as I recall, found a treasure trove of papers at some college library which documented that the studies blaming cholesterol and saturated fat for heart disease were done at the behest of the sugar industry! Imagine that.
So what I tell my friends: we have science-based medicine; we have the best science that money can buy; and that those that have the money, buy the science.