Are You Politically Brainwashed?

AI Generated Transcript (I only fixed the mis-spelling of my name and added one extra paragraph break - I left the rest of the mess just the way AI delivered it haha):

Oh boy, I am really going to step right in it today with what I want to talk about. Welcome to Jon's Voice Notes, where I pick a topic that's on my mind for the day and go at it stream of consciousness without any planning, just to see what happens, just for fun.

I am sitting in my living room, where I live, looking out a large window at grass and trees and sun and kind of hazy cloudy skies, but beautiful. It's pretty warm out, but I can't feel it because I'm inside. But here we go. Let's step right in it. I want to talk about political brainwashing.

Marketing. Stirring up people's fears. Fear mongering. I'll tell you what's motivating me. I try and talk in a timeless way usually, but this would apply at almost any time in history since I've been alive. This is always going on in different ways.

There are currently these, at the time of recording this, these protests going on. Oh my goodness, a really tiny baby rabbit just hopped in front of my window. There are these protests going on basically saying, no kings, no kings. And I have a picture of a crown crossed out or a picture of Donald Trump with a crown crossed out. And I just, I'm a little bit surprised by how many people...

are really buying into the whole Donald Trump is some sort of tyrant thing. So, good luck figuring out my politics, but I will say this.

Donald Trump is not in any unique way a tyrant relative to all of the presidents that we've had. I mean, he's kind of pushy in his language, but that's his personality. I don't see anything that he's doing that is like a tyrant other than in the sense that

Our executive branch has set up to be tyrannical for a long time before him and will be so after him. He's not causing that. He is living within that. So there you go, my kind of libertarian side showing up there. But Congress has given the executive branch so many tasks and so much...

So many laws and so much to do that it's basically given the presidency far more power probably than the founders intended. I blame Congress more than I even blame the president. So I actually don't know exactly precisely why they think Donald Trump is in some unique way a tyrant.

So maybe a few people, this is my observation over the years, maybe a few people have a good reason. Although if I were talking to them, I'd probably have to say, well, you realize that applies also to Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and George Bush and just about everybody, right? Would they admit it? I don't know. But it looks like and it smells like

Most people are just being stirred up by irrational, nonsensical fears. So I'm not saying every single person who's concerned about something Donald Trump is doing is irrational. What I mean is the movement. This has got to be marketed. This has got to be somebody that has the power and the money to mobilize this.

This has got to be their project to find a way to oppose Donald Trump yet again. Donald Trump derangement syndrome. I always say that Trump derangement syndrome has two sides. There's the side where you believe if Donald Trump does it, it must be evil. This is the common side. But there's the other side also, which is like...

If Donald Trump does it, it's good and it's what I believe now. So whatever you believed in the past, whatever your political principles were in the past, now that Donald Trump has said it, it must be true. I remember during his first presidency, during the pandemic with the COVID and all that,

I remember seeing on my own, I didn't hear Donald Trump say anything. I don't believe he had said anything yet. There had been a study, a clinical study. No, not a double blind placebo, this and that. It was just a clinical study or multiple clinical studies. I believe in Israel. It's been a long time, but I remember reading about it just early in the early days.

where they were having great success in controlling the disease with some basic antivirals like hydroxychloroquine. So nobody was saying hydroxychloroquine magically cures COVID. They were just these trials where they were using it. It's a common, cheap, used all over the place to deal with malaria.

And then I remember, okay, so there it was. I didn't hear a lot of people talking about it. I read about it. I thought, hmm, that's interesting. And then at some point, Donald Trump mentioned it. I heard him mention hydroxychloroquine. At some point later, he mentioned that other one, ivermectin. I didn't hear that. After that, I heard about that one. I didn't hear about hydroxychloroquine anymore.

But as soon as Donald Trump said it, all of a sudden, like one of the greatest evils you could possibly commit was to suggest that ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine could help with COVID. Now, just to be clear, I do not know if either of those help. I'm not saying take it if you get COVID. What I'm talking about is political brainwashing.

This is what it looks like to me. I don't know if I can prove it. This is what it looks like. This is what it smelled like. As soon as Donald Trump said that, a very large number of people were like, well, it must be nonsense then, or we have to believe it's nonsense.

And there was this huge political lockdown on just the idea. You could get cast out of society, basically, off of YouTube, off of Facebook. I might get cast off something even now, this much time later, just for saying it in my voice note, even though I'm not even advocating for it. I'm just mentioning it.

That's bizarre and that is twisted. The forces that were so against the hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin are just twisted. The whole idea to shut down, the whole idea of misinformation is twisted. It's political brainwashing. And who knows what other forces and interests were involved.

You know, we're like pharmaceutical companies. Was it against their interest? I don't know. How do you even prove something like that? But I could stand back and watch it happen in real time. Somebody says ivermectin and they're cast out of society and what? So I actually put the no kings thing in the same category. It's basically brainwashing. People have been stirred into so much fear that

That if Donald Trump got elected, it was kind of going to be the end of democracy. That they believe it irrationally. I wish I could talk to some of them, but they run from people like me. They don't want to even see someone like myself. And I'm not even a mega hat guy.

But it's offensive or whatever, distressing. People need their safe space. They need to go take care of their mental health and leave and go to their safe space. They can't even handle talking rationally about it. But I wonder if it's because of all the executive orders. I remember back in the day, a lot of conservatives, especially the more libertarian-ish side of the conservatives, were like, executive orders have no place.

Back then, I didn't agree, and I don't agree now. The way I would say is executive orders have no place in creating law the way the legislature should. In that case, I would agree. Yeah, any executive order that does that...

is out of place however if the executive order is executing a constitutional duty of the president that the president has been given that authority in the constitution itself or

If it is implementing the laws that the legislature passed, according to the standards that they passed, and assuming that that law is within constitutionality, those are all legitimate executive orders.

So I know that Trump has issued a very large number of executive orders. I have no idea how it compares to other presidents, but it's been it was in the news, all these executive orders. I haven't read all of them. Maybe some of them are just awful, tyrannical executive orders. But I'm not I don't have time to read them all. Do you?

You can't trust the news to read them for you and tell you the truth. They will tell you their agenda. So I picked some. Occasionally one would come out and I'd look it up and see, okay, what does this say? And what I found was that usually, the ones that I actually read, well, there's usually a bunch of references to other laws, which is like how it applies to these other laws or whatever that take forever to research all those.

But what I found is, in general, it was an implementation of the president's policy, and within the executive order itself, it would insist on it all being done within the law. So the very words of the executive order, the several that I read, if you found one that's not, send it to me. Send me a message. Gospelofeverything.com slash contact. Seriously, send me a message and say, look at this one.

Don't just do that because, you know, I'm not interested in reading a bunch more. I've already read a bunch. Tell me what you see in the executive order that is a problem so I can look specifically for that and see why you believe the executive order is the act of a king and we need to protest no kings. I'm doubtful, but maybe, I don't know, maybe you'll come up with one. Maybe you won't.

But the ones that I read, like I even read one that was shrinking some department. I don't remember if it was the Department of Education or some other department. And it literally said it was going to reduce the personnel and the funding to the lowest possible...

statutory guidelines allowed that was my paraphrase that's basically what it said in other words we're cutting this department down to the minimum we can cut it by law they were deliberately stating that they're not going to violate the law

They're going to just get rid of all the fluff. And they clearly probably have an opinion that it should go entirely. But their action towards removing it is just going to be to reduce it as low as they can get it within the law. So whatever that is, it isn't tyranny. It isn't dictatorship.

I had an old friend, I don't know if he likes me anymore, but he was trying to tell me that Trump's statements about being a dictator were like a serious threat to become one. I went and listened to them and I was like, no it isn't. Anybody can see that he's just being obnoxious Trump, the way he likes to be. I think he deliberately trolls people.

You know, that whole thing with him being the Pope. You know, he's deliberately trying to get under the skin of certain people. Like it, don't like it. But if you observe an actual tyrannical tendency, I hope you can observe that it probably predates Trump.

It's probably actually a result of the whole way the legislature and the presidency over a long time has been operating and building into a more tyrannical system. It's not unique to Trump. So anyone who wants to go back to Joe Biden-type government or Barack Obama-type government or whatever Kamala Harris would have done,

I can never remember if it's Kamala or Kamala. I mean, no disrespect by mispronouncing it. I literally just can't remember which one is correct. There was a lot. The COVID stuff was tyrannical. The way COVID was dealt with, the way the Biden administration dealt with social media and trying to silence opposition, that was tyrannical. You want to go back to that? That's what you want?

So, yeah, I know I'm getting a little outside my norm by going this political. I don't have either version of Trump derangement syndrome. I don't feel like he's magically doing everything right and I need to believe everything he says and does or I need to prefer his style or even his philosophy of government, if he has one.

But I'm also not like, because Trump said it, it must be bad. I have seen people that I know stirred to what I can, you can see it, you can discern it, you can smell it. This is an irrational fear. Even if there is some tyrannical act, they're not talking about that. They have this irrational, bizarre, off perception of reality about Donald Trump and his presidency. There's things not happening that they think are happening.

Basically, I'm saying there's nothing uniquely tyrannical. Like I said, if you find something, it's probably already there before Trump. There's nothing uniquely tyrannical about Donald Trump. He will pass by like all presidents do.

I wonder what God is doing in the midst of it all. I've talked with some about whether such and such a president is a judgment or a blessing. I personally have no problem seeing a president as both a force of judgment and a force of mercy at the same time. We probably, as a nation, don't deserve the kind of president we actually need.

But I'm pretty sure Donald Trump represents at least in part a pause of the descent into madness. Maybe not enough of a pause. Maybe there's other madnesses he brings along. But the madness that we were going into with Joe Biden and

Gender bizarre bizarreness and strange ideas about men and women and, you know, doing things to kids and all that. That has been at least paused. I don't know if it's been ended, but it has been paused.

So, or at least partially paused, or more, less, less madness? I don't know. But the main thing I wanted to say was this whole No Kings protest, this is people being stirred by their fears and

In order to mobilize, somebody's trying to mobilize certain kinds of activities and actions in order to disrupt and stop the things that Trump is trying to do and not even the bad things, even the good things. I think probably he's a threat.

to the long-standing political order of all sides of the aisle. I don't like to say both sides because I'm not committed to two sides. All of it. He's a threat to what has been. Yeah. That's it. There you go. Do I dare get political again in my future episodes? Well, you know what this is? This is what I want to say today.

So if you don't like it, go away. Or maybe stick around and tell me what you think so we can have some fun. But thank you so much for listening today.

This is Jon and Jon's Voice Notes signing off.